Delivering Renovation Plans With Property Logbooks

by | Oct 5, 2021

The RLBA has welcomed the opportunity to work with the Green Finance Institute’s Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings on the data schema for Retrofit Plans. Our members believe its publication will unlock the necessary service innovation to support the shift to NetZero in residential property.

The drive to NetZero and the need for Retrofit planning for our homes has come at a time when the Government has been investigating different areas where open, shareable property information could drive change. A combination of the Grenfell Tragedy, poor quality in housebuilding, the failure of the conveyancing process and the need to digitise land & transaction data have led to multiple calls for cloud-hosted data solutions.

The challenge now is to bring these strands together and synthesise a single, comprehensive solution to residential property data that puts the homeowner in control. Retrofit brings a new dimension to this challenge.

The RLBA’s member companies have previously focussed on creating records of past activity transactions, building work, project and materials records and maintenance information. The property industry has delivered data standards in each of these areas. Retrofit now brings a view forward as well as back. Retrofitting our homes will mean planning for a series of future works to be undertaken over the next decades. So for Property Logbook owners this means adding a set of future project plans Retrofit Plans to their record of past ones.

There is a direct link between the data in a Retrofit Plan and the rest of the data in a Property Logbook. As each component of a Retrofit Plan is completed, it will become a historic project record alongside all the other project records in the Logbook. A Retrofit Plan will add to the broader record that a Logbook represents.

It is likely that many homes will be sold in the next few years with this Retrofit journey only partially completed. This means that project and green finance information will need to be passed between owners. It is crucial that the information in Retrofit plans is co-ordinated with the other digitally hosted data being collated by homeowners to support these transactions.

For RLBA members to be able to create a standardised way of delivering Retrofit Plans within Logbooks, we required an agreed industry data standard. This is why the Green Finance Institute’s Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings’ work in this area has been so crucial to service providers looking to support change. The first Retrofit Plans based on the new data schema agreed during the Green Finance Institute’s project will be launched within RLBA Logbooks before the end of the year.

The next challenge will be agreeing how this data can be exchanged and shared between the various systems being developed by the Retrofit community. We look forward to working with the other industry players to agree data and API schemas necessary for integration and data sharing.

This blog is an excerpt from a longer blog on the RLBA site here: https://www.rlba.org.uk/delivering-retrofit-plans-within-property-logbooks