Building Next Gen NLIS: lessons from modernising critical property market infrastructure

When people think about digital transformation in the home buying and selling market, they often focus on the visible parts of the process: the forms, the portals, the PDFs, the points where people interact with each other.

What is less visible is the infrastructure underneath it all: the systems, standards, integrations and trust mechanisms that allow authoritative property data to move between organisations securely and reliably.

Over the last 18 months, Data Clan has been working with Land Data to build the technical foundations for Next Gen NLIS and the Land Data Trust Framework. With the initial build now complete and user testing underway, it feels like the right time to reflect on what we’ve learned along the way.

Respecting what already existed

One of the most important principles from the outset was recognising that the existing NLIS Hub had achieved something remarkable.

It is easy, with modern hindsight, to look at a platform designed more than two decades ago and focus on what feels dated. But the reality is that connecting conveyancers, local authorities and data custodians electronically in 2001 was genuinely visionary. The fact that the platform has continued operating successfully for so long is an achievement in itself.

That shaped one of our core non-negotiables for the project: if the existing platform worked for its users and the market, Next Gen NLIS had to preserve that continuity.

This was never about innovation for its own sake or replacing familiar processes with unnecessary complexity. It was about modernising critical infrastructure carefully and responsibly while creating the foundations for future innovation.

At the same time, we wanted to avoid simply recreating a twenty-five-year-old architecture with newer technology. The opportunity was much bigger than that, as our market research in Spring 2025 confirmed.

From transactions to trusted data exchange

One of the biggest conceptual shifts in the build was moving away from seeing the platform purely as a people-to-people transaction system.

Historically, much of the home buying and selling process has been built around documents moving between people and organisations. In many areas, despite huge advances in technology elsewhere, the process still relies heavily on PDFs, manual intervention and tacit operational knowledge.

What became increasingly clear during the build is that true digital transformation requires something different: structured, reusable, and trustworthy data that systems can exchange intelligently and securely.

That thinking heavily influenced the architecture behind Next Gen NLIS.

The introduction of the market data model, alignment to industry standards and the development of the Land Data Trust Framework were all designed to support a more interoperable future where authoritative data can move securely between verified participants with clear provenance and governance.

Importantly, this does not remove people from the process. It allows people to focus on where they genuinely add value rather than spending time managing avoidable friction.

The challenge nobody sees: tacit knowledge

Perhaps the biggest challenge during the build was the amount of operational knowledge in people’s heads.

As with many long-running systems, there were nuances, workarounds and assumptions that had evolved over many years but were not formally documented. Some elements of the existing transaction flow were understood instinctively by experienced users but difficult to trace back to a clear technical or operational rationale.

That created an interesting challenge for the project team. Building modern infrastructure is not just a technical exercise, it is also about uncovering and understanding years of accumulated operational practice.

This is where the collaborative nature of the project became incredibly important.

Land Data, local authorities and other data custodians, existing suppliers and the wider community around the service were consistently open, constructive and generous with their expertise. That willingness to share knowledge and work through complexity collaboratively made a huge difference to the success of the project.

One of the strongest lessons reinforced from the build has been that successful transformation depends just as much on relationships and trust between people as it does on technology.

Designing for modern trust and security

Another major area of learning was the role of trust frameworks and modern security principles.

When the original NLIS Hub was created, the digital landscape looked very different. Cybersecurity threats were not understood in the way they are today, or as prolific, and many systems relied heavily on trusted individuals and organisational processes rather than explicit identity, governance and assurance mechanisms.

Today, expectations are very different.

Modern digital infrastructure must be designed around verified identities, traceability, accountability and clear rules governing how data is shared and accessed. The Land Data Trust Framework introduced an entirely new layer of thinking into the project and challenged us to design not just for functionality, but for long-term trust and resilience.

That learning curve was significant, but it has ultimately made the platform stronger and more future-ready.

Balancing innovation with continuity

One of the constant tensions throughout the build was balancing innovation with compatibility.

There is always a temptation during major infrastructure programmes to preserve every historical process exactly as it existed before. Equally, there is a temptation to modernise everything at once.

In reality, successful transformation sits somewhere between those two extremes.

For example, we expected that moving from older XML-based integrations to modern JSON APIs might create resistance or require complex transitional arrangements. In practice, many organisations recognised the benefits immediately and were keen to move towards more modern standards.

That openness to change has been one of the genuinely encouraging aspects of the programme.

At the same time, we have remained conscious throughout that this is critical national infrastructure supporting real property transactions. Reliability, continuity and operational stability matter enormously.

The goal has never been to build the most experimental platform possible. It has been to build the right platform for the market as it exists today while creating the flexibility to evolve in the future.

What surprised us most

One of the biggest personal reflections from working on Next Gen NLIS has been just how much of the wider home buying and selling process still operates in ways that are fundamentally document-centric rather than data-centric.

There is enormous innovation happening across the sector, alongside important work around Smart Data, interoperability and open standards. But large parts of the underlying process still depend on moving documents between organisations rather than enabling trusted, structured data exchange.

That is not a criticism of the sector. These processes evolved over many years in response to legal, operational and regulatory realities. But it does highlight why programmes like Next Gen NLIS matter.

Modernisation in the property market will not happen through one large technology change alone. It requires steady, practical improvements to the underlying infrastructure, standards and governance that allow organisations to work together more effectively.

What we’re most proud of

The thing I am personally most proud of is the working relationship between Data Clan, Land Data and the wider stakeholder community involved in the programme.

Projects of this scale only succeed when organisations are willing to collaborate openly, challenge constructively, and stay focused on long-term outcomes rather than short-term convenience.

Technically, we are also proud to have introduced genuinely modern concepts into the platform architecture, including the market data model and standards-led interoperability approach.

But ultimately, success will not be measured by technology alone. It will be measured by whether Next Gen NLIS helps create a more trusted, transparent and interoperable property data ecosystem that supports the future needs of the home buying and selling market.

With user testing now underway, that next phase of learning has already begun.

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash