Strategy — internal · 20 May 2026

Sail — the opportunity, honestly

Verified property information, built on a community data substrate. Where the market is, who's already in it, where Sail wins — and where we still have to prove ourselves.

Huw Thomas · Evan Williams · Richard Scott  ·  Status: working assessment  ·  Awen Weave Limited (17229089)

Why now — the law is already here

Mandatory upfront property information is not coming. It is law.

The transaction is being forced upstream. The duty to collect, verify and present material information now sits with the seller and agent — before marketing. Sail is built for exactly this regime.

• DMCC Act 2024 (in force 6 Apr 2025) — omitting material information from an invitation to purchase is an unfair commercial practice; the CMA enforces directly; penalty is the greater of £300,000 or 10% of global turnover; UK-wide including Wales. Law in force
• TA6 6th edition — mandatory for Conveyancing Quality Scheme firms from 30 March 2026 (the slimmed, post-controversy transaction form). Law in force
• NTSELAT material information (Parts A/B/C) withdrawn 8 May 2025 because the DMCC superseded it — but the disclosure duty remains. Law in force
• MHCLG home-buying reform (consultation Oct–Dec 2025) proposes mandatory upfront information at listing and UPRN-linked digital property logbooks — the living-record thesis, in policy. Proposed
• Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 provides the enabling Smart Data framework for portable property data. Law in force

Every fact verified 20 May 2026. Law-in-force stated as fact; reform, logbooks and statistics labelled as proposals/projections.

The opportunity

The transaction is being forced upstream — and it has no trusted data spine.

Property data is fragmented, unverified, and re-gathered from scratch every transaction. The regulation now demands it be assembled, verified and disclosed at the point of marketing.

Market size — the honest version

Fund it on the tailwind, not on a TAM that doesn't exist yet.

• ~1.15–1.2m UK residential transactions a year; ~£340bn transacted value.
• ~£290–520m/year displaceable buyer search spend. (Note: the widely-cited "£300m" is HMLR's data-benefit figure, not the search market — corrected.)
• The logbook / material-information market is forming — no reliable £ size yet. This is a tailwind story, not a sized-market story.
• Buyer universe: ~25,665 estate-agent businesses; ~5,904 conveyancing firms. Highly fragmented — top-10 conveyancers = 10.3% of transactions, so no gatekeeper to clear.
• TAM (search + MI + logbook) plausibly £0.5–1bn/year [estimate]. The Welsh-first beachhead is small in £ but defensible.

The field

Busy, validated — and nobody has won it.

Above them sits OPDA — a bank-backed standards body (NatWest, HSBC, Nationwide, Lloyds, PEXA) publishing the open property-data schema. The substrate is becoming a public good; the value migrates to verification.

Funding & the real risk

The hard problem isn't the technology. It's adoption.

The wedge

Four things the whole field is missing.

Every competitor holds a piece. The three starred rows are uncontested — and they are precisely the things the conveyancing-only, commercial, licensed-data incumbents are structurally unable to build.

The trust card — our big win

We don't sell the data. We sell the verification.

The product is computable trust — provenance, validation, ground-truth — applied to open public data and the customer's own. Because the product is the verifying and not the data, the data stays sovereign and the model is structurally non-extractive.

• The verified basic locks (TOID ↔ UPRN ↔ EPC) flow back to the community commons as refined open data; the higher-level derivations stay commercial.
• The moat is human verification at scale, accruing transaction by transaction — it can't be scraped, licensed, or manufactured quickly.
• Welsh-sovereign, CIC-operated, Future-Generations-aligned — a trust position no commercial incumbent can occupy.

"Rightmove can build the tool. They cannot buy five years of verified curator decisions."

The operational unlock

Every Sail user is already a curator. Using the product is the curation.

The verification moat was also the bottleneck — slow, costly human curation. This dissolves it: the agent's marketing visit is the cheapest ground-truth event in the entire property lifecycle, and it already happens.

• The marketing capture an agent already does — photos, floor plan, increasingly 3D / LiDAR — now yields structured, measured, condition-tagged data automatically.
• Matterport Property Intelligence reads room dimensions, materials and condition; Giraffe360 LiDAR floor plans to ~2%; Restb.ai extracts 450+ fields + condition scores from photos; Inspectify OCRs appliance plates.
• The capability is mature and shipping — but nobody routes it into a verified, cited, UPRN-linked open living record. That is the white space.

From capture to construction

Condition data captured at listing → instant refurbishment pricing.

The same capture event that verifies the property profile yields construction-relevant data: fabric, condition, materials, dimensions. One visit, two value layers.

Beyond conveyancing

The hungriest buyer of verified property data isn't the estate agent.

The playbook

We hold both adoption levers nobody else has — the mandate and the community.

In diffusion terms: a strong p (the DMCC duty + mandatory TA6 = a regulatory forcing function) and a strong q (CIC community word-of-mouth). The funded competitors have neither working together.

• Saturate one Welsh town for reference density, not revenue — cross the chasm in a market small enough to own.
• Sell compliance as relief, not regulation — the agent's downside risk under the DMCC is the wedge; 30 March 2026 is the sales calendar.
• Seed the data (hard side) first via the CIC before recruiting agents — so the data already exists and saves them work.
• Make the marketing visit the verification event — zero-extra-work curation.
• Do it for them; never a "second tool" — integrate into Reapit / Alto; distribute via a network, not door-to-door.
• A parkrun-style replicable curator kit — each town stood up by a local champion; the give-back funds the next town.
• Ride existing infrastructure: Colouring Cities (ally), Welsh Local Area Energy Planning networks (channel). And measure conversion, not pilots.

Where Sail is — honestly

A strong, on-mission opportunity — held hostage by two unknowns.

The verdict

The door is open, the room is filling — nobody has taken the seat Sail is built for.

A real opening and a defensible wedge (verification + living logbook + Welsh-sovereign + the Olive construction layer). But adoption is the war, and the moat is the bottleneck — so the strategy is to out-manoeuvre, not out-spend.