Novello Chartered Surveyors has joined the Open Property Data Association (OPDA), a move the company says reflects its ambition to help define open data standards for the surveying industry, not merely comply with them once someone else has written the rules.
The Novello OPDA membership is the latest development for a firm that, according to FF News, began with two surveyors working out of a garden shed. Founded in 2019 by James Brook and Jack Pye, Novello Chartered Surveyors now delivers over £10 million worth of surveys to home buyers every year and employs more than 70 staff, including over 40 surveyors, working across England and Wales.
What Novello actually claims to be building
The company’s pitch rests on two things: a live referral platform that connects estate agents and mortgage brokers directly to surveying teams, and an AI-powered platform that it says is soon to launch. That platform would convert static survey PDFs into interactive reports. Surveyors would walk a property with a camera and microphone; the platform, the company claims, does the rest.
Brook, chief executive officer of Novello, put the ambition plainly: ‘Surveying has spent 30 years producing paper reports that arrive too late in the transaction to change anything.’ The company also uses drone-assisted inspections and digital data capture on site, though what that amounts to in practice (in terms of data quality, coverage, or any comparative benchmark) is not set out in what the company has released.
The next stated step is a full upfront platform for estate agents and sellers, combining condition survey data and what the company calls Scout data with title information, seller forms and early-stage searches. The goal, Novello says, is for offers to be made on fully informed properties so that fewer sales fall through. That is the aspiration; the platform is described as a next step, not a completed product.
The regulatory backdrop driving Novello OPDA membership
The context here matters. The Data Use and Access Act requires property data to be digitised at source by 2029, and condition information is set to form part of material information at the point of listing. That regulatory deadline gives the whole open data agenda a harder edge than it had even two years ago. Brook said the Act ‘changes the rules’ and described the legislation as the framework within which Novello’s platform is being built.
Joining OPDA, Brook said, ‘puts us in the room where the standards are being set.’ He argued that condition reports produced by qualified surveyors, delivered as open data at the start of a transaction, represent ‘the missing piece in upfront information.’ Whether that assessment is correct depends on questions the company does not answer in its announcement: how its structured data integrates with other systems, what the error rate looks like at scale, and how the AI-generated reports perform against conventional ones.
Maria Harris, chair of the OPDA, said the association was ‘delighted’ to welcome Novello, pointing to the firm’s direct relationships with agents and consumers as something ‘different’ from existing membership. OPDA’s membership already includes all six major banks, building societies, conveyancers, estate agents and technology providers. Since its launch, the association has developed open property data standards designed to create trusted, reusable and shareable property information across the industry.
What membership does and does not mean
Being an OPDA member is not a certification that a company’s product works. It means Novello will be involved in the industry conversations about what open standards should look like. That is a reasonable place to be, provided the standards that eventually emerge are tested against real transaction outcomes rather than optimistic projections.
The Data Use and Access Act’s 2029 deadline for digitised property data means the window for shaping those standards is narrowing. Novello OPDA membership at least positions the firm at that table. Whether the AI platform, when it launches, performs as described is a separate question entirely, and one that will only be answerable once it is in use.
