Estate Agency Working Group

You’re invited to help shape the Smart Property Data Trust Framework

Hello Alex Morgan,

Your participation in the Estate Agency Working Group has been approved. This invitation is for this group only. If you selected other groups, each is reviewed separately and you will receive a separate invitation for each one that is approved.

OPDA is bringing the property sector together to make UK property transaction data interoperable, verifiable and consent-driven. Today, the same information is repeatedly re-entered, translated and interpreted as it moves between organisations and systems. The OPDA Smart Property Data Standard will establish a shared language so that information can be understood, exchanged and reused with greater confidence.

Rather than forcing the whole property lifecycle into one universal model, OPDA is creating a governed family of connected domain models, each shaped by the people who understand that part of the market. Estate Agency is one part of that wider standard. The models will preserve precise local meaning while allowing information to cross boundaries, and will support familiar outputs such as business glossaries, data dictionaries, schemas, APIs, forms and readable documentation.

Your experience can help distinguish a property from a listing, an instruction from an offer, and an agreed description from an unverified claim. Help us make marketing and sales-progression information clear enough to move between professionals without losing its meaning.

You are not being asked to understand ontologies, adopt AI, or have technical knowledge. We ask you to share the material your organisation already uses, contribute your domain knowledge in Teams and challenge successive model drafts. OPDA will use an AI-assisted, human-governed process to turn that evidence and feedback into reviewable candidates, publishing and revising them with the group until the Estate Agency model is ready to become its first official working-group draft.

🤝 Your contribution

There are three ways to take part:

1. Share resources. Upload approved source material from your organisation as evidence for the model, where you have private company-folder access.
2. Join the discussion. Contribute to relevant conversations in Teams and keep replies in their existing threads.
3. Review model drafts. Provide feedback on model candidates published in Teams.

📤 How to contribute source material

Teams-only access. You can join discussions and review drafts. No private company-folder upload access has been granted for this group. Contact OPDA if you need an approved company-domain account added for uploads.

Ordinary Teams files are shared with the working group. They are not the private company-folder intake route. Do not upload private source material to a channel’s shared files.

💬 How to participate

Reply in threads. With many participants, threads keep each subject together and make the discussion manageable.

Open the most relevant channel and check whether a thread already covers the subject. If it does, select Reply beneath the original post. The Start a post box creates a separate thread, so use it only for a genuinely new subject.

🧭 Where discussions happen

Open this working group in Teams and choose the most relevant existing conversation. The topics below are examples for discussion, not a list of channel names.

Check for an existing thread before starting a new subject. Explain the practical situation, the meaning that needs clarifying and any evidence or exceptions that should inform the model.

🔐 Access and privacy

• Invitation only, with approval for each group. Access to this working group does not approve you for another. To invite additional colleagues, email smartdata@openpropdata.org.uk with their names, email addresses and organisations.
• Private organisation area. Where private company-folder access has been granted, approved company-domain contributors can view, create, upload, edit, rename, move and delete material in their organisation’s area. Other organisations cannot see it.
• Permissions stay controlled. Contributors cannot view another organisation’s submissions, invite people, change permissions or make material public.

📚 Useful source material

For this domain, useful starting points include blank instruction and listing forms, material-information checklists, property-description guidance, offer and sales-progression status definitions, and non-production CRM field lists. Explain who supplies each fact and how it is checked. Do not submit seller, buyer or live listing records.

• Schemas and APIs: JSON Schemas; OpenAPI, Swagger and AsyncAPI definitions; GraphQL schemas; XML Schemas.
• Database structures: database schemas, entity-relationship diagrams, data dictionaries and non-production DDL extracts.
• Data and field lists: CSV, TSV, spreadsheets, JSON and XML.
• Documents, guidance and blank forms: PDF, Word, Markdown and plain text.
• Taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and semantic models: CSV, spreadsheets, Turtle/RDF, OWL and JSON-LD.
• Diagrams and screenshots: draw.io, Visio, SVG, PNG, JPEG and PDF.

⛔ Do not submit

• Personal, customer or live property-transaction data.
• Passwords, API keys, credentials, private keys or other secrets.
• Material restricted by confidentiality, contract, licence or NDA.
• Executable software, active scripts or macros.
• Password-protected files, encrypted archives or compressed archives.

What happens next

OPDA keeps the original source, reviews it for security and suitability, and uses approved information as evidence for AI-assisted data-model candidates. People review every candidate before it becomes a working-group draft. Source files are not automatically published or shared with other participants.

💬 Questions and model feedback: use the most relevant channel and reply in an existing thread whenever one covers the subject.

✉️ Additional invitations, private access problems or leaving this group: email smartdata@openpropdata.org.uk. Unsubscribing from email below does not itself remove your workspace access.

🌐 Your OPDA website access

Visit the OPDA website for modelling guidance and programme documentation.