Have you ever bought or sold a home? What an expensive and time-consuming hassle! Technology advancements could dramatically change this antiquated process in the very near future. Here’s how selling your home could look:
You decide that you want to sell your home. You go online to one of the many new real estate marketplace platforms and enter your address. Using a secure blockchain-based identifier, you confirm that you own the home. All relevant information, including your current mortgage, and any repairs that have been done, are instantly added to the platform’s database.
Of course, before you can sell your home, it needs to be inspected and you need photos and video to show potential buyers. But now, thanks to new technology, that’s fast, easy, and inexpensive. In fact, when you schedule an inspection and order a complete multimedia package, you’re able to select a time within thirty minutes.
Twenty-seven minutes after you initiate the service, you get an alert on your mobile device to answer the door. Instead of a being met with a team of humans carrying cameras and inspection equipment, you find a single drone. The drone verbally requests that you confirm when all humans and pets are out of the house. (This isn’t to