Moverly’s digital home-moving property pack wins Smart Data Challenge prize

Source: Seven Consultancy

A Smart Data prototype that generates Digital Sale Ready Packs to make it easier to buy and sell a home has been named the winner of the Smart Data Challenge Prize by the Department for Business and Trade.

It has been awarded the £50,000 top prize following eight-months of development and testing in a data sandbox created especially for the prize – a world first, simulating the data that would be created in a city area in a year. Smart Data allows individual consumers and business customers to access and share their data simply and securely with third parties, enabling those third parties to provide innovative services.

The prototype Digital Sale Ready Packs developed by Moverly and Open Property Data Association brings together multiple sources of data into a single source of truth, needed by sellers, buyers, conveyancers, surveyors, and mortgage providers to smooth the homebuying process. This includes land registry, EPC, council tax, utilities and restrictions data, title documents, searches and legal forms.

The packs have been developed to be reused throughout the homebuying journey. The seller’s conveyancer can resolve issues pre-emptively, such as mismatched names on title deeds. Buyers receive simple, plain-English summaries with red, amber, and green risk flags. Buyer’s conveyancers receive the same trusted data, already packaged with provenance. Surveyors draw on the pack to auto-populate reports, while lenders can access validated data and can issue mortgage-ready status or full offers within minutes.

If adopted at scale, Moverly estimates that average transaction times can be reduced from 22 weeks to under 12, with fall-through rates cut from over 25% to below 10%. It believes that this could save each household £1,000-£2,000 in direct costs, while market-wide efficiencies could exceed £2-3 billion annually through reduced duplication and delay. Home moving becomes faster, more transparent, and less stressful.

Ed Molyneux, founder and chief technology officer of Moverley, winner of the Smart Data Challenge Prize

Ed Molyneux, founder and chief technology officer of Moverley, winner of the Smart Data Challenge Prize, said: “Finding a home and making a new life in it should be one of the most positive experiences, instead it is fraught with stress and uncertainty, and if a transaction falls through it can be heartbreaking. Why should anyone settle for this?

“In the UK it takes an average of 22 weeks to complete a transaction, and more than one in four sales collapse – often very late in the process. Each failure leaves buyers and sellers with legal fees, survey costs, and wasted time. The financial loss to consumers runs into billions each year. It reduces mobility, adds friction to the housing market, and undermines consumer confidence in one of life’s most important milestones.

“We address these challenges by reframing the transaction around trusted, reusable data. Instead of information being repeatedly requested, re-keyed, and re-verified, Digital Sale Ready Packs provide a single, trusted source of truth built on Smart Data principles. Each pack contains verified property data that can be confidently reused by buyers, sellers, agents, conveyancers, surveyors, and lenders. This enables once-only data capture and transparent sharing between participants.”

Minister for digital economy, Baroness Lloyd of Effra, said: “Cutting edge ideas and innovation is central to this prize and I congratulate Moverly and all the teams that competed this year on their projects.

“We want to harness the power of Smart Data so it can have real world benefits for consumers but also help cut red tape and boost the economy, and that’s why this prize is so important.”

In addition, two runners up have been awarded £25,000 each. Nigel by Beyond Encryption provides households with one secure place to store and manage their information. With the average person juggling data across more than 100 accounts, and many still relying on paper letters, Nigel (short for Now I’ve Got Everything Labelled) makes records comparable across sectors e.g. insurance, motoring, pensions, banking services and energy, unlocking insights that remain invisible when data stays siloed. Users can search instantly, receive reminders for bills and renewals, and share documents securely with trusted family members, carers, or advisers.

By linking transport accounts, Open Banking, and official UK government CO2 datasets, Open Transport has been developed to create a picture of travel activity across multiple modes of transport. Its dashboard empowers individuals to interrogate their own data, understand journeys, costs and emissions, and receive personalised insights to make new travel choices. Unlike existing travel apps that optimise a single journey, the Open Transport Dashboard is designed to deliver long-term, cross-sector insights making transport choices clearer, greener and affordable.

The Smart Data Challenge Prize, funded by the Department for Business & Trade, is delivered by challenge prize experts Challenge Works, in partnership with the Open Data Institute, bigspark and NayaOne.

Ten finalists competed for the prize, including platforms to help people get more value from household solar panels, make home-heating more affordable, improve access to financial products, and make it easier for businesses to manage their energy and environmental impact. Each of the competing teams received £50,000 and access to a bespoke and secure Smart Data sandbox enabling them to test their products, taking the total funding to £600,000.

Through the prize, the government is gaining insight into a range of in-depth, tested use cases across a variety of sectors, providing a clear picture of the potential barriers to development for innovators, and identifying exactly what data would need to be unlocked to bring the most innovative ideas in the Smart Data space to life in the long term.

Further reading: Insight: It’s time to unlock the Smart Data dividend – with urgency and direction