John Reynolds is the CEO and founder of Coadjute. John has a background in enterprise technology and helping organisations optimize internally. In this podcast he talks to us about the exciting blockchain opportunity they've unlocked in the real estate and construction industry which is worth $10 trillion globally!

 

What is blockchain?

John perspective on blockchain is from a workflow and synchronization angel. Blockchain enables different companies to work together by keeping their different databases to stay synchronized, thus enabling everyone to have the same version of the truth. Coadjute looks at blockchain as an inter-organizational workflow that allows organisations to stay in sync.

 

Property marketplaces around the world are broken

In April 2019, John wrote an article entitled “Transforming the Real Estate Value Chain: Collaborative Innovation and Co-Operative Delivery”. In the article he states “Property marketplaces around the world are broken. It is slow, complex, confusing and costly to buy and sell both residential and commercial property.”

Anybody who has bought a house would recognize that it is a complex process because the consumer has to engage multiple businesses:

* Visit an estate agent to view a house

* Visit a bank to see how much you can afford

* Visit a mortgage broker

* Visit a conveyancing lawyer

* Visit a surveyor

Whilst each of those verticals have digitized and perform their job correctly the process itself is broken because the entire value chain is fragmented and it is down to the consumer to knit it all together. This can take four to five months and could cost 4% of the property value. It is an expensive, frustrating and time-consuming experience for most consumers. At Coadjute they believe that distributed ledgers and decentralized workflows can fix this problem.

 

Do you really need a decentralized solution?

There has been attempts to build a centralized platform fo the marketplace. In April 2007 the Land Registry invested £4.6m to the “Chain Matrix” a e-conveyancing type platform. It didn’t get the necessary adoption and was ultimately closed down in 2009.

Whilst in Australia the government mandated a e-conveyancing platform called PLEXA which was successfully launched in 2010 and has had over 4m property transactions of a combined value of $622bn go through it.

In the UK and other jurisdictions estate agents have invested heavily in their workflow tool and their internal business processes. Surveyors and conveyancers have their own tools that they have built up over 10 years. Banks have their internal systems. Taking a centralized platform approach would cost significant amounts of money, require heavy regulation which in turn could lead to a number of businesses shutting down. Because of these reasons a centralized approach probably wouldn’t work in the UK.

The API approach is an interesting one but one that still has challenges. How do you synchronize those APIs? How do you set the standards and processes to facilitate the synchronization of those APIs within a group of companies wishing to collaborate?

DLT and smart contracts allows those companies to orchestrate workflow ac...