Why we joined the RLBA
The Residential Logbook Association is the trade body for the companies building digital logbooks for UK homes. Here is what it is, what it does and why homehogs is a member.
homehogs is an associate member of the Residential Logbook Association
Visit the RLBA
What the RLBA is
A home logbook is a young idea with an old problem: everybody agrees a house should come with a record and nobody agrees what should be in one. The Residential Logbook Association exists to settle that. It is the trade association and self-regulatory body for companies providing digital logbooks for UK homes, working with the housing ministry rather than for it. Its stated aim is that every property in the country should eventually have a logbook.
Its members are the people actually building these things. Getting them into one room is how a logbook stops being whatever each company decided it was that week.
What it actually does
Less of a badge than a set of jobs, most of which only matter if somebody does them properly.
A shared standard
The Core Logbook Standard sets out what a logbook has to hold, so one is recognisable as a logbook whoever built it.
A national register
A register of logbooks, so a home's record can be found and recognised beyond the company that first created it.
One voice to government
Digital logbooks are being written into how homes are bought and sold. This is how the people building them get heard while that happens.
Standards to keep
Members agree to build to the specification and to hold to the professional, commercial and ethical standards the association sets.
Why we joined
Two reasons. Neither of them is the logo.
The first is that a logbook is only worth keeping if it still means something the day you hand it over. Ours is already good at being read by a person: a buyer, a solicitor, a plumber who wants to know which boiler is in the loft. What comes next is being read by a system, which only works if everybody agreed the shape of it in advance. We would rather build to the standard while it is being written than bolt ourselves onto it afterwards.
The second is that the rules are being written right now. The government's homebuying changes name digital logbooks and sales packs directly. The detail of how those work lands over the next couple of years. A two-person company has no way into that conversation on its own. The association is the way in. It also comes with obligations rather than just a membership number: build to the agreed standard, hold to the professional and ethical standards the members set and work with the other providers instead of against them.
What it means for you
Nothing you have to do, which is the honest answer. Your home hog carries on exactly as before.
What changes is underneath. The facts you record are kept in the shape the rest of the industry is agreeing on, each one carrying a note of where it came from, so your logbook can go to a conveyancer or a buyer's system without anybody retyping it. You can already export your property as Property Data Trust Framework data from the logbook page, which is the same idea from the other end: your home's record should travel with you rather than live inside whoever happened to build the app.
Your logbook is yours either way. It still goes nowhere you have not sent it yourself. The association's own account of what it does is at rlba.org.uk.
Start your home's record
Add a home, file the first bit of paperwork and let your home hog take it from there.
Join the waiting listWe're not open to everyone yet. Join the waiting list now and your first three months are free the day the doors open.