“We do roughly two million property valuations a year. We've done this for over a decade, in an exceptionally secure environment. It just does the job quietly in the background connecting all these people together. So we took this and we upgraded the platform so now it can support rich data and documents rather than just the valuation data,” Brown said.
The goal is then to replicate this principle further across the other streams of the home-buying process.
“In doing this, we can make sure that the right information is put in the right place at the right time, upfront. We don't have to chase.
“The mortgage advisers don't have to go chasing post valuation queries and the lenders and the conveyances. The agents don't have to go chasing different stuff. We can just do it once and put the information quickly at the front of the process and if you do that, you'll actually collapse the time it takes to do the process.
“This is what we've been proving to ourselves,” Brown said.
“Fundamentally, if you begin to collapse this down and let's say we end up at four weeks as a transactional cycle, you end up with a situation where your house is a liquid asset rather than an illiquid one.
“And so more mortgage products begin to come to the fore like bridging loans and so on and so forth as chains disappear - and people just buy and sell houses, which is what happens in other markets.”
Landmark has said the new hubs will become operational in the summer of this year, with mortgage advisers paying a transaction fee to use the service.
Outlining the benefit a service like this would have for brokers, Brown said: "The transaction is faster for the broker - that's improved cash flow being absolutely honest and more turns per year. In other words, you get more revenue for the same number of people working."
jane.matthews@ft.com
