Searchland took part in the Geovation Accelerator Programme in 2021. The programme is co-sponsored by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey and supports start-ups in the geospatial and property sectors.
Searchland is a PropTech (property technology) company that uses various datasets, including those from HM Land Registry, to provide a business-to-business platform for property developers, architects, planners, agents and others. Searchland’s platform enables users to access and manipulate information, such as HM Land Registry’s ownership, leases, transaction prices and company ownership data. This helps their customers to make informed decisions about property development opportunities.
Other users include renewable energy and utility companies. For example, solar panel providers using Searchland’s platform can easily investigate the best sites according to proximity to substations, planning permissions and so on.
Hugh explains the benefits of taking part in the Geovation Accelerator Programme and how it probably sped up Searchland’s development by a year. It fast-tracked their journey from an idea to a business, providing access to valuable courses, mentorship and a supportive community of fellow start-ups.
Since taking part in the Geovation Accelerator Programme, Searchland has gone from strength to strength. Hugh says a recent data integration with Rightmove means customers can immediately see whether or not a site is on the market, which gives them a competitive advantage in acquiring land for potential development.
Searchland’s goal is to become a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management-like platform for the property industry. With continued growth and strategic partnerships, they are poised to make further advances in streamlining property development processes.
We welcome your comments about this blog in the comments below. Please note that we are unable to discuss individual cases through the comments section and would request that all such queries be directed to our Contact Us web form where you will receive a response as soon as possible.
Property technology (PropTech) provider adoor joined the Geovation Accelerator Programme in October 2020 – a programme backed by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey which provides geospatial and PropTech start-ups with grant funding and 12 months of support.
Currently, transactions take over 151 days on average to complete and nearly half of transactions fell through in the first quarter of 2023. Conveyancers and estate agents are battling higher caseloads, with more enquiries, meaning they have less time to complete tasks.
We’ve built adoor to help buyers, sellers, conveyancers and estate agents track the progress of property transactions from mortgage to moving day, whenever works for them.
By enabling everyone to see the entire chain in one place online, we have seen users save up to seven hours per week in reduced admin. We’ve also seen fall-throughs reduce to almost zero with greater clarity and transparency made possible by tracking the chain in one place.
We provide proactive notifications on upcoming tasks and give everyone the same view on progress. This reduces the need for chasing calls as you can see the next stage and its due date across the entire chain of transactions. Connecting services such as identity verification, anti-money laundering checks and property searches all within the adoor platform also saves time.
We use HM Land Registry’s title numbers to validate each property on adoor and to get the title deeds. We also reference the UK House Price Index and Price Paid Data to track the trend of house sales and prices. The data from HM Land Registry is then combined with property data provided by property professionals, alongside the automated data we provide for the Energy Performance Certificate and the council tax band. We also work with Veya to show their title insights and risk scores that help property professionals focus enquiries and to give a heads up of potential issues, ultimately reducing fall-throughs and speeding up transactions.
We joined the Geovation Accelerator Programme in October 2020. Having access to this network and community during the peak of the COVID pandemic was especially helpful. Members of the Geovation team challenged our assumptions to craft a product that truly solves a problem. In addition, introductions to people within the industry helped us to get vital feedback, enabling us to improve the service before launch.
For a small team of three, we’ve already achieved a lot! Most importantly, we have powerful partnerships with LEAP, Thirdfort, Veya, Search Acumen, AnyVan and Rhino Home Protect.
Our partnerships have allowed us to create a central platform for property data and updates which was previously siloed between different systems and stakeholders. This data is infinitely more useful when shared - conveyancers can be instructed sooner and complete enquiries faster with the upfront property information collected, meaning there is less of a delay after the offer has been accepted. Estate agents can also track progress in the same place.
By bringing everything onto one platform, there is no need to waste time finding folders, remembering passwords or having too many tabs open! We also hope to see this reduce the stress levels for property professionals.
We’re about to announce our partnership with Just Move In – the home moving experts, handling removals and changing your utilities.
We’re implementing version 2 of the BASPI (Buying and Selling Property Information) form created by the Home Buying and Selling Group. This aligns to the Property Data Trust Framework that standardises the format property data is shared in. Collecting this upfront property information helps to speed up property transactions by up to four weeks and reduces fall-throughs significantly as potential buyers know more at the point of making an offer.
