“Conveyancing doesn’t have to be this stressful” – a thought shared by clients and conveyancers alike, and in particular by the MatterHive team. After experiencing some stressful conveyancing processes where we were left floundering in the dark without any visibility into the process or progress of our transactions we decided to do something about it and create software for truly collaborative conveyancing.
What problem are we solving?
Our initial view into the world of conveyancing was as clients. During our transactions we kept thinking “I wish this was more digital, smoother, and more transparent”. Recent surveys of clients show that this feeling is not an uncommon one, and surveys of conveyancers shows that many conveyancers feel the same. Everyone wants the same thing, and progress is undoubtedly being made, but there’s still a disconnect between expectations and delivery.
“88% of clients surveyed after completion said they would be prepared to pay more for a more digital, smoother conveyancing process”
Survey conducted by iamproperty, reported by LegalFutures
Despite media articles claiming the contrary, hard-working conveyancers aren’t the problem. They are doing their best to cope with an ever increasing case load, ever more demanding clients, constantly changing and straining legislation, and are having to do all this without adequate digital tools that support both them and the other stakeholders in a property transaction.
What about current software?
There have been great strides in creating software to digitally handle client on-boarding, KYC checks, searches, and post completion submissions. Digitising these tasks is awesome! However when working with conveyancers these tasks don’t take up the majority of their time. They estimated that 70% of each day is spent managing emails during the pre-contract enquiries phase, and that this phase is where the majority of the time is spent for each transaction. If we want to drastically improve the conveyancing experience for both conveyancers and their clients, this is where we should focus our efforts.
What do Conveyancers think about this problem?
We’ve invested a lot of time and resource into working with conveyancers to fully understand the problems they face, the nuances involved in those problems, and how we might truly solve them. A favourite question of ours that we asked was “if you had unlimited time and budget, what would you change?”. Every single conveyancer we’ve spoken to have said they would like a portal which integrates with their CMS, which shows all the raised enquiries, has all the documents and forms in one place, involves third parties like estate agents and management companies, and automatically tracks the progress of a case so they can spend less time replying to “what’s the status?” emails.
Building the future
This is not an easy problem to solve, but the most worthwhile problems never are. The scope of the solution seemed a bit daunting at first, but we’ve been working hard to build not just a portal, but the portal.
Document uploads, annotating documents and raising enquiries, digital chat, notifications, workflows, status tracking, integration with CMS’ – these are all solved problems which clients expect from their software. Using all our experience building these very same features in bespoke products for enterprise clients we set to work.
We’ve used the most modern tech, reliable infrastructure, and implemented a robust permissions system based on how Google secure their Drive and YouTube products to build something which is guaranteed to impress.
Whilst some other companies in the space have put together quick inter-conveyancer messaging portals with limited features, we’ve been working with conveyancers to take the pre-contract enquiries phase of the process into the future and bring all the stakeholders for a transaction into one place for a truly collaborative conveyancing process.
How can you get involved?
We’re still building and polishing, we won’t launch until it’s ready, but if you would like a quick demonstration of what we’ve got so far as well as tell us about what you need please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
We’re friendly, we’re open to feedback, and we want to make conveyancing software that empowers you.
