Marples sold Property Investment Exchange Ltd to Costar in 2007. He was formerly a partner at Brown Cooper Marples and Weatherall Green & Smith.

Jacob Philipson, CEO of Datscha said: “The appointment of Paul, coinciding as it does with the launch of Datscha in the UK, is of huge significance to our clients, coming at a time where more and more commercial property professionals are harnessing the power of digital technology to research, analyse and share real estate data. For the first time in the UK businesses can now access highly valuable information regarding millions of properties at the click of a button. We have tied together all the public information sources, and added additional data from other sources, to enable users to examine market information down to individual properties and owners and make the most informed decisions possible. We believe that the availability of such detailed property intelligence will disrupt the UK market in the same way that it has in Sweden.”

Paul Marples said: “By drawing together data from the Land Registry, Ordnance Survey, Environment Agency, Valuation Office Agency, Companies House and MSCI (formerly IPD), and by combining it with the records of over 7 million properties in England and Wales, Datscha now provides the market with an incredibly powerful commercial property intelligence and research tool. Combining all this data together brings a new level of transparency to the market.”

Mark Bruno, MD of Datscha UK added: “Since Datscha was launched in Sweden 16 years ago it has become the commercial property research service of choice for the vast majority of the market. It has introduced a new way of working to thousands of property professionals from the smallest to the largest firms. With this launch we are now ushering in these changes to the UK. The true innovation comes from how the data from all our suppliers is merged and visualized, giving our customers much better support for their decision-making. We provide them with a massive competitive advantage by making it possible to search, map and analyse huge amounts of property information and ownership data. Users tell us that after a few minutes using Datscha they’re already two days into their research. They really appreciate the speed and ease of use of the interface and the depth of data that is available to them, often using Datscha as the main information source when doing first cut market analysis."