The Open Banking Moment for Property: How a small UK association is quietly rewiring the foundation of the housing market

By Maria Harris, Founder and Chair of the Open Property Data Association (OPDA)

When Open Banking launched in the UK, few outside finance understood what it would unleash. It began as a regulatory mandate to share data between banks. It evolved into a platform that reshaped payments, lending, personal finance, and entire categories of fintech. Now the same blueprint of openness and standardisation is moving into one of the most fragmented and outdated sectors of all: property.

At the centre of this shift is Maria Harris, Founder and Chair of the Open Property Data Association (OPDA). She is leading an effort to bring structure, trust, and interoperability to the way property data flows across the market. Her goal is simple in theory but transformative in practice. She wants the home-buying journey to be as fast, transparent, and data driven as any digital financial transaction.

"You could look at any ten systems involved in the mortgage and home-buying process, and every one of them represents the same data in a slightly different way. Even something as basic as an address or a unique property reference number is formatted differently."

From chaos to coordination

The result is duplication, delay, and frustration. Banks, brokers, conveyancers, surveyors, and software providers all describe property data in their own formats. Information that should move instantly between systems instead gets rekeyed and rechecked repeatedly.

OPDA’s Property Data Trust Framework aims to replace this patchwork with a shared digital language for property information.

“The first thing is the data dictionary, which is a large JSON schema that sets a standard way to describe every piece of property data,” Harris explains. “When we talk about an address, address always looks like this format, uses this structure, and everyone uses the same thing.”

This common language allows every participant to communicate in a consistent way. Systems can trust the structure of the data. Lenders can trust its origin. Processes that once took days can be reduced to minutes because the information being passed around is consistent and reliable.

The mortgage industry offers a perfect illustration of the problem. “We are renowned for everyone creating their own API,” Harris says. “We have around a hundred live lenders and countless CRM platforms, and every one of them connects using a bespoke API. We basically created Spaghetti Junction.”

To solve this, OPDA has introduced a standard API specification. It defines how systems connect, what is exchanged, and how it should be interpreted. Both the data dictionary and the API standard are already live and being used in production.

Building the foundation before AI

Across the industry, AI tools are being deployed to extract property information from PDFs, scanned documents, emails, and unstructured text. These tools can be useful, but the more unstructured the input, the more costly and unreliable the output becomes. AI can handle unstructured data, but OPDA ensures the data never becomes unstructured in the first place.

OPDA’s framework tackles the root issue. It creates structure at the point data is generated and shared. It removes the need for constant interpretation and correction. It also creates a stable foundation that AI can build on. Clean, structured data always produces better models, safer automation, and more consistent decisions. Rather than attempting endless short term fixes, OPDA is building an infrastructure layer that everything else can rely on. It turns property data into something predictable and trustworthy.

From regulation to collaboration

Open Banking was forced upon banks by regulators. It required them to open their systems, publish APIs, and allow third parties to access data they once controlled tightly. Most banks saw it as a cost rather than an opportunity. Open Property is the opposite. It is industry led, voluntary, and welcomed by lenders. Standardised property data creates clear efficiencies in lending, valuations, conveyancing, and underwriting. Mortgage processing is one of the slowest and most resource heavy parts of banking. Shared standards give lenders the ability to reduce friction, lower error rates, and cut weeks from the journey. What began as a coordination effort inside the industry has turned into a movement that actively improves bank operations. The incentives align for everyone involved.

Real momentum, not theory

This is not a pilot or a proposal. It is already becoming national infrastructure. The majority of major lenders in the UK have joined OPDA, including Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC UK, NatWest, Santander and Nationwide Building Society. They are joined by lenders such as UTB and L&C Mortgages, along with technology firms like Atom Bank, PEXA, Coadjute, and Mortgage Advice Bureau. The contrast with the early days of Open Banking is striking. That initiative happened only because regulators required it. Open Property is something the industry is choosing to create for itself because the benefits are clear and immediate. Harris often compares the current property ecosystem to the tangled wires behind an old hi fi. The moment you begin untangling them, the entire system becomes clearer.

The trust framework

“The third element is the governance layer, the technical trust,” Harris says. “In the same way Open Banking is underpinned by a trust framework, we need to build one for property data.” This layer will verify where data originates, how it was collected, and when. It will create a record of provenance that lenders, surveyors, regulators, and buyers can rely on. It turns property data into something certified rather than assumed.

The next wave of open innovation Property transactions are worth hundreds of billions of pounds each year, yet the digital foundations beneath them remain inconsistent and outdated. Standardisation may seem unglamorous, but it is what unlocks scale. It is what allowed Open Banking to flourish, and it is what can power the next decade of housing innovation. As AI, automation, and digital infrastructure reshape industries, the value will not flow to those with the largest datasets, but to those with the cleanest and most connected datasets.

What OPDA is building is more than a framework. It is the basis for a faster, safer, more transparent property market. The Open Banking moment for property is arriving slowly, through standards, schemas, and collaboration. It is the invisible work that makes the visible economy finally fit for the digital age.