The UK property market does not fail because people do not work hard enough. It fails because no one can see the whole picture.
Around 55% of UK residential transactions sit inside chains. Buyers depend on sellers; sellers depend on onward purchases. Progress is dictated not by individual effort, but by the slowest or most fragile link elsewhere in the chain. Despite this being universally understood, chains remain largely invisible across the systems professionals rely on every day.
These issues arise not because the information does not exist, but because it is not shared in a usable way.
For years, the industry’s instinctive response has been to add more tooling: better CRMs, better workflows, better checklists. Each participant has optimised their own part of the process. Yet, chains do not live in any one part—they exist between organisations, between systems, and between incentives.
Most digital transformation in property has focused on doing the same things faster: streamlining internal processes, reducing admin, improving visibility within individual firms. These improvements matter, but they miss the structural issue: property transactions are interdependent, but property systems are not.
No single agent, conveyancer, lender, or platform owns the chain. Each sees only a partial view, filtered through their own data and system boundaries. When progress stalls, everyone feels the impact—yet no one has authoritative visibility.
Trying to solve that with better tools inside silos is like trying to fix traffic congestion by upgrading individual cars. The bottleneck isn’t the vehicle. It’s the shared state of the road.
Other parts of the economy have faced—and solved—this problem:
In both cases, success came from treating data as infrastructure, not as a competitive feature.
Property is the outlier—not because it is uniquely complex, but because it never built a shared data layer for the thing that matters most: the live state of the chain.
Property needs multiple infrastructure layers—standardised identifiers, milestone definitions, permissioned data flows. But chain intelligence is foundational because it captures the interdependency that defines how transactions actually work.
A property chain is not an enhancement or a convenience. It is the shared state of a transaction.
Yet chains are still reconstructed manually, through calls and emails, based on partial and often outdated information. Each party maintains their own version of the truth. That is the missing infrastructure layer.
Shared visibility changes behaviour. When progress is observable, everyone in the chain coordinates proactively.
Chain intelligence is not a communications tool, a workflow manager, or a consumer update feed. It does not replace professional judgement. It is a layer which sits between systems. It is permissioned, standardised, and continuously updated. It does not replace CRMs or case management systems—it feeds them. It allows different organisations to operate from the same underlying picture, even while using different tools.
As property digitises, this gap becomes harder to ignore.
In that environment, chain intelligence stops being a “nice to have”. It becomes hygiene.
The question is no longer whether chains will be made visible in a standardised way, but where that capability lives. Inside every platform, duplicated imperfectly? Or once, as shared infrastructure that everyone can rely on?
History suggests the latter always wins.
The next phase of property digitisation will not be defined by who has the most features. It will be defined by who reduces friction across the whole system.
This is not about replacing systems. It is about connecting them.
ViewMyChain exists to provide that layer—a live, permissioned chain intelligence infrastructure that embeds directly into the systems people already use. Machine-to-machine, not screen-to-screen. Standardised, not bespoke.
Property has spent years optimising individual participants. The bigger opportunity now is to optimise the connections between them.
Chain intelligence is property’s missing Smart Data infrastructure. Mapping connected transactions and making it visible changes how the whole system behaves.
This builds on ViewMyChain’s submission to the Home Buying and Selling Group consultation. If you are working on property platform integration or policy in this space, we welcome the conversation. Chain infrastructure raises interesting questions about standards, governance, and implementation that benefit from broader input.