We’re continuing to develop our system with more integrations with case management systems and fellow PropTech providers, most recently with fellow Geovation alumni Veya.
We will continue to collaborate with industry bodies and clients to refine and develop new features in our quest to make moving home easier for all.
]]>Blocktype was a participant in the Geovation Accelerator Programme in autumn 2022 – a programme backed by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey which provides geospatial and property technology (PropTech) start-ups with grant funding and 12 months of support.
Over the next five years we need to build at least 1.5 million homes to meet England’s housing needs. But we don’t know where, how, or even if, we can fit that many homes in the land available.
Some people argue there is no space left, and that if we keep building new homes we will destroy our most precious landscapes and heritage assets. Others argue that the social need for housing should trump everything else.
The problem is that both camps have limited understanding of what these large abstract housing numbers actually look like. For example, 100 detached houses with gardens is radically different to a 20 storey block with the same number of homes.
The only way to confidently understand how much housing we can fit on a site is to hire architects to design proposals for every site. They can test different types of housing and produce detailed floor plans and robust information. But architects cost money and take time, two things we are currently scarce on.
Instead, our industry turns to spreadsheets. We apply formulas of varying levels of complexity to each site, and quickly get figures for ‘number of homes’ or ‘gross internal area’. Whilst this approach allows us to assess a large number of sites quickly, it also has huge margins of error, as it doesn’t take into consideration the shape and size of a site or building typologies used.
Developed by an urban designer and a data scientist, Blocktype provides a middle ground between abstract formulas and detailed architect designs.
It provides developers and planners with pre-designed, customisable architectural floor plans, which they can drag and drop onto any site to create their own design. Whilst they do this, they get instant feedback, not only on the number and types of homes you fit on your site, but important information on the financial, policy and design implications of your design.
In other words, Blocktype democratises the process of site appraisals. Anyone can easily explore what they can fit on a plot of land without relying on architects, planners or any other consultants, until you actually need them. What used to take days to research, design and present, now takes minutes.
Blocktype’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to understand what housing you can build where. We believe this will increase certainty and transparency in the planning process, reduce land speculation and help us build the right homes in the right places.
Blocktype has a database of architectural floor plans which users can customise and turn into ‘blocks’ by setting the number of floors, construction costs, sales values and so on. This provides information such as the area of the development and the number and types of homes.
It also has a database of local authority planning policies and viability data, such as construction costs and sales values. As the user places blocks on the map, the information from these blocks create the inputs into the policy and viability information, to give instant feedback on the most critical information when deciding what to build, where.
To make all this work we rely heavily on two key datasets from HM Land Registry: Price Paid Data and the National Polygon Service. The former allows us to estimate the gross development value of the proposed development, and the latter helps the user know where they can build on.
Blocktype is for anyone that needs to understand what you can build where. We’re starting to offer this to property developers, as they appraise thousands of sites a year and rely on a good understanding of development capacity to value land correctly. Next, we’d like to expand this to the rest of the industry, particularly local authority planners, who rely on a good understanding of development capacity to write planning policies, plan infrastructure, and make decisions on what should get planning permission.
Taking part in the Geovation programme helped us develop our early concepts into a fully functional start-up. The access to mentors and experts, including HM Land Registry specialists, put us in the right direction to develop our approach to sales, marketing and financial modelling.
Blocktype private beta has just launched to a limited number of early adopters. Over the next couple of months we’ll continue to improve the product and aim for a public launch in August – you can sign up on our website. We’re also starting to look for investment, to retain users by improving the product and rapidly scale to the wider development industry.
If you’re interested in finding out more go to www.blocktype.co.uk.
]]>You could argue that house prices are a national obsession. Who among us hasn’t wanted to know how much a property has sold for at one time or another? But where does that data come from? And how do we know what average house prices are, and how much they have gone up or down?
If you’ve ever wondered where websites such as Rightmove and Zoopla get their house price information from, the answer is us, alongside others such as Registers of Scotland. We register, on average, more than 100,000 residential sales each month. That means we are the main source for house price information in England and Wales and have a huge amount of data about what properties have actually sold for.
Our monthly house price index (HPI) is widely recognised as critical information about house prices, in fact it’s a National Statistic, meaning it meets the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and value. It shows average house prices broken down by:
Having house price data so easily to hand means homebuyers and sellers are much better informed from the outset. For example, if you want to discover if an asking price is reasonable based on the type of property and area it’s in, you can easily find this out with a few clicks of a mouse. By making this kind of data more transparent, the whole housing market can operate more smoothly.
