The Unique Property Site Blog

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Since this is the Unique Property site blog let's start with real estate. Let's have a look at the UK's favourite habit, buying property. How does the activity of buying and selling land and houses work at the moment?

You find a house you'd like to buy. The first thing you need to do is get in a surveyor to report on the deal and whether the place is mortgageable. When you've sorted out the finance, you go to a solicitor, who checks the details at the land registry, and maybe also checks the local authority to make sure there are no plans to put a motorway through the front garden, or open a pig farm at the end of the road. All of this takes time, and means dealing with different organisations and checking various databases. It can easily t ake three months from your first decision to buy, to moving in.

Just for the record, it took me eleven months to buy my first property in Portugal, but then Portugal is one of the slowest countries when it comes to getting things done, and the sheer barrage of bureaucracy is mind destroying.

On the other hand, the fastest deal I have done was about twenty-five years ago when I bought a property in the North of England. At nine o'clock in the morning I rang the selling agent, and agreed to buy. I wired the money through later that morning and by one thirty I received a phone call telling me the house was mine.

Soon, that kind of turn-round time will be commonplace. The first thing that will have to happen is the Land Registry putting all of its material onto a blockchain. It should add all information pertaining to every plot of land, in other words, government departments will have to list all decisions which are likely to affect the land. This will mean that all information is in one place and downloadable. A prospective purchaser would be able (presumably for a fee) to look up the proposed purchase property's file, and make a decision there and then whether to go ahead with the purchase.

The buyer would then pull up a purchase contract, which would be a smart contract, and fill in the details, then pass the document to the vendor, who would fill their side of the contract. Part of the contract would stipulate that it would come into affect when the money was paid, and an electronic copy of the transaction would exist on the chain, and a copy would be on the hard drive of the parties' computers.

And you won't be using legacy banking for the transfer of money or setting up a mortgage. Both banking and mortgage facilities already exist in the digital world, and they will proliferate from here at a significant rate of knots.

Let's look at how things would have changed.

The deal could be done in minutes rather than months
There would be no need for any intermediaries
The conveyancer would be out of a job
There would be no paperwork
The smart contract would automate the transfer of funds
No-one would be needed at the bank to okay any transaction
The mortgage contract would be automated
Direct debits & mortgage funding would also be automated

Smart contracts? What are they?

Glad you asked. They are an essential part of most of the really useful blockchains. Let's have a look at how they work.

Smart contracts use blockchain technology to verify, validate, capture and enforce agreed-upon terms between multiple parties. Smart contracts on the blockchain allow for transactions and agreements to be carried out among anonymous parties without the need for a central entity, external enforcement, or legal system. And these contracts operate on the Etherium blockchain.

I once read an article by someone who was intending to fly to Japan to attend a wedding. His plane was late taking off so he missed his connection. He didn't have enough money in his account to buy another ticket for a later plane. He claimed that if his insurance company had used smart contracts, there would have been no need to make a claim against the insurance policy, he would have been paid out straight away after the first plane was so late that it meant a connection was missed.

A simple way such a contract would work is: I buy insurance for £25. The insurance company pays (say) £2000 into the contract. A set of commitments that have to be performed and at what times would be agreed. If all goes well the £2025 is paid to the insurance company. If there is a failure along the way that £2025 is paid to me.

Most contracts will be more complex than this, but that is the principle.

Let's go back to the guy who couldn't get to the wedding. How is that contract enforced?

The contract would have needed to have a lot more data fed into it. The whole itinerary would need to be provided for. If any part of the itinerary didn't hold up for some reason, then the agreed compensation would automatically and immediately be paid.

That leaves one crucial question unanswered; how would the contract know there had been a failure along the line?

Part of the smart contract would have to address this question, and it would involve consulting what is called an oracle. There would need to be an online database listing flight departures. The smart contract would ask a previously defined oracle to scan the departure and arrival times of the various connecting planes to see if they all left and arrived on time, or at the very least in time for the insured to catch a connecting flight.

The oracle would be chosen because it had the facility to scan arrival/departure times of planes at the relevant airports. That way the smart contract would know whether the conditions for a successful claim had either been met, or had not been met.

Initially this would be a bit complex to set up, but simple enough when the insurance company had done enough testing to get several template contracts that worked satisfactorily. Once such template smart contracts were in use, the checking of insurance claims would not need to be done by humans shunting pieces of paper this way and that to come to the facts of the matter.

Once again, the use of these smart contracts would save time and money. They would reduce rather complex dealings to a simple matter of activating a set of computer code to do the things needed. They would operate without any further input from humans. Great for disintermediation, and great for putting people out of work, but also great for making life a lot easier for most of us, and also great for cutting insurance fraud significantly. Welcome to the world of blockchains and smart contracts.

I am not going to give examples of other types of blockchain, but you can probably see that this new way of organising things is going to make a lot of activities a lot simpler, and a lot cheaper. At the moment blockchain is already being used in the more modern banking institutions. Blockchains are also in use in the logistics business. It is only a mater of time before we see most businesses working blockchain to blockchain. Those that dont will be positively Dickensian.

If you have any questions about any of this feel free to ask.