HM Land Registry unveils its ambitious Strategy 2025+ focused on digitalising property services with a strong emphasis on AI, data sharing, and faster registration, but calls for clearer timelines and detailed commitments persist among industry stakeholders.
Last week, HM Land Registry (HMLR) unveiled its ambitious Strategy 2025+, setting out a transformation roadmap aimed at delivering better services and creating a faster, less stressful property market. Central to th...
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e plan is a commitment to extensive digital transformation and the harnessing of data, with key targets including the adoption of agreed data standards by 2030 and making all property information instantly accessible online by 2035.
HMLR’s strategy has drawn a mix of optimism and scepticism from industry stakeholders. Digital property platform PEXA, which pioneered online property completions in Australia, welcomed the approach, noting clear alignment with its own vision for a fully digital, seamless conveyancing process. PEXA’s group chief officer, Krystle Kocik, highlighted the importance of the roadmap’s focus on API services, digital identification, and e-signatures as critical components of the next-generation property market. However, Kocik also urged HMLR to provide clearer timelines and more granular commitments around API service levels and automation targets, emphasizing that detailed benchmarks would build greater market confidence and trust.
Conversely, some voices in the legal conveyancing sector viewed the strategy with cautious realism. David Jabbari, CEO of national conveyancing platform Muve, praised HMLR’s vision but warned the strategy tends to repackage long-standing promises without sufficiently detailed execution plans. His concerns reflect persistent registration delays that continue to undermine HMLR’s transformation claims. Marion Silvey, a real estate partner at Spector Constant & Williams, echoed the sentiment that while strategic ambition is welcome, it must translate into concrete improvements in registration speed and accuracy to truly benefit developers, lenders, and buyers.
A significant focus of the strategy is the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes and reduce turnaround times, slated for full deployment by 2030. Peter Ambrose, managing director of The Partnership Property Lawyers, welcomed this move, acknowledging that the traditional approach of boosting headcount is unsustainable. Ambrose highlighted that AI, particularly suited to handling the unstructured data in HMLR’s registers, could yield substantial efficiency gains sooner than the 2030 target, based on his firm’s early adoption experience.
The strategy also garnered attention from the Residential Logbook Association (RLBA), which champions homeowner empowerment through residential logbooks linked to property data. Nigel Walley, RLBA chair, observed that HMLR’s plans for giving homeowners access and control over their property records align well with RLBA’s goals. Sally Holdway, RLBA’s buying and selling lead, described the strategy as a crucial first step toward enabling homeowners to fully manage their HMLR accounts digitally, a shift toward a more homeowner-centric service model.
HM Land Registry’s own recent progress suggests that its ambitions are grounded in ongoing digital advancements. The organisation’s Annual Report 2024-25 highlighted that 95% of applications were processed within 12 months as of March 2025, surpassing previous targets. The introduction of AI in document comparison has enhanced accuracy and efficiency, and counter-fraud measures have prevented more than £59 million of fraudulent property transactions. Automated services already in place save an estimated 300,000 hours annually by catching errors before submission and streamlining applications through the Digital Registration Service.
More broadly, HMLR aims to automate up to 70% of land register updates by 2025, with many simple applications completed in seconds. This automation will free expert caseworkers to focus on complex cases, while integration of property data with other datasets, such as health and crime statistics, is expected to yield public benefits including fraud prevention and improved community safety.
Despite these advancements, industry experts urge that the transformation must be sustained by clear, transparent milestones and collaboration with market participants. PEXA’s Kocik, for example, called for publicly visible roadmaps for data standards and regular performance dashboards to build market trust and demonstrate steady progress. There is also a push for enhanced developer and integrator experiences, including realistic sandboxes for testing and thorough conformance validation.
In summary, HM Land Registry’s Strategy 2025+ sets out an ambitious vision for a fully digital, data-driven property market designed to accelerate transactions, improve user experience, and enhance security. While industry stakeholders broadly support the direction, many seek more detailed execution plans and quicker adoption of transformative technologies like AI. Success will depend on HMLR’s ability to deliver tangible improvements in registration speed and accuracy, backed by sustained investment and genuine partnership with the conveyancing ecosystem.
Source: Noah Wire Services