In addition to homebuyers and sellers, our historic and recent property sale prices data is used by:
We have 13 datasets which are publicly accessible on our Use land and property data platform. These are bulk datasets suitable for business and professional use such as overseas companies that own property in England and Wales.
Individuals wanting to find out information about a specific property can use our Search for land and property information tool. This provides information about the property such as:
Making this kind of data easy to access means there is transparency in the property market which allows people to make informed decisions more quickly.
Another example of how we are making data easier to access is the creation of a central Local Land Charges (LLC) Register, one of the biggest ever government data transformation projects. It involves collating and transforming LLC data from all local authorities in England and Wales so that it is consistent in format and accessible in one place.
Whenever someone buys a property, a conveyancer checks the local land charges which are restrictions on the use of a property or area of land such as planning conditions and tree preservation orders. Rather than dealing with a wide range of LLC registers in separate local authorities, in different formats and at different costs, the central register that we are creating offers:
By speeding up and simplifying this element of the conveyancing process, buying decisions can be made earlier, reducing the risk of property transactions falling through due to late revelations. These failed transactions cost buyers time and up to £2,700 per incident. When the project to centralise all local land charges data is complete, property buyers, developers and policymakers will all have easy access to LLC data across England and Wales.
There is a well-known data sharing principle that you should never predict all potential uses of data once it’s released. We’ve certainly seen evidence of that with our location and ownership data being widely re-used outside of our traditional user base of conveyancing and lending, such as:
By supporting PropTech (property technology) start-ups through our Geovation Accelerator Programme, dozens of new uses of our data have been created to revolutionise the property market and beyond. For example, Skyroom uses our data to identify buildings which are suitable for airspace development, enabling landowners in London to build upwards rather than outwards.
We’ve calculated that our top four datasets alone create an annual benefit to the economy of more than £300 million. How did we calculate this? We’ve been working alongside the Geospatial Commission to develop a new framework to measure the economic, social and environmental value of public sector location data. This guidance should benefit both the public and private sectors and boost the UK’s global geospatial expertise.
The quality of our data is even more important to us and our customers than the amount of data we release. Our focus over the next few years will be on making our data more FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Our ambition is to make better quality data available to more people, and so unlock more value, in turn helping the property market and wider economy.
]]>This weekend will see people across the United Kingdom celebrating the Coronation of His Majesty The King and Her Majesty The Queen Consort.
Thousands of events will be hosted for the occasion including street parties, Coronation Big Lunches, Big Help Out plans and other Coronation activities. If you would like to see what’s on in your local area or share how you will be celebrating then check out the digital map on the Coronation website.
In the spirit of the celebration, I thought I would take a look at the Coronation through the lens of HM Land Registry data and see what I could find out about the roads around the country named Coronation.
We have more than 1,000 streets registered with Coronation in the name. These were the top 5 most common among them:
From this I thought I would drill down further into the data for one of these sets of streets and despite not being one for soaps myself, one name stood out more than others. Coronation Street.
So after finding all of the Coronation Streets we had registered I took the relevant postcode sector for them, 'CB2 1' for example, and using HM Land Registry’s open data I ran a report on the average prices and volumes of each postcode for the year-to-date to get the average for sales for each street.
As the report uses current year-to-date information these rankings will vary over time.
The top 10 Coronation Streets for average house price year-to-date were:
Unfortunately, we don’t have any price paid data for the cobbled Coronation Street of fictional town Weatherfield so I can’t tell you what Ken Barlow’s house would be worth nowadays. There is however a Coronation Street in Salford (the borough Weatherfield is based in) which has a year-to-date average house price of £205,000.
If you want to create some price paid reports for any of the non-fictional streets out there you can do so free of charge. There is more information available on the other types of data you can access from HM Land Registry within our GOV.UK pages.
I would like to wish to wish everyone a happy Coronation weekend and hope those who are watching the Coronation or taking part in any of the celebrations enjoy the occasion.
]]>Veya was a participant in the Geovation Accelerator Programme in 2019 – a programme which provides geospatial and PropTech start-ups with grant funding and six months of intensive support, backed by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey.
