The world of digital assets has expanded rapidly over the last quarter of a century, and we are starting to see all parts of our lives converted into a computer-readable formats. Money is already digital with only 8% of the world’s currency in the form of physical cash and art and new digital commodities are being created in the form of NFTs and the Metaverse. With low value physical items such as books having already been digitised thanks to ecommerce, larger and non-movable physical assets such as real estate are now starting to change from a purely physical asset to one behaving digitally.
Studies suggest that the real estate sector is underdeveloped in terms of overall digitalisation and data applications in comparison with other industrial sectors6. This lack of digitisation and a common trustful data repository amount to additional costs and inefficiencies, stifle innovation, increase risk and undermine investor, lender and underwriter confidence.
Housing in particular is stubbornly analogue with digitisation and datafication failing to touch it and bring the same efficiencies and innovation benefits as has occurred in most other sectors. Whatever digital information is available, is not normally in one place, has no systematic approach to collection and storage or is largely lost or missing forever. It’s so surprising that as our biggest investment, our home, and our place of shelter, has a history that is so ill documented and formally logged.
Data has the power to unleash better outcomes for users, but the current absence of a digital presence for a home and the ability to capture, analyse and monetise data, risks homes and their participants failing to benefit from it. Digitised, transparent and standardised data gathering and storage for every house will increase trust in provenance, speed up of sales transactions, provide transparency to relying parties and create new innovative services and business models, all to the benefit of the users. The ability to put data to work in a home is key to unlocking enormous value from third parties such as lenders, underwriters and insurers to build a more comprehensive view of an occupier and a house, allowing them to better expand products, reduce premiums and bring alternate financial incentives for occupiers.
If thinking of data being akin to iron ore or steel. Then just like you need steel to make a bridge, factory or car, to gain analytical insight you need analytics-ready data. Data starts off like ore and needs refining into steel by joining it together, cleaning it up, making sure it’s the right data and then embellishing it with metrics. But today a home and its user’s ability to make data useful is constrained because data is not collected and there is no refinement process for it.
Data in singularity is useless. Our mission is to aggregate and sort and batch all data sources so that they can be anonymised and analysed to gain insights, discover lost and uncaptured value and create new kinds of value for assets and their users. Customers are more likely to agree to share their data if it improves their experience and is to their monetary benefit.
Blockhouse is a Web 3 businesses built upon the core concepts of decentralization, openness, and greater user utility. We offer a distributed model away from the centralised behemoths that see your data as their own and monetise it for their own balance sheets. We help you take control and own your data and directly monetise any revenue derived from sharing it.
