One of the biggest handicaps to Surveyors working in private practice, is lack of data.

For whatever reason, the Government chooses not to collect or publish rental data but is happy to publish residential transaction data. This leaves the UK with a property market on a par with Poland, in terms of transaction data, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.

Any firms of Surveyors looking to provide quality advice will find this unacceptable but the solutions proposed so far have been so "unwieldy" and costly e.g. the National Evidence Database, that they have not come to fruition. Morever nobody has come up with a solution to the problem that a large amount of data, primarily in the secondary market, isn't in the possession of Surveyors

LeaseholdersUnited have developed solutions to both problems.

Our primary service is to businesses, where we take them down the path to educating them on what they need to know on property costs and how to pay less. That path shows them how important it is for them to share rental information with their neighbours, and we have developed an online system to allow them to do that.

The rental information they add goes into a Knowledge Base in their area.

Surveyors, through the Professional section, can contribute their rental data to that same Knowledge Base. This has the benefit of not only allowing businesses and Surveyors to exchange rental information but also the Business gets to see and contact the Surveyor who is acting on a similar property nearby

After you have added yourself to the Contact Database for free, then you simply add your transaction data to the Knowledge Base for free. This then allows other business members of LeaseholdersUnited to see you are acting on a property near them and message you for fre

This means by contributing your data you, effectively, get free advertising to your target market. If you only want your data to be viewed by the Surveyors in the group, you can tick the box

As with the Contact Database, by adding your data for free you get to view partial data for free. To view all the data and send messages, as before, costs £10 for 12 months. So you only pay for using the service when the Database has enough data to make it worthwhile and you have a job to do

The uses for this system are numerous e.g. rating appeals, rent reviews, service charge disputes, valuations etc etc.