I’m Jason Howarth, founder of Veya. Veya provides an instant and comprehensive analysis of HM Land Registry title deeds – giving anyone access to a layperson understanding of property titles (the evidence of a person’s right to property). Through our system you gain insight into risks, opportunities or issues that may be present within any land/property title in England and Wales, so you can make the right decisions with confidence and clarity.
Having been an estate agent, I was all too familiar with the frustration of discovering issues weeks into transactions that resulted in delays. By reading the title deeds from the outset, I could address issues early on to ensure a smoother and quicker sale. However, the legal jargon in the deeds often made it difficult to understand, and solutions or recommendations are not provided. I had to do a lot of additional research to understand the potential impact of certain title issues, and what to do next to resolve them.
That’s why we developed Veya. The analysis Veya provides is invaluable to all involved in the sale of a property. Risks or issues associated with a property can be explained prior to listing, which leads to smoother and faster transactions for all.
With Veya, you can quickly get a comprehensive understanding of the key aspects of a property title's details in less than seven seconds. We use HM Land Registry’s Register Extract Service together with our proprietary scenario identification methods and scoring algorithm to generate the Veya Report.
The report provides key information such as class of title, tenure (whether leasehold or freehold) and ownership details. Where possible, solutions to title issues are provided, and details on restrictions and charges are explained. Every report also includes our unique complexity score – a numerical ranking designed so you can quickly get an idea on where the property stands in terms of potential risks or complexities.
Veya has been proven to significantly reduce transaction times by up to 25% through highlighting the key areas of focus right from the point of appraisal by the estate agent through to being able to allocate cases to the appropriate conveyancer. To date, more than 3,500 reports have been downloaded, saving those businesses a great deal of time. The return on investment is significant.
Taking part in the Geovation programme was a pivotal moment for Veya. The workshops were incredibly insightful, and well positioned for startups looking to scale up.
The main benefit for Veya was being able to create excellent relationships with key members of HM Land Registry. Their insight and knowledge are exemplary and if they didn’t have an answer, they always knew someone who did, quickly.
Up until now Veya has been focused on developing the business-to-business model for property professionals such as estate agents and conveyancers. Now, I'm thrilled to announce that we have launched our direct-to-consumer offering! This will give buyers/sellers or simply curious homeowners the ability to easily understand complex information about any property they are intrigued about.
We welcome your comments about this blog in the comments below. Please note that we are unable to discuss individual cases through the comments section and would request that all such queries be directed to our Contact Us web form where you will receive a response as soon as possible.
Our data is a national asset and a crucial part of achieving our vision to enable a world-leading property market. By making our data easy to find, access, use and combine with other data, it will provide maximum value for the UK. We’ll do this through greater use of application programming interfaces, Unique Property Reference Numbers and machine readability.
Our new strategy builds upon the strong foundations established under our previous one. However, rather than continuing to focus on the sharing of additional datasets from the register, we will focus on increasing the usefulness of the data that we already make available.
Over the next 3 years, we want to expand the opportunities for using our data in new ways. Alongside this, we aim to increase the quality of our data so it’s more valuable to a larger number of users. We hold a critical national asset and are responsible for allowing the nation to access and use it as effectively as possible.
To increase the wider value of our data, we will focus on making it FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). This aligns with the FAIR principles introduced by the Geospatial Commission to make better location data available to more people.
Findable: The first step in using any data, is to find it. Data should be easy to find for both people and computers.
Accessible: Data must be accessible in order to be useful. This means that terms for using the data should be clear and simple with minimal registration and authentication requirements.
Interoperable: Making datasets easier to link with each other is critical to ensuring their wider impact and value.
Reusable: Data should be more usable across a wider range of purposes so its value can be unlocked.
We carried out extensive research in 2021 with our data customers, including central Government departments, data companies, property consultants and utility companies.
We asked what improvements they would like to see and what enhancements would generate more activity within their business. This is what they told us:
Accessibility: The top priority our data customers identified was being able to access the right amount of data when needed and as close to real time as possible. Application programming interfaces (APIs) obviously come into play here, so we are currently refining a strategy for this and designing the necessary infrastructure to make it happen.
Interoperability: The second priority for customers is additional attributes within the datasets to make them more ‘linkable’ to other information. Combining HM Land Registry data with other land information results in powerful data which is vital to a sustainable economy.
