Tech’s Role in the Home-Buying Process
We’ve all heard it before: the three most stressful experiences in life are the death of a loved one, getting divorced and moving home.
Whether this is true or not depends on the individual, but there’s no getting away from the fact that buying a house is hugely stressful, even if your conveyancing solicitors are doing their best to keep you calm.
Tech has a significant role to play in keeping house-buying stress levels as low as possible. But how is it going to do that? And are conveyancing firms and lawyers adopting the tech that will have an impact?
AI Assisting Lawyers
Artificial intelligence has the capability to take on some of the less complex administrative tasks for conveyancers, letting them focus on the more complicated aspects of sales and purchases. They can then use this time to help make the process of buying a house easier and less stressful for you.
AI can also be taught to help lawyers improve the accuracy of their work. If a report or file does not contain a sufficient amount of information or detail, machine learning can help systems detect this and prompt the lawyer to re-evaluate it and check their work.
Cutting down on errors or misunderstandings can take a huge amount of pressure off the situation and help keep stress levels down.
Online Mortgage Applications
Mortgages are going online. New online mortgage brokers are popping up all over, meaning that you can search for a new mortgage, apply and get approved all on your phone – or other devices of choice.
It’s long been possible to arrange a mortgage through nothing but email, but online portals are making it easier to keep track of everything. Managing all your information in one place can make things far more straightforward.
The other parties involved – lawyers and lenders – can also access the data, keeping everyone in the loop about what needs to be done. Managing a mortgage application can be far less stressful when you’re not left wondering what happened to the last form you filled out and mailed back.
Blockchain Property Sales
In 2017, a property in Wiltshire, UK, was the first to be sold by blockchain. Online property sale platform Clicktopurchase.com said it took the sale from initial marketing to an online sale in just a week.
The retail property was sold to an anonymous buyer through cryptocurrency. It’s now thought that this technology is going to continue to be adopted across the industry, making it more likely that we’ll end up seeing more of these transactions.
So if you’ve invested in cryptocurrencies, you could find yourself able to purchase a new property online – possibly in record time. This could see significant reductions in typical stress levels.
Are Lawyers Adopting This Technology?
Law firms are increasingly making use of digital technologies to improve their work processes. For example, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has highlighted the case of a chatbot that can carry out all the duties of a junior barrister’s clerk. It can handle 100 instructions a day and has led to reduced working hours for its operators.
This is the kind of technology that could make the house-buying process far more straightforward for lawyers and consumers.
But there are still barriers to technology’s wider adoption in the legal industry. Many law firms are still highly traditional in their approach, preferring more conventional methods of operating. A Peppermint Technology study found that law firms spend less than comparable sectors on IT investment.
This shows that it’s up to technology providers to convince legal professionals that their services can help make things simpler. Find out more about conveyancing here.
We hope you enjoyed this promoted piece as much as we did!
