The UK government has committed to building 1.5 million new houses across England. While this expansion creates opportunities for banks and insurers to grow their portfolios, it also represents a shared underwriting challenge.
Traditional approaches across both lending and insurance draw on a combination of historical market performance, comparable properties, claims experience, and established risk patterns – insights that are often limited or unavailable for homes that have yet to be built or occupied. This lack of precedent can slow lending and insurance decisions, complicate pricing and coverage, and introduce uncertainty, whether in valuation, exposure modelling, or long-term desirability.
At the same time, today’s customers expect instant decisions around insurance and mortgages. They anticipate that lenders and insurers already know a property's characteristics and expect applications to auto-fill in a matter of minutes.
The tension between underwriting timings and the lack of available data will become crucial in underwriting for new-builds. In order to make confident decisions about planned or newly-built properties, financial institutions need robust data that can be linked to each individual property, supporting insurers and lenders across the entire lifecycle of new properties.
Data available for new-builds
The underwriting process for a property that has not yet been built can be challenging, with no historical data to base decisions on.
However, data collection can begin earlier than most institutions realise: at the planning approval stage. To support this, when the planning application for a new house is approved, the local authority creates an address and assigns a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) to the property – a unique identifier that is linked to every addressable location in Great Britain. From the beginning of the cycle, before the official address is created, the UPRN acts as the golden thread that easily connects data sets.
Even before construction begins, the UPRN serves as a central point for accumulating verified property data. This can include proximity analysis – assessing how close this property is or will be to various risk-inducing factors like flood or subsidence zones. While the building characteristics themselves may not be populated yet, this location-based information can feed into initial underwriting decisions, avoiding evaluation with uncertainty.
Data during the building process
Once construction begins, surveyor-collected information like building footprint, construction material, or basement presence can be linked to this identifier, as can image-based data like roof materials and solar panels.
This means that financial institutions can track a property from planning through to completion, reviewing verified building data as and when it becomes available. For institutions, this enables more accurate risk assessment and faster decisions. For their customers, it means smoother applications and faster approval decisions, overall improving the borrowing and insurance experience.
When a customer applies for a product related to a new build property, the UPRN provides a consistent reference point that allows lenders and insurers to link applications to authoritative sources as they become available. This helps reduce the re-keying of address information, improves consistency across systems, and supports updates to reliable location and property attributes.
OS data and the competitive advantage
As these 1.5 million new homes progress from planning to completion, financial institutions will manage increasingly large volumes of quotes for properties at various stages of construction. Institutions that integrate OS location data into their underwriting workflows – through trusted OS Partners – will gain a competitive edge, aiming to approve applications faster and increase customer satisfaction in the process.
With OS data assisting financial institutions every step of the way, banks and insurers can be confident in their new build underwriting decisions at the speed the market now demands.
To find out more, visit www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/industries/finance where you can get in touch with the OS team to find the best Partner for you.
