Hey everyone,
I'm going to preface this by saying this will be about blockchain technology and no, this has nothing to do with ICOs or the hype or any get rich investing advice. Frankly, I'm more interested in the underlying technology such as scalable consensus algorithms, tighter smart contract languages, zero knowledge proofs, decentralized governance, etc. If you want to talk about the technology side, let's talk offline.
This forum post is purely because I'm curious about your thoughts on the following problems as fellow investors:
1) Sourcing Deals: As an investor myself, I know full well how the best deals are off-market. But what if brokers were incentivized to put their best deals online? I know that REXMLS is based on this concept but I'm curious as other investors' thoughts.
2) Financing Through P2P Lending: For investors, you want capital and you don't want to wait forever for it. For lenders, you want your money or the collateral. Again, if you can have a trusted network, you're golden. But that takes years of building a successful track record to do. And even if you have one, wouldn't you want more transparency with who the borrower is, their track record, property LTV, title and whether they fulfilled certain milestones before making another draw of capital? What if that could all be securely automated?
3) Due Diligence: The first US property transaction to be recorded on a blockchain happened two weeks ago. It won't be the last. Interoperability (the ability for blockchains to interact with each other) is a problem that is rapidly being solved. So even if different blockchains hold their own deeds, they can still be confirmed against each other. Obviously this will take time to grow but in time, more and more deeds will be publicly auditable and immutable databases. If you could learn more about this, would you?
For the record, I had one deal that fell through because we only found some last minute violations on the property and the seller was quite shady in saying he fixed them when he actually didn't. That made me think about this since the better blockchain projects utilize oracles, which are independent data gatherers, in addition to nodes that act as validators of recorded data entries.
4) Leasing and Cash Flow Management: No, blockchains are not going to replace PMs. But they will make their life easier with automating leasing renewals, money transfers and documentation. You can think of Invisible Payments as an example.
What are your thoughts? And if you don't find these to be challenges, what would you want to be more efficient (aka less time and fees) in the course of a common deal
P.S. To give some background, I work in public accounting as a tax CPA who automates corporate tax calculations with technology. If there is one trend I see, it's that people take for granted what they are used to before it gets automated out of existence.
