Zero Down Lease’s journey—from personal frustration to becoming an SRA-regulated, data-driven legal service—demonstrates how innovation can reshape complex sectors like property law. In this blog, Co-founder and CEO Josef Wasinski shares insights on the PropTech landscape, the challenges and opportunities for data-led transformation, and what regulation means for the future of legal services.

The Power of Property Data

Fundamentally, property law is about property data. We’re actually incredibly lucky that England & Wales has probably the best property data of any country in the world. We all take for granted things like standardised addresses which is by no means normal around the world. The fact that there are datasets like Ordnance Survey AddressBase that give addresses for every property in the country is foundational to everything from getting a mortgage to buying something from Amazon. Land Registry is another luxury we forget about. The fact that there’s a central, almost fully digitised registry of all property ownership is something that simply doesn’t exist in most countries. Without it, our business and many other property startups couldn’t function.

I discovered this firsthand when I tried to extend my own lease. Even after building a £100m property business, I was totally l lost and confused. The problem wasn’t just legal complexity; it was about poor integration of data that already exists. A lease extension is one of the most complex property transactions. It involves multiple stakeholders, strict legal timeframes, and technical legal and valuation work. Each tiny step in the process requires dozens of data points that, when properly connected, can save hours of manual work per case.

From Frustration to Innovation

That frustration of trying to extend my own lease led me to found Zero Down Lease. We recently became an SRA-regulated law firm, which fundamentally unlocked various possibilities for what we could build. Being regulated means we can handle the entire process ourselves in-house. More importantly, it means we can apply data and technology to the areas that matter most.

As an example, a key part of any lease extension is placing a notice on your landlord’s title to protect your statutory rights. This is done through a standard HM Land Registry form called a UN1. Traditionally, a solicitor might spend 10-15 minutes gathering title numbers, addresses and party details to complete this form. Because property data has been digitised, we can now source all of this automatically. That task takes seconds instead of minutes. Multiply that efficiency across every form, every check, every verification in the process, and you’re not just saving time. You’re eliminating transcription errors and reducing risk.

Reducing Risk in a High-Stakes Sector

This matters because leasehold enfranchisement has the most negligence claims made against solicitors of any area of property law. It’s complex, the stakes are high, and mistakes are expensive. The combination of data and technology doesn’t just make things faster; it builds systematic and rigorous processes that dramatically reduce the chance of error.

We’ve reached a point where public datasets, private APIs and proprietary tools can be woven into workflows that are genuinely transformative. That’s without talking about the possibilities of applied artificial intelligence.

A Vision for Systemic Change

Our vision is simple: take a process that has historically been slow, stressful and expensive, and turn it into something predictable, transparent and fair. After years in property, that’s the kind of transformation that keeps me excited about what we’re building.

Scaling with Geovation

Zero Down Lease’s evolution is a powerful example of what’s possible when innovation meets infrastructure. As alumni of the Geovation Accelerator Programme, they benefited from expert guidance in shaping their business proposition and leveraging location, land & property data to solve real-world challenges. Today, their continued growth is supported by Geovation’s wider ecosystem, which offers startups access to market insights, strategic exposure, and a collaborative network of industry leaders. It’s this combination of foundational support and forward-looking opportunity that helps startups like Zero Down Lease scale with confidence.

Speaking of the Accelerator Programme back in 2022, Josef Wasinski said:

“Geovation was an incredible resource for us. When we joined we had the an idea which we had validated with a few paying customers, by the end we had a business with product market fit. Through the support of the various mentors and other founders expertise we were able to triple our monthly sales and are on track to hit a £1mil in annualised revenue by December.”