Q&A with Countrywide Surveying Services – The Intermediary

Article originally published in The Intermediary September 2023 – page  76 – 78

The Intermediary speaks with Matthew Cumber, managing director at CSS, and Mark Blackwell, COO at CoreLogic, about their partnership and the future of surveying tech.

CSS and CoreLogic announced their partnership recently, what does that entail?

MC: We took about 15 months from when we started requesting suppliers to provide information about their services before we came to the final decision to partner with CoreLogic. The level of due diligence and governance we put into this is beyond anything we’ve done before, because we wanted to make sure that we were getting two things. One was products that we can use immediately and that we don’t have to put a lot of time into developing. That was one of our absolute pure objectives.

Second, we wanted an organisation that truly understood our needs and was completely prepared to work with us to build products and services that we could see are going to be needed in the future.

MB: We were delighted that CSS awarded us this opportunity, considering the key players that are in the marketplace. We work with some great customers already, but CSS really helps create a significant enough cohort in the industry to look at how we can build out even more efficient technology networks, improve the exchange of property data, and use that data to improve the wider conveyancing process, not just surveying and valuation.

What are your plans for the future?

MC: We’re quite a simple organisation, really. We’re about providing valuations and surveys, so it’s about what that survey product will look like in 18 months times. I’m really trying to innovate for the long-term future. Our business will continue to grow and we’re very ambitious to do so by ensuring we’ve got the right sort of platform to work on, and to build on those foundations.

CSS has been through some relatively big changes over the past five years. It’s now about making sure that our people coming into the business are the best talent, the best equipped, and the best quality.

MB: You can have great technology and datasets to play with, but you absolutely need the right people in both businesses to make the whole proposition come together. Both organisations, in the time that we’ve spent working together, have shown that in droves.

Right now, we’re in the middle of a series of workshops and sessions where’re we’re looking at our software and CSS processes and blending those together to give them the optimal launchpad to go live later this year. Alongside that, we continue to invest in and support all of our existing customers to make sure that everybody’s got the right access to the right data tools and people to optimise opportunities they see in the market as it evolves over the coming years.

For the full original Q&A article click here: