The Open Property Data Association (OPDA) has admitted two new members, Hiizzy and Instamo, as the UK property transaction industry accelerates its push towards shared digital data standards. The additions bring the total membership to a coalition that already includes all six major high-street banks, building societies, conveyancers and estate agents working under a common open-data framework.
What the new members do
Instamo offers a secure autofill service for mortgage applications. It populates form fields within a lender’s portal using adviser-approved client data, without requiring the lender to change its existing interface. The company says the tool improves accuracy and reduces the time lost to manual re-keying, one of the persistent friction points in the UK mortgage origination process. Freddie Savundra, founder of Instamo, said the company believes too much time is “currently lost through duplication, manual processes and disconnected systems”, and that OPDA membership will allow it to collaborate with organisations working towards a data-driven property market.
Hiizzy takes a different entry point. Its platform begins at the property listing stage, where it captures seller disclosures, digital verification records and supporting documents into what it describes as a structured, reusable property record. The aim is to make that record portable across the transaction, so that buyers, sellers and conveyancers are not repeating the same data-gathering exercise at successive stages. Lewis Buckley, chief executive and founding partner, said the listing stage is where most property information is first captured, making it the logical place to build transaction infrastructure that can be reused securely throughout the whole process.
Market and regulatory context
The timing is notable. The UK government’s home buying and selling reform programme has been progressing through the Digital Property Market Steering Group, which brings together the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Business and Trade’s Smart Data Council. OPDA has been a formal participant in that process, and its chair Maria Harris gave evidence to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee in 2024 on improving the home buying and selling process. The association’s open data standards are intended to feed directly into the legislative and regulatory framework the government is building out.
The broader proptech market has seen sustained investment in digitising the property transaction stack, with a cluster of firms working on identity verification, digital title, upfront property information packs and mortgage origination automation. What remains unresolved is interoperability: individual point solutions multiply, but without shared data standards, each handoff between a listing platform, a conveyancer and a lender still involves manual intervention. OPDA’s core proposition is that agreement on standards is a prerequisite for any of the individual tools to realise their full efficiency gain.
For Hiizzy and Instamo, OPDA membership offers two things: a standards framework that makes their data outputs recognisable to other participants in the chain, and a seat at the table in a trade body that has government engagement. Both companies are early-stage, and neither disclosed revenue, customer numbers or transaction volumes in the membership announcement.
The next milestones to watch are whether the government’s reform programme produces binding interoperability requirements, and whether OPDA’s standards achieve the network adoption needed to shift industry behaviour beyond early adopters.
