RICS recently signed an open letter from professional bodies to the UK government, calling for its support in encouraging increased adoption of unique property reference numbers (UPRNs).
While some progress has been made in the use of UPRNs, their wider adoption remains a critical factor in allowing property data to be shared in digital form among numerous market participants.
The letter urges ministers to ensure that UPRNs are included in all public-sector projects and legislation related to buildings, to increase the sector's awareness of data already available under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement, and to develop a clear road map for full sector-wide adoption.
Moreover, signatories want the government to engage with the private sector to identify and overcome barriers to the wider use of UPRNs, including market awareness and the perceived cost of mass adoption by both public and private sector organisations.
The letter also urges ministers to ensure an ethical approach to data by defining a clear agreement by market participants about its use in the housing and broader property market.
How are UPRNs used?
The UPRN is a distinct identifier assigned to every addressable location in the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands at the earliest possible stage of the property life cycle by local authorities and Ordnance Survey, from a set of UPRNs provided by GeoPlace. Though commonly used to identify properties, other addressable locations allocated UPRNs include structures such as bus shelters and electricity substations.
GeoPlace also creates and maintains mapping between the UPRN and the unique address reference number (UARN) used by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to help link properties to the hereditaments used for council, tax and business rating purposes.
A notable characteristic of the UPRN is the ability to allocate a reference to a block of flats and to then have additional numbers for each individual apartment.
This means that a UPRN can not only identify the block and the flats within it, but also that the relationship between the two is recorded in an owner–member structure, with the owning block having a unique UPRN and the individual apartments having their own UPRN, with a clear link between them.
Nationwide Building Society has in turn streamlined the digital homebuying process by using UPRNs to link key datasets such as flood risk, allowing it to make faster, risk-based lending decisions.
Meanwhile, Humberside Fire and Rescue Service has created an interactive map combining Environment Agency flood-risk data with UPRNs and details about people with restricted mobility. This has allowed people who might struggle to escape an inundated property to be identified so the emergency services can prioritise assistance.
More recently, the London Borough of Hackney has used UPRNs and artificial intelligence to identify houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) and work more effectively with landlords and tenants to ensure that these are fit for purpose.
The government's Open Standards Board mandated the use of UPRNs in the public sector in 2020, to make them the standard approach for sharing and referencing property and street information, using the unique street reference number (USRN) as well. Public-sector organisations should have adopted these standards and use UPRNs and USRNs when identifying geographic locations.
In November 2021, the then Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) also began including UPRNs in energy performance certificates (EPCs).
This was part of broader efforts to improve the way data is linked as well as enhancing safety standards for the property sector by linking to safety certificates and users of EPCs. The goal is to hold all data in a central register that can be used automatically to check whether a property has an EPC.
It is important to emphasise that using UPRNs to uniquely identify properties doesn't change the need to protect personal data. A UPRN merely provides an additional and more accurate reference than a traditional postal address.
Barriers to adoption
Although they are being used more widely, many property stakeholders are still hesitant to adopt UPRNs because of three key challenges.
The first is that many property professionals have limited knowledge of UPRNs and consumers are even less aware that such an identifier is available for their property and how it could benefit them. As with any identification system, they may also have concerns about how it might compromise their privacy.
Second, there remain cost and technical implementation issues for both the public and private sectors to adapt and enhance existing systems and datasets to include UPRNs. Matching UPRNs to postal addresses in existing datasets involves a cost for the private sector.
Third, the limited availability of UPRNs across multiple datasets at present discourages their use: there is little incentive in adding UPRNs to your dataset if the set you want to link to doesn't already have them itself.
Any identifier requires time and effort to manage, and some market participants perceive that the UPRN is not available early enough in the land and property life cycle, particularly for new developments.
Furthermore, when alterations to a building create new properties – for example, when a single dwelling is converted into flats – accompanying UPRNs are not created in a timely manner.
However, while there may be some delay in updating and using UPRNs, there is a strong argument that the accuracy and precision in using them to identify property and connect datasets together far outweighs these issues.
Market participants will always be required to maintain other property identifiers such as HM Land Registry title numbers, and in some cases proprietary identifiers such as an asset register number.
While a common reference point such as the UPRN provides a powerful way to connect the large number of fragmented datasets, that very fragmentation is itself a further barrier to adoption.
In addition, many consider postal addresses sufficient for their purposes, and without a more explicit mandate from government, many private sector organisations feel there is limited incentive to adopt UPRNs.
Wider adoption could streamline property processes
Although these barriers remain, if more widely adopted, UPRNs offer many benefits, including increased data transparency and less fragmentation of property information.
For instance, surveyors carrying out building surveys or condition assessments can use UPRNs to identify properties in their records and organise data more consistently, to ensure that it is easily accessible and accurate.
With the advent of changes to the Building Safey Act 2022 and the introduction of the golden thread of building safety information, UPRNs could also be used to coordinate datasets and documents such as the external wall system form (EWS1), presenting a significant opportunity for the sector to manage safety-critical data across the asset life cycle.
Using UPRNs also helps streamline property valuation by providing valuers with data such as transactions, planning permissions, building history, environmental risks and location-based information on amenities and transport links.
By linking relevant data, UPRNs mean risks can be identified earlier in property transactions so buyers have as much information as possible, reducing the likelihood of sales collapsing as well as speeding up the process.
Beyond the property sector, UPRNs were also used during the pandemic to link datasets such as patient records and properties, allowing the emergency services to identify the location of homes they needed to visit, and subsequently to track and analyse the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The real-estate sector therefore has a great opportunity to take a lead in adopting UPRNs: if RICS members implement the numbers in their day-to-day processes, they will encourage their use across the wider property market.
'If more widely adopted, UPRNs offer many benefits, including increased data transparency and less fragmentation of property information'