How the platform cut their data vendor spend by 61% with one API

The proptech platform had spent four years building a B2B property data platform used by over 200 estate agency clients. Their proposition was simple: give agencies access to comprehensive property intelligence without building data infrastructure themselves. In practice, delivering on that proposition required the platform to maintain seven separate vendor relationships simultaneously.

There was a provider for EPC data. A different one for flood risk. Another for address autocomplete. A comparables data feed from a Land Registry aggregator. School data from a specialist education data provider. Demographic data from a market analytics firm. Each vendor had its own contract, its own API quirks, its own data quality characteristics, and its own invoice hitting accounts payable every month. The combined bill ran to £190,000 a year.

The operational overhead was substantial. When the platform signed a new agency client, the integration process required configuring seven separate data sources, each with its own authentication model and response format. Six to eight weeks from contract to go-live was the norm. For an industry where time-to-value is a competitive differentiator, that was painfully slow.

Oliver Marsh, CTO, had been looking for consolidation for two years. The requirement was straightforward: a single API that covered the majority of Their data categories, with consistently good documentation and a response format that made building on top of it tractable. Most single vendors covered only a subset of what the platform needed. Until Homedata.