Article in Estate Agency trade journal 'The Negotiator' see here

Property logbooks now have political backing at a high level and, it is claimed, will be an established part of the property sales process by 2025 at the latest.

Nigel Walley, chair of new trade body the Residential Logbook Association, says he and the other founders had initially struggled to make headway until the housing ministry suddenly began taking an interest as political promises to ‘make moving home easier’ came to the fore.

“One day we were battling to even get low-level ministry interest in logbooks, and the next minute big political guns were sat around at meetings showing a keen interest,” says Walley.

Ministers are interested in logbooks because it’s an ‘oven ready’ solution to creating a central database of the nation’s properties that doesn’t require government funding; many of the different logbook providers are already making revenue and profits.

“It’s important to flag up that most of the logbook companies are already live and signing up users,” he says.

“We just don’t yet have good integration with the estate agent industry although one of our new members, Sprift, is doing well in integrating to supply property data.”

Walley says that with agents it’s a chicken-and-egg situation – many of them are waiting for logbooks to gain traction before they get involved, and yet they are one of the keys to making logbooks successful.

“Although it might take until 2025 to achieve, with the government behind us and agents beginning to see their benefits, logbooks will get there in the end,” he says.

Other companies already up-and-running in specific sectors including the National Deeds Depository in conveyancing, Spaciable within new homes and Chimni (which Walley leads) in consumer property management.

It already has 1,000 users in West London where it is trialling a ‘property history’ database with Knight Frank that will see the histories of famous and important homes added to its logbooks.

Leading house historian Melanie Back-Hansen has been involved.

Chimni MD Nigel Walley was quoted in the Sunday Times 'Homes' Section today, in an article by Carol Lewis looking at the delays and backlog in conveyancing process.  As we emerge from post-COVID lockdown, the impact of staff furloughs, redundancies and a surge in sales have conspired to increase the length of the homes sales process to unacceptable levels.

The article highlights the backlog in sales processing, and the structural problems in the conveyancing industry that have caused it. Beth Rudolph, of the Conveyancing Association, explains: “The selling process has speeded up, but the time to complete is the same, if not longer, because of a lack of capacity, backlog and other problems.” The article highlights property logbooks as potentially one of the solutions and quotes Chimni MD Nigel Walley:

'One way in which [an improved conveyancing process] might be achieved is through digital logbooks, where all the material needed to buy, sell or rent a property is held.   Nigel Walley, managing director of Chimni, a logbook provider, is chair of the HBSG’s logbook working party. He says: “There are just four providers and 5,000 users of logbooks — we are almost universally unknown.”

This could change in the next year. “We are about a year way from mass roll-out,” he says. “Then people could be perpetually ready to convey with all their house information in one place in a format that can be shared between everyone.”  It can’t come soon enough, with buyers and sellers growing increasingly frustrated by the delays and concern mounting that many will miss the stamp duty deadline as a result.'

This is the first article in the property section of a national newspaper to discuss property logbooks