openmoove makes material info free as UK proptech reform bites

The Cardiff proptech removes compliance charges for sellers as the UK government's Home Buying Reform Roadmap accelerates the industry's digital shift.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Wed, 19 August 2026

A succulent plant, a tablet displaying a user interface, and a steaming white coffee mug sit on a wooden desk in front of a window overlooking blurred white buildings under bright natural light.

openmoove, the Cardiff-based residential property transaction platform, has announced that material information, the legally required upfront disclosure pack that has increasingly become a revenue line for third-party providers, will be made available free of charge to every seller it onboards. The move positions the startup directly against a growing commercial trend of charging consumers for regulatory compliance, and it arrives as the UK government's Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap, published in June 2026, pushes the industry towards mandatory upfront data, digitisation, and earlier binding agreements.

The company says the decision is principled rather than promotional. Material information is a compliance obligation under current trading standards guidance, and openmoove's argument is that charging consumers for it distorts the transaction before it has even begun. The platform earns revenue instead through its communication app and through revenue-share arrangements when sellers or buyers choose ancillary services, such as conveyancing or mortgage brokerage, via the platform's in-app integrations.

Integrations as the real infrastructure play

The mechanism matters as much as the pricing decision. openmoove's CRM integrations went live across Rex, Street, Loop and Apex27 in July 2026, with Alto and Reapit next in the pipeline. Sellers are onboarded at valuation; buyers at the point of viewing. Compliance data is gathered inside the agent's existing workflow, removing the separate administrative layer that has historically added both cost and delay. National partners are reported to be putting hundreds of properties per month through the platform, with volume scaling since those integrations completed.

The in-app environment also connects conveyancers and mortgage brokers to the same transaction record from day one, eliminating the re-keying of data between firms that contributes to the UK's notoriously extended transaction timelines. According to TwentyCi's Q2 2026 Property and Homemover Report, time to exchange now stands at 130 days year to date, with the total move taking around seven months compared to five and a half in 2019. More than 60 per cent of 2026 exchanges exceeded six months from instruction, against 36.1 per cent in 2019, and fall-through rates on concluded listings stand at 23.4 per cent.

Ross McKenzie, Co-Founder of openmoove, was direct on the commercial logic: "Material information is a compliance obligation. It is a given, not a product. Too many people are trying to commercialise something that should simply be part of doing the job properly, and every pound taken out of the consumer at that stage makes the transaction harder, not easier."

The convergence angle: proptech meets regulatory infrastructure

The deeper read for cross-sector investors is that openmoove is attempting to do in UK residential property what open-banking rails did in retail finance: commoditise the compliance layer, then monetise the trusted relationship it creates upstream. The analogy is imperfect, property is still paper-heavy, jurisdiction-specific, and legally fragmented in ways that payments were not, but the structural logic is the same. Remove friction at the regulatory baseline; own the workflow that sits above it.

The UK government's reform roadmap also creates a regulatory tailwind that mirrors dynamics seen in other markets where digitisation of transaction data has unlocked adjacent fintech and legaltech revenue. openmoove's backer list, which includes Haatch, the Development Bank of Wales and the British Business Bank, reflects the devolved-nation angle: Wales has been a quieter but deliberate incubator for proptech infrastructure, with Move Wales (of which openmoove is a founding member) bringing together FinTech Wales, Legal News Wales, PEXA and OPDA into a cross-sector consortium.

The company has also signalled an imminent announcement relating to property searches, which it says will materially change how searches are treated by sellers across the UK. If that move follows the same pattern, absorbing a compliance or data cost that the market has historically charged for, it would suggest a broader platform strategy: own the free-to-access data spine of the UK residential transaction, and compete on experience rather than information rent.