Preview the Future of PropTech

March 11, 2016

The future of PropTech, will actually be the part of the future of FinTech. A number of high level technologies, have swiftly come about that will cause this transition in these opposing but similar technology industries.

Currently data and contracts are separate. Perhaps your property software merges data into pre-made templates, for example to produce a tenancy agreement, this is not what I mean.

Imagine a digital agreement that is not only binding like the real-life counterpart, but it is also its own enforcer of those terms.

For example a pre-sales agreement made between the Vendor and a Purchaser of a property. Within this agreement, it states both parties to pay a deposit to an Estate Agent, and on completion of the sale, the deposits returned.

Currently this type of agreement requires a manual enforcer and trust in the Estate Agent’s processes.

This will change with Blockchain technology, a decentralized verifiable ledger that can handle things like currencies, assets and rules. A good example is Ethereum, a basic blockchain level coding tool, that allows programmable contracts. Allowing logic and rules to tie into real-life finances and investments, in a reliable and trust-less manner.

Now back to the example, how does a contract become self enforceable.

If we built this sales contract on a blockchain, we could store value in the Cloud. Effectively connecting say a payment API to receive the funds and a payment API to pay out the deposits. We could then link the contract to the Land Registry API, as the trusted source of the approval, which could trigger the rule to pay back the deposits.

We could go further and add time limit clauses, that if a sale is not completed by such a date, then both deposits pay out to a certain party automatically.

Understanding this, you may see that the future of PropTech will be also the future of FinTech, as we merge Assets, Money into programmable agreements.

Do you agree?

What else do you think the future of PropTech will hold?

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