Metastreet: from a wild idea to the standard tool for property licensing across London
What started as an ambitious idea — replace paper-heavy council licensing with an AI-assisted platform — is now the tool more than 20 councils use to license and regulate private housing. Everlution's project managers, architects, developers and security team built and secured it.
- Service
- Development
- Industry
- GovTech · private housing regulation
- Client
- Metastreet ↗
- Year
- 2024
Private-housing licensing in UK councils ran on forms, spreadsheets and back-and-forth email. Applications took weeks, unlicensed properties went unnoticed, and every council solved the same problems in its own way. The founders had a bold idea and a hard requirement — public-sector-grade security and scale from day one.
Everlution turned the idea into a product. Our project managers ran delivery with the founding team, our architects designed a multi-tenant platform that a council can onboard onto without a bespoke build, our developers delivered the application and renewal workflows, the inspector app, case management and analytics, and our security team designed, hardened and tested the environment to the standard a local authority procurement demands.
Metastreet is now used by more than 20 councils — including Haringey, Hackney, Islington, Westminster, Croydon and Birmingham — to automate applications, renewals and approvals, flag unlicensed properties with AI-driven insights and run inspections in the field. Simple licences complete in around ten minutes and processing time is cut by up to 50%.
The idea
Licensing private rented housing is a legal duty for UK councils and a slow, manual process for most of them: applications on forms, evidence by email, inspections on paper, enforcement driven by complaints rather than data. Metastreet set out to change that with “intelligent, AI-driven technology that transforms how you deliver private housing regulation” — a wild idea when it started, because it meant convincing local authorities to run a core statutory service on a new platform.
What Everlution did
Everlution was the engineering organisation behind it, from the first architecture sketch to production operations:
- Project managers ran delivery with the founders and the first council customers, turning statutory requirements and council processes into a shippable backlog.
- Architects designed a multi-tenant, cloud-native platform: one product, many councils, each with its own licensing schemes, fees and workflows — without a bespoke build per authority.
- Developers built the application and renewal automation, approvals, case management, the inspector app for field officers, and real-time analytics.
- The security team designed and hardened the environment, ran penetration tests and prepared the security documentation councils require in procurement — because a platform holding landlord and tenant data for entire boroughs has to be secure before it is anything else.
What Metastreet does today
| Capability | What it delivers |
|---|---|
| Applications & renewals | Online applications, automated renewals and approvals — simple licences completed in about ten minutes |
| AI-driven insights | Flags unlicensed properties instantly, so enforcement is proactive rather than complaint-led |
| Inspector app | Inspections and evidence captured in the field |
| Case management | Service cases and enforcement tracked end to end |
| Analytics & tenure intelligence | Real-time dashboards and property-tenure data to support decisions |
The platform is used by more than 20 councils across London and beyond — Haringey, Hackney, Islington, Westminster, Croydon, Slough and Birmingham among them — and cuts licence processing time by up to 50%.
Why it matters to us
Metastreet is what our model looks like when it works: a ventures-stage idea, engineered by the same people who audit and secure systems for a living, that became a standard tool in a regulated public-sector market. It is scalable because it was architected to be, and secure because security was in the room from the start.
Product descriptions and figures from metastreet.co.uk.
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