Having instant visibility of housing association assets can sometimes be surprisingly challenging. A chequered history of organisational mergers, stock acquisition and dispersion plus inconsistent methods of recording information means there is often a lack of clarity about the exact asset holding at any one time.
Endeavouring to fill the gaps, most housing associations purchase regular supplies of land ownership data including land title polygons from HM Land Registry directly. However acquisition of this data is not without its challenges - filling in forms, charges per search on top of a charge per title polygon.
By combining OS Mastermap and AddressBase data with HMLR’s land parcel polygons and Commercial and Corporate Ownership dataset, emapsite has created an all-in-one bundled product for use direct in a housing association’s GIS or database; web app services are also available for organisations without a GIS.
Using this solution, emapsite can query for ownership data based on a combination of a housing association’s area of interest, company registration number/s and organisation name/s, allowing for fuzzy searching of HMLR’s often difficult-to-query ownership lists.
The service has been made accessible for all Plus Dane staff, allowing users to analyse the data on their own properties as well as discover ownership information for neighbouring properties, which previously required individual payments to HMLR, thus proving to be greatly beneficial in terms of time and cost savings.
Alex Hill, GIS Manager at Plus Dane said, "This new service is hugely efficient, saving us both time and fees now emapsite is doing the intelligent querying. But more importantly we are getting more data we can really use: emapsite’s querying is pulling out not only our own assets but those in our areas of interest for other social housing providers in our areas. This increased visibility of our (and others) asset holding means we can look forward to closer collaboration across the social housing sector”.