The addition of Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) was considered as a high value addition and a way to link a wide range of datasets together to provide insights that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. A couple of our datasets, such as the National Polygon Service and the Registered Lease Dataset, already include UPRNs, but our aim is to add them more widely to other datasets, despite the challenge that UPRNs do not correlate easily with our property titles!
Findability: Another requirement that customers identified was metadata (information about the data) improvements. Metadata and data should be easy to find for both humans and computers, so our third priority will be on making our data and metadata more machine readable.
We will continue to engage with our customers to establish the best ways to make our data FAIR.
We will continue to sponsor the Geovation Accelerator Programme alongside Ordnance Survey, supporting start-up businesses who want to use our data to create new products and services.
So far 137 start-ups have been supported by Geovation with more than 1,500 jobs created. For example, SearchLand combines HM Land Registry data with information from other providers such as the National Grid, Companies House and the Environment Agency to save their clients hundreds of hours per month searching multiple sources. This is particularly useful for property professionals wanting to identify off-market sites that can be developed for new homes or wanting to investigate the development opportunities of existing buildings.
We are part of a much wider data landscape. Our data is a national asset and, combined with other datasets, it has the potential to generate insights that can help government and others to tackle complex social, environmental and economic challenges.
We are working closely with the Geospatial Commission and others to achieve the government’s ambition to build a world-leading data economy across all sectors. Our data strategy aligns with the government’s intention to unlock the value of the data that it holds, making it open, transparent and easy to use. We will continue to collaborate with others to ensure that the data we hold can be used to add value to society and support a data-driven economy.
]]>SearchLand was a participant in the Geovation Accelerator Programme in spring 2021 – a programme which provides geospatial and PropTech start-ups with grant funding and 12 months of support, backed by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey.
We started SearchLand to enable property professionals to make better informed property and land decisions.
I am one of three co-founders with two of us being software developers. This means that user experience and data integrity is vital to what we offer.
We have sourced and combined a whole host of property and land related data from across England and Wales to provide a platform that captures the most reliable and relevant data for anyone looking for property information.
We launched in January 2021 and participated in the Geovation Accelerator Programme later that year. The programme gave us 12 months of invaluable support, both financial and practical, in developing our business. Support included workshops on areas such as sales and marketing as well as coaching, mentoring and networking opportunities, all of which has helped us to deliver our solution to challenges that exist in the property market.
Our customers range from small start-ups to business giants across the property sector. They are usually interested in:
As a PropTech (property technology) company we focus on giving insights on all property information. Our entire platform is structured around HM Land Registry title numbers and we also use a number of their datasets, such as:
We combine this data with data from other providers such as the National Grid, Companies House, Environment Agency, Historic England and local planning authorities.
When someone clicks on a title, they can see all the information associated with that title from the data that we have combined. This means customers find sites based on their own requirements across any dataset from any provider. For example, users can quickly access planning data and see if planning permission is due to expire. They also have the option of sending personalised letters directly from the platform to the property owner.
Price paid data means the users can create accurate valuations and not rely on third parties for this information. This allows them to set realistic expectations with landowners as well as operate in areas that fit their budget.
Property professionals spend an average of 100 hours per month just collecting data. Finding sites for development can be a time consuming and repetitive task. What’s more, conversion rates are between 3 to 10% for the sites that are found which means that 90% of the work is wasted.
We designed SearchLand to save property professionals hundreds of hours doing research and enable them to validate information much more quickly and easily. We do this by combining all the necessary data on our platform and making it searchable according to individual criteria. This means clients have a one-stop-shop rather than having to search multiple sources and platforms.
Users can apply filters when searching so they see only the relevant results for them, making their work incredibly quick and easy. For example, they can filter searches to show only brownfield sites within a particular town centre with failed planning permission but in a council that has recently started its local plan review.
We know of one new user who was searching for land to build a house on. Within a week he found 30 sites, was able to engage with all landowners in writing immediately and closed a deal without ever getting past the free trial!
So far, our customers have identified and saved over 190,000 sites on the platform. Of these, a small percentage will go through to become tangible deals that ultimately will be used to deliver more housing.
We have recently completed the huge task of digitising local plans for the South East of England and London. Using this data, we have created a new ‘strategic land tool’. Our future focus is to scale this up by digitising all 350 local plans across England and Wales. This is true to our commitment of releasing new tools for users which is what we’ve done since we launched.
]]>Skyroom was a participant in the Geovation Accelerator Programme in 2018 – a programme which provides geospatial and PropTech start-ups with grant funding and six months of intensive support, backed by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey.
