1.0 Introduction
The Problem with Real Estate
Last updated
The Problem with Real Estate
Last updated
The global property market is over $235 Trillion (USD) in value, with residential property accounting for 79% of all global real estate value. That is more valuable than all global equities and debt securities combined, and almost four times that of the global GDP. The real estate industry worldwide is one where slow, paper-dependent processes cause major delays in the change of property ownership, resulting in property being a highly valuable, but illiquid asset.
The property buying and investment experience has largely remained the same for the last half century, especially when compared to other technological advancements made in the financial and information sectors. The main reason investing in property remains slow, costly, and lacks transparency revolves around trust.
Blockchain technology has the ability to enable the real estate industry to address inefficiencies and inaccuracies. It can broaden property accessibility to everyday investors and provide close to real-time settlement of recorded transactions—reducing friction, costs, risks, & eliminating trust. Tokenization and fractional ownership provide a clear solution to these problems and allow for retail investors to participate with lower barriers to entry.
Accessibility of property investment has been restrictive to most demographics, due to increasing land value worldwide and global inflation for the past five decades. Property ownership has reached the lowest percentage of the total population per capita worldwide in 2022 and continues on a downward trajectory for most retail investors and younger generations.
Transforming property ownership into a modern liquid asset class
Our mission is to solve these main problems today, namely: (1) democratizing the benefits of real estate investment through fractional ownership, making property ownership accessible to everyone, and (2) bridging the gap between digital and physical assets.
Propbase is revolutionizing property transactions for retail investors to buy and sell real estate assets within a few minutes right from your smartphone. Propbase is the first platform to enable real estate investors to safely and securely trade individual property holdings anytime and from anywhere. This is a game changing transformation, giving real estate investors freedom previously unheard of in the industry.
Starting with as little as $100, Propbase enables the benefits from property ownership to be accessible to everyone. Before Propbase, investors could only trade indirectly owned real estate via REITs, stocks, and funds on the stock market, but these options are costly, with little tax breaks, no controls , low returns, and of course, big penalties for withdrawing funds early.
This process not only takes time, but also requires that the company has a dedicated back office operations team – this also means the process costs money in the form of salaries. Every time someone buys a share in an LLC the traditional way, both parties are required to sign a sales & purchase agreement that then needs to be updated by a government registry, adding the new investor as a shareholder of the underlying entity. This is costly and time-consuming.
As a solution, Propbase does not have a dedicated back office because we have put the ownership of the holding entity on the blockchain, which is a public ledger that anyone can check and verify. The Propbase Registry, records an immutable history of every transaction for every property, ever transacted on Propbase. As a result, you are able to publicly see exactly which wallet owns which property and how much of that property that wallet owns.
Therefore, we never have to update the holding entity’s list of membership ourselves when investors purchase or sell a share in the ownership stake. Instead, the Operating Agreements of the property holding entity would simply point to a specific token on the Propbase Registry blockchain for its member ownership list and information.
Should a government entity have valid claims to request ownership information beyond that of wallet addresses on the blockchain, we can simply output names associated with the wallets automatically for them, at little to no cost.
Propbase is developing a full custody, multi-signature ("multi-sig") crypto wallet that users own and control. We eliminate the need for a separate crypto wallet before ever joining the Propbase ecosystem. Giving users a bridge between physical and digital assets, allowing users to have the benefits of blockchain technology without the hassle or headaches.
Our overall mission is to make property investment accessible to everyone, and a crucial factor in making that happen is building a Propbase ‘multi-sig’ wallet, included natively in the Propbase App. It hits a perfect point between usability, security, and control, unrivaled by traditional wallets. The Propbase wallet is the first multi-sig wallet embedded in an app that brings real-world assets onto the blockchain for practical investment usecase.
The Probpase Wallet gives users control and protection with multi-signature technology. The wallet has two keys, one held by users and one held by Propbase.
Users can use the wallet without needing Propbase set of keys, which are encrypted and safeguarded similar to how your bank would secure your bank account.
If users keys are lost or compromised, users can still access the Propbase Wallet via their Propbase Account and transfer your assets to a new Propbase Wallet or external wallet.
Users are always in control with the Propbase Wallet; your keys, your wallet. There is no method or circumstance, that users can be locked out of their Propbase Wallet, since users have the keys and the keys cannot change.
We are building the infrastructure for modern real estate transactions. Using cutting-edge technology, we eliminate fees, processing times, and barriers to entry, enabling property investment to be accessible for everyone.
