Plus Dane Housing has been working with geographic data provider Emapsite in the creation of a new asset management data product.
Emapsite explained that gaining instant visibility of a housing provider’s assets can sometimes be difficult. A chequered history of organisational mergers, stock acquisitions and disposals, combined with inconsistent methods of recording information, means that there is often a lack of clarity about the exact asset holdings at any given time. Endeavouring to fill the gaps, most housing providers buy regular supplies of land-ownership data, including land title polygons from HM Land Registry, but this is both time-consuming and expensive.
By combining Ordnance Survey Mastermap and AddressBase data with HM Land Registry’s land parcel polygons and commercial and corporate ownership datasets, Emapsite has created an all-in-one bundled product for use direct in a housing provider’s GIS or database. An app-based service is also available for organisations without a GIS.
Using this solution, Emapsite can query for ownership data based on a combination of a housing provider’s geographic area of interest, company registration number(s) and organisation name(s), allowing for ‘fuzzy’ searching of HMLR’s often difficult-to-query ownership lists.
Emapsite’s service has now been made accessible to all Plus Dane staff, allowing users to analyse the data on their own properties as well as discover ownership information for neighbouring properties, which previously required individual payments to HMLR.
Alex Hill, GIS manager, Plus Dane Housing, said, “This new service is hugely efficient, saving us both time and fees now that Emapsite is doing the intelligent querying. More importantly, we are getting more data that we can really use because Emapsite’s querying is pulling out not only our own assets but those in our areas of interest for other housing providers in our areas. This increased visibility of our and others’ asset holdings means we can look forward to closer collaboration with our housing neighbours.”
