Leobit
Blockchain-Based Real Estate Platform
A Fully-Functioning Solution for Property Management
In 2021, with over 60 years of history to its brand, the customer’s company ranked among the best US full-service real estate agencies, closing over 20 million in sales that year. Our customer became one of the first industry leaders to understand the potential value of blockchain and its potential impact on the future of real estate. Constantly implementing new initiatives to stay on top in the competitive market, the company partnered with Leobit to develop an easy-to-use blockchain-based system and web portal for buying and selling real estate items.
Challenges
Leobit’s customers realized that reliability, data accuracy and security are imperative in the real estate business. That’s why they wanted to boost their proprietary solution with blockchain technology. A blockchain-based real estate portal would provide trusted proof of evidence of the origin of their listed property. First, blockchain decentralization allows all participants to have a “single source of truth” and be sure of information transparency. Second, a blockchain-powered platform makes it virtually impossible for someone to change the data. Thus, the publicly available payment history and background associated with a specific property item are valid and equitable.
The real estate industry involves a lot of players like banking institutions, insurance companies, brokers, lawyers, agents, etc. It’s crucial to maintain correctness and completeness of real estate property records as they can be used in resolving disputes, protecting owners’ rights, ensuring updated ownership transfers, preventing fraudulent activities. Implementing decentralized data storage based on blockchain technology, the biggest challenge the Leobit team faced was data aggregation from all these sources, additionally to automatically collecting property data from other public sources. However, we gave all these participants a clear mechanism of integrating with the blockchain directly or by using a convenient and developer-friendly API to access blockchain data in a simple and meaningful way.
Land ownership and land titles registration continue to rely on paper documentation. Property transfers require costly and time-consuming procedures that could easily be exposed to fraud and mismanagement. Leobit helped the customer to digitize their business with a fully-functioning blockchain-powered platform. Our solution, powered by Microsoft Azure, uses blockchain technology to describe real estate assets, collect all the required associated information from public sources, make essential documents validated and easily accessible to necessary parties. Our team replaced the property listing SQL database with blockchain-based storage. Here, blockchain makes the system more transparent, keeping all records of previous transactions in one place and prohibiting any changes to historical records.
Having no limitations on the technology stack from the customer, our experts used .NET Core for the back-end and Angular for the front-end development. This stack combination enabled quick development, guaranteed product security and scalability, and decreased development costs for the customer.
Features & Functionalities
Opportunity to manage multiple listings of properties offered for selling and buying
Enhanced property search experience with personalized content for well-considered decisions
Access to the full descriptive listing details with high-quality photos of each property
Ability to get an impression of a neighborhood, routes and location of the property thanks to Google Maps integration
Single unified blockchain-based environment with full transaction history and legit data on each property
End Users
Private and corporate real estate industry players (banking institutions, insurance companies, brokers, lawyers, agents, etc.); other real estate service providers using our solution as PaaS.
Results
Paying tribute to the traditional real estate ecosystem, the Leobit’s customer was still ready to step aside from it and leverage the latest information technology to drive business growth. With a blockchain-based solution developed by Leobit experts, they attracted new clients increasing sales revenue by 20% within the first year after the product launch. The blockchain-based real estate platform easily replaced the roles of brokers, lawyers, and banks. It guarantees transparency and immutability of information, thus making unnecessary intermediaries and saving end-clients money on commissions and fees. Decentralized storage managed by various participants also enhanced clients’ trust in the system. Since multiple users can verify the information, buyers and sellers are more confident in secure and successful transaction outcomes.
With a blockchain-based MLS database, Leobit software engineers provided all parties with a single version of verified aggregated information, a secure environment for data sharing, transaction and real-time payment monitoring. The property registry is automatically updated and maintained in one place, ensuring accuracy, transparency and security of the information, so all real estate deals are based on accurate and valid data.
Leobit’s development team ensured that the solution could function in two modes depending on the customer’s clients’ needs and preferences:
- SaaS – available for end-users to access and operate it via web-browser
- PaaS – helps other real estate service providers to create their applications based on our platform
This business approach to the developed product expanded the client base of our customers from private to corporate ones.