Real estate sales require the sharing of a considerable amount of paperwork. With emails bouncing back and forth between the buyer, seller, their agents, lawyers, financiers and others, the process is very messy. More importantly, if one person has a hold-up, other parties may be unaware of the delay. Hence, blockchain could be used to share documents and data about the progress of the sales transaction process, making it more transparent. In Japan, SBI Holdings, SBI Real Estate Finance and Sumitomo Real Estate Sales have collaborated on a blockchain-based solution, SREC.
So far they’ve conducted a demonstration of SREC, which uses R3’s Corda enterprise blockchain. Following the successful demo, they plan to build a data sharing platform for the general public.
Another high profile real estate blockchain project is the UK’s Coadjute, which also uses the Corda blockchain.
Coadjute is designed with a similar purpose. Consider all the documents that need to be shared for a real estate transaction – property deeds, surveys, mortgage debentures, contracts and more.
However, with many blockchain solutions, the challenge is to get a sufficient number of people to use the same platform. If only a few companies use it, those who adopt the solution can only use it for some transactions where the counterparties are onboarded.
The UK’s Coadjute managed to address the adoption issue. In the UK numerous companies provide software to real estate agents. So, instead of trying to sign up real estate brokers directly, Coadjute has partnered with several software platforms.
Hence, the genius of Coadjute isn’t just the business idea and the execution. It’s the go-to-market strategy.
