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E-ssential facts Imagine all market and building data being avaiable in 60 seconds and at a cost of a few pounds. Labour started the ball rolling with it's plans to put government services online by 2005.
Now it's time foir the industry to gear up too.

By Adam Tinworth

The property industry will be in the grip of an online fever in 2005. The first signs appeared before Christmans, says Andrew Waller or Remit Consulting, when work advising on new IT implimentation surged. "We even had a dot.com looking for advice on a second phase," he says.

Most computers need to be replaced every four or five years as they reach the end of their effective life. Four years on from the huge investment to squash the millenium bug, companies now need to examine their IT use.

On a deeper level, there is a greater force at work: the government. In the millenial enthusiasm for all things "e", Labour committed to putting as many government services online as possible. These initiatives have not stopped with the collapse of commercial enthusiasm for online ventures.

Planning has already made its way online (http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/) and the pieces needed for e-conveyancing are dropping into place. Chief amoung these are the National Land Information Service (http://www.nlis.org.uk/), which is a means of extracting information from the National Land and Property Gazetteer (http://www.nlpg.org.uk/). At the heart of these systems is the ability to identify any building with a unique property reference number - more accurate than a postcode or address.

The Valuation Office was one of the first departments to spot the potential of this information. It extracts data from the NLPG for its Valuebill systems, which both speeds up the billing of business rates and ensures that new buildings are quickly assimilated.

And people are using web-based services. "They, like e-mail, are part of the scene now," says Waller. "In fact, people are using them enough to see how crap they are."

And that realisation is driving further web development. Industry big names from 2000 are still there - Propex, Focus (now owned by US site CoStar), fProp and our own EGi, amoung others - and all are responding to the growing amount of information available.

There's no better example of how this could change the industry than Landmark's Enviroscreen product, an addition to the successful Promap (http://www.promap.co.uk). The service addresses the growing need for detailed environmental site reports. Its deceptively simple. You select a site by map, and 60 seconds and £45 later you have a detailed report of the contamination risks.

Why is it deceptive? All the clever work is done behind the scenes, aggregating data ranging from historic mapping to all the Environmen Agency data available.

With the government's continuing push to aggregate all property data through the NLPG and the Land Registry by 2007, imagine all data on any building you choose being avaliable in 60 seconds and for a few pounds. Is this the tolling bell of change for an industry that sees market knowledge as one of its key assets?