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
- How big is the market you are addressing and what share of it are you expecting to take?
- You have just moved from seed to Series A funding. What convinced the new investors (e. g. Amro) to support you?
- How many customers do you have, what types of organizations are they, and how long is the pipeline?
- 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?
- You are handling a lot of data flows. Do you offer data analytics services?
- Real estate is useful to money launderers. Do you offer KYC, AML, CFT and sanctions screening services?
- Would digital identities be useful to your clients?
- What blockchain technology do you use?
- How hard is it to connect to your blockchain network (e.g. does it require a change of software, investment in an interface etc.)?
- Do your users want to operate their nodes themselves or do you have to operate them for them?
- Are your clients really software vendors rather than customers and intermediaries?
- 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?
- Doesn’t cutting costs mean cutting intermediaries – dies what you do raise fears of disintermediation?
- What incentive (apart from fear) do intermediaries have to be more efficient in their operational processes?
- The residential property market in the UK is notoriously inefficient and exasperating. How are you improving the customer experience?
