Electronic Property Settlement (EPS) integration guide

Electronic Property Settlement (Elektronisk Eiendomsoppgjør), is a B2B service for supporting the settlement process of selling real estate. It enables collaboration between banks and real estate agents, enabling digitization and automation of today’s manual work.

EPS establishes a hub between the parties to enable digital workflow and facilitates a shared understanding of the process flow (digital or paper). EPS is designed to support all the collaboration needs regardless of the systems involved, and will be a hub providing a single unified way of working together. The idea of digitizing and automating the process of trading real estate was born back in 2015! Now we start to see real movement in the market.

This service supports

• Share information regarding a settlement with the banks

• Decide on flow, paper or digital

• Send mortgage documents to the real estate agent for digital registration together with the digital deed

Getting started

EPS requires an access token provided from our login service. Read our Quick Start guide to get started. EPS is accessible on https://beta-api.ambita.com/eps for test and development and on https://api.ambita.com/eps for production.
Our rest endpoints are documented using Swagger. See swagger for beta or swagger for production

Definitions

The settlement process

All property sales require a contract. This contract defines all details needed to transfer ownership and trigger a loan process. The flow goes like this:

1. Create a settlement [Broker]
   The broker initiates the settlement process by creating a settlement with relevant information. Upon creation information is validated and stored and the flow is set to it’s initial state.

2. Find settlement [Bank]
   Once the buyer contacts his/her bank to prepare the loan, the bank can search for the settlement by buyer’s social security number (SSN) and the property key. The settlement contains all relevant information for the bank to start the loan process and perhaps automate the payment.

3. Send intention [Bank]
   Upon processing the settlement the bank may send an Intention back to the settlement, hereby stating that it will provide a mortgage document and state which flow it can support. This may influence the settlement flow initially set by the broker.

4. Send mortgage document [Bank]
   When the mortgage document is signed, the bank sends it to the broker through the settlement found in step 2. The bank may attach the prerequisite letter/terms for payment as PDF or XML.

5. Preparing documents for registration [Broker]
   The broker accepts or rejects the mortgage document and terms.

6. Registration [Broker]
   The broker registers a change of ownership together with the mortgage at the Land Registry and returns the receipt(s), called Grunnboksutskrift, and additional structured data (document referance) back to the settlement. The bank can monitor the process and detects any changes to the document. After registration, the bank may fetch the receipt and store it as a proof of the registration.

Alternative process

If a settlement is not found in step 2 above, this could be because the broker has not created the settlement yet or that the broker is not using EPS. If the broker is only using Afpant for collaboration, the bank can still collaborate seamlessly through EPS by providing the broker’s organization number. EPS integrates with Afpant and will take care of the hassle of integrating by file-sending with Afpant/Altinn.

If the bank is sending mortgage documents through Afpant directly (not through EPS) EPS will be listening for the documents on behalf of the broker and download and attach the document to the broker’s settlement in EPS.

Adding financial source to the settlement NEW FEATURE

This feature enables financial institutions to automatically detect relevant settlements.

• Broker add financial sources

  • The broker may add a list of financial sources when creating the settlement

  • The list of financial sources shall correspond to the financial information given by the buyer on how to finance the purchase. Typically this represents the same institution used to verify the validity of a bid.

• Banks may query for relevant settlements

  • If added, the financial institution may query settlement where they are the source of finance, where the juridical person (organization) matches the organization derived from the authentication.

  • This enables better communication with the buyer after winning the bidding contest

See here for API details

Future options

There is a group (Digital samhandling ved Eiendomshandel) working together to define a standard for bank-broker collaboration to digitalize and automate the wider process related to ownership transfers. Some of the processes currently being worked on are:

• Saldoforespørsel

• Restgjeldsforespørsel

• Kjøpekontrakt

As soon as the technical standard is agreed upon, EPS will implement support for these process steps.

Data in a settlement

When creating a settlement, the following information is available:

• Unique ID (technical)

• Flow (broker intention) & status

• Real estates involved

  • Sellers with fraction

  • Buyers with fraction

• Assignment number (oppdragsnummer)

• Contract details

  • Purchase price

  • Additional cost

  • Handover date

  • Account and KID info

• Intentions

  • Bank intention

• Documents (For example mortgage document)

  • Attachments (For example prerequisites or grunnboksutskrift)

Example settlement response:

{
  "uniqueIdentifier": "SET-a3531bd2-eade-4224-9dbc-fa6959e314bf", //Unique id of the settlement
  "status": "MORTGAGE_IN_PROGRESS",
  "flow": "DIGITAL",              //The brokers intention 
  "flowValidations": [],          //List of flow validations that led to paper flow (empty = digital) 
  "assignmentNumber": "A-1234",   //Broker settlement reference (oppdragsnummer)
  "contractDetails": {            //Information from the buyers contract  
    "payment": {
      "purchasePrice": {
        "value":4000000.00,
        "currency": "NOK"
      },          
      "additionalCost": {
        "value": 60000,
        "currency": "NOK"
        },
      "accountNumber": "3214.32.12345", 
      "customerIdentificationNumber": "1231238423423"
    },
    "handoverDate": "2019-12-31"
  },
  "realEstates": [                //List of properties involved
    {
      "propertyKey": "987654322-1",
      "ownershipType": "COOPRATIVE",
      "cooperativeShare": {
        "organizationNumber": 987654322,
        "shareNumber": 1
      },
      "sellers": [
        {
          "seller": {
            "officialId": "123456789012",
            "name": "KARI"
          },
          "fraction": {
            "numerator": 1,
            "denominator": 1
          }
        }
      ],
      "buyers": [ 
        {
          "buyer": {
            "officialId": "123456789034",
            "name": "OLA"
          },
          "fraction": {
            "numerator": 1,
            "denominator": 1
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "intentionsFromBank": [         //List of intentions from bank
    {
      "uniqueIdentifier": "INT-835cd2af-d87c-4df9-83a8-4785eae367b1",
      "created": "2019-12-18T15:38:26.747",
      "capability": {
        "flow": "DIGITAL",
        "reason": ""              //If provided by bank
      },
      "bankInformation": {
        "department": {
          "name": "Bank Dept",
          "organization": {
            "name": "Bank",
            "orgNr": "987654321"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "documents": [                  //List of documents
  ],
  "owner": {                      //Broker (Owner)
    "organization": {
      "name": "BrokerOrg",
      "orgNr": "987654321"
    }
  },
  "contactInformation": {         //Contact information broker 
    "contactPerson": {
      "email": "test@broker.com",
      "name": "Frank",
      "phoneNumber": "43215678",
      "phoneNumberDirect": "98726351"
    },
    "organizationId": "987654321",
    "organizationName": "BrokerOrg"
  }
}

For more details, see the API specification