Did you know that 70% of the cost of a home in London is not its four walls but the land it’s built on? (Rise Up, UCL, 2018)
The competition for land in London is fierce and development is costly. As a result, supply has not kept up with demand. This means that key workers, such as our nurses, teachers, firefighters, and police officers, can’t find affordable accommodation near to where they work.
Skyroom is a technology, design and airspace development company founded in 2018 with a mission to improve the lives of key workers in London by delivering affordable, sustainable and beautiful homes near where they work.
We help landowners originate, design and deliver homes in the airspace above existing buildings in their portfolio.
Building upwards, not outwards, we achieve a more sustainable model of urban development, which preserves existing buildings, and prevents urban sprawl.
Skyroom joined the Geovation Accelerator Programme, co-funded by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey, in October 2018. We benefitted from funding and six months of intensive support including workshops and one-to-ones to fast track our growth.
We use HM Land Registry data - including the UK House Price Index, property ownership data and freehold and leasehold data - to identify buildings in a landowner’s portfolio which are suitable for airspace development.
Using HM Land Registry data, Skyroom can accelerate the earliest stages of development by ranking sites in order of opportunity and risk.
Currently we are working with two London boroughs - Lambeth and Waltham Forest - who were successful in applying for the £100 million Key Worker Homes Fund. The fund offers them technical expertise and capital to deliver airspace developments above buildings in their portfolio. Early-stage designs indicate that over 111 new homes could be delivered across two sites, 50% of which would be affordable and allocated to key workers.
Skyroom is a trusted partner to public and private sector organisations including FTSE 100 companies, housing associations, local authorities and NHS trusts. At the time of writing, Skyroom has more than 1,030 homes in the development pipeline.
In 2020 Skyroom secured planning permission to build 15 homes in the airspace above an apartment building in Southwark (see picture). The development will see four storeys added to the current three-storey building, together with rooftop gardens which will benefit the residents and encourage biodiversity.
By 2030, Skyroom aims to have provided London’s key workers with 10,000 homes, in partnership with London's major landlords.
]]>I have been lucky enough to work on the Geovation Accelerator Programme since 2017 as part of HM Land Registry’s involvement in the initiative, and was delighted when it won Accelerator Programme of the Year in the recent Go:Tech awards.
The Go:Tech awards celebrate businesses and entrepreneurs who lead the way in technology and innovation across the UK. This is exactly what the Geovation programme aims to do, providing funding and support from both HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey so PropTech and geospatial start-up firms can advance to the next level.
So far 137 start-ups have been supported by Geovation, with more than 1,500 jobs created and £116 million in funding raised.
I have worked with great community members and business founders during my time as part of the Geovation team. I have regular sessions with participants throughout their time on the programme covering what commercial data HM Land Registry has and how it might help them, introducing them to stakeholders and helping them understand our statutory services. The support doesn’t stop at the end of the programme as they remain members of Geovation. It’s the best role I have had in HM Land Registry and it’s very rewarding to see how the companies we have supported go from strength to strength.
There have been many success stories along the way.
Orbital Witness was part of our first cohort. Their platform is used for due diligence in property transactions and they are already making tens of thousands of property transactions a year more efficient by giving lawyers and other professionals the technology they need to get the job done. Looking ahead, their goal is to make property radically more transparent, quick and easy to transact by replacing manual diligence with automated solutions.
Sail Homes joined the Accelerator Programme in 2020. They help families going through probate to value and sell inherited properties and have been involved in more than 30,000 property sales.
Sociability joined the cohort in October 2019. They launched an app which makes it quick, easy and free to find detailed and reliable accessibility information, helping disabled people find accessible places and enjoy greater social inclusion. Sociability also helps businesses better appreciate which barriers they have, what problems they’re creating and how to fix them. So far, 4,000 venues are profiled on the app.
Start-ups who are successful in being chosen to take part in the Geovation programme receive financial support, worth more than £100,000. This includes grant funding, a 12-month residency in the data hub, intensive support from industry experts, workshops, coaching and access to the latest location and property data from Ordnance Survey and HM Land Registry. At the end of the first 6 months the start-ups take part in a showcase/demo day where they pitch to potential investors and stakeholders.
Applications for the next cohort will go live in the summer and I can’t wait to start the cycle once again with the new participants in October.
]]>