Property is a knowledge business where the knowledge is public but unusable: ownership records, transactions, planning data and lease information exist, scattered across sources that don't talk to each other. This is the story of connecting them for one UK property group — the general lessons apply to any data-heavy sector.

The before

Finding development and investment opportunities meant analysts working portals and title documents, cross-referencing by hand into spreadsheets. A serious search took days. Off-market opportunities — the valuable ones — surfaced only through luck or relationships, and identifying an owner behind a promising site was its own research project.

The after

  • Plain-English search. Describe the site you want the way you'd describe it to a colleague. The system turns that into queries across tens of millions of records — transactions, commercial units, corporate ownership, parcels — and streams back results with the evidence attached.
  • The owner, named. Click any result and the ownership chain resolves, including through corporate structures: the company, its officers, the people behind it.
  • Off-market signals, daily. The system watches for events that precede sales — including probate notices matched to property-owning companies — and surfaces opportunities before they're ever listed.
  • Outreach from the same screen. Shortlist a site, and the letter to its owner is generated and posted from the same pipeline. Search to letterbox, one flow.

What changed commercially

Research that took days takes one search. Opportunities arrive before the market sees them, which in property is the entire game. And outreach volume stopped being limited by research capacity — the bottleneck the whole pipeline used to queue behind.

The transferable lesson

Every sector has a version of this: recruitment, insurance, logistics, legal — valuable public or internal data, unusable because it's fragmented. The pattern is always the same three moves: connect the sources, make them answer plain-English questions, wire the answer into the action. The full case is on our work page, and if your sector's version of this is on your mind, that's a good first call.

Want this looked at in your business? M22 is a London-based AI consultancy. A thirty-minute call gets you an honest read on where automation would pay, and where it wouldn't.

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