The blockchain network that aims to digitise the UK housing market

The blockchain network that aims to digitise the UK housing market

The UK residential property market is an active one, supporting more than 100,000 transactions a month. But it is also notoriously slow, complicated, inefficient and expensive, with multiple intermediaries extracting transaction costs – guaranteeing anybody who offers to digitise the process a warm welcome from house-buyers and sellers. 

Counter-intuitively, all those intermediaries – estate agents, conveyancers, lawyers, surveyors, mortgage brokers, lenders, data vendors and government offices – also have much to gain.  Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute, a start-up whose purpose is to digitise the UK housing market, explained to Future of Finance co-founder Dominic Hobson why it also makes sense for intermediaries to welcome greater efficiency.

Questions that are being asked

1. How big is the market you are addressing and what share of it are you expecting to take?
2. You have just moved from seed to Series A funding. What convinced the new investors (e. g. Amro) to support you?
3. How many customers do you have, what types of organizations are they, and how long is the pipeline?
4. Coadjute offers a blockchain technology to make residential property transactions more efficient, essentially through data-sharing. Is the current state of data at members of your network a problem?
5. You are handling a lot of data flows. Do you offer data analytics services?
6. Real estate is useful to money launderers. Do you offer KYC, AML, CFT and sanctions screening services?
7. Would digital identities be useful to your clients?
8. What blockchain technology do you use?
9. How hard is it to connect to your blockchain network (e.g. does it require a change of software, investment in an interface etc.)?
10. Do your users want to operate their nodes themselves or do you have to operate them for them?
11. Are your clients really software vendors rather than customers and intermediaries?
12. There are a lot of parties involved in residential property transactions: buyers, sellers, estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors, mortgage brokers, lenders, lawyers, data vendors, the Land Registry. What do they gain from your service?
13. Doesn’t cutting costs mean cutting intermediaries – dies what you do raise fears of disintermediation? 
14. What incentive (apart from fear) do intermediaries have to be more efficient in their operational processes? 
15. The residential property market in the UK is notoriously inefficient and exasperating. How are you improving the customer experience?