Missed the property address data event? Here’s what you need to know.
Data is transforming the property sector, and there’s one vital component that ties everything together: UPRNs (Unique Property Reference Numbers). We chose to host a webinar all about UPRNs because they’re becoming the go-to solution for improving data consistency, reducing friction, and streamlining processes across the industry.
Here are the top highlights from the event:
1. Data quality is everyone’s priority
To understand the industry’s biggest pain points, we ran a poll with five possible answers. Here’s how the votes broke down:
52% of attendees said ensuring data quality was the greatest challenge in property data management. That figure surpassed every other option, emphasising the need for a single source of truth.
People often write addresses differently, which computers can’t interpret without a standardised system or reference.
A Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) is a 12-digit identifier assigned to addressable objects, created and managed by local authorities, Ordnance Survey and GeoPlace. It stays with a property throughout its lifecycle.
“We talk about flats quite a lot as a good example. Someone might say, I live on the ground floor flat, and actually someone else would describe it as flat A or flat one. So if you have a data set behind all of that … then you’re removing kind of the introduction of error.”
— Emily Griffiths, Ordnance Survey
These minor address discrepancies can cause problems for your database, but UPRNs solve that by ensuring everyone uses the same consistent label.
2. UPRNs go far beyond addressing
The property sector is steadily catching on to how data can improve processes. While you may not refer to UPRNs daily yourself, having them built into your systems is beneficial for performance. Our speakers stressed that UPRNs aren’t just a data point, they impact everything from risk assessments and insurance premiums to last-mile deliveries and mortgage approvals.
Some real-world use cases:
Building Safety: Following the Grenfell tragedy, there was an urgent need to pinpoint and evaluate high-rise buildings that might pose similar risks. UPRNs provided a precise, standardised way to identify each affected structure. This made it much easier to coordinate safety inspections, track necessary improvements, and quickly share updates across different agencies in real time.
Insurance: Insurers have historically relied on postcodes to gauge risk, but postcodes can span large, varied areas. By adopting UPRNs, insurance providers can focus on a property’s exact location, right down to whether it sits in a floodplain or near other risk factors. This level of precision leads to far more accurate risk calculations, ensuring that premiums more closely match actual conditions rather than broad assumptions.
Mortgage Lending: Mortgage providers also benefit from UPRNs by linking each loan in their portfolio to a specific property. Lenders can see precisely where they’ve issued mortgages and if they’re overexposed in one area. This clarity supports better lending decisions, helps institutions spot localised risks, and ultimately creates a more balanced, informed approach to mortgage management.
“If we take that sort of a step further … we enhance that data model around addressing, we add more attribution to suit multiple use cases rather than single ones … and then importantly, adding the immutable identifiers.”
— Simon Barlow, GeoPlace
Simply put, UPRNs enrich traditional data to do more than just confirm a property’s location. Searching an address alone only gets you so far, but tying datasets together delivers a more powerful impact.
3. The future of property data is connected
A major theme in the webinar was the Red Letter Initiative, an industry call to make UPRNs a universal standard. Property professionals access data through various systems, such as spreadsheets or software solutions, which often store addresses differently. This mismatch leads to errors in the database. The UPRN can fix this, but there’s a sense that adopting UPRNs is only urgent if the entire market does it. That’s why the initiative advocates a mandated, sector-wide approach. If every stakeholder uses UPRNs, you remove discrepancies and establish a robust, unified data infrastructure.
In turn, it also has a direct impact on the property market’s future, including how easily it can attract funding and investment.
“One of the biggest problems from the UK’s point of view … is how do we fund all the houses and property changes that need to be done. And one of the key elements of attracting investment into a market is its data infrastructure.”
— Dan Hughes, Alpha Property Insights
For the property market to stay competitive, it needs trustworthy data. Incorporating data alone isn't helpful if it's not accurate and it's not managed. Trust and transparency of data will be essential to attracting future investment.
The UPRN makes sure every corner of the property ecosystem uses the same foundation. At Ideal Postcodes, we believe UPRNs can truly drive change if more companies embrace them. We’re raising awareness of this powerful dataset to help the property sector evolve. To build this seamlessly into your database, we incorporate UPRNs by default, giving you accurate data matching without having to think about it.
UPRNs: The Key Identifier for Tomorrow's Real Estate
We covered so much more in our first-ever UPRN webinar, plus interesting audience Q&As on open data versus premium data. If you want to hear it all straight from the experts, watch the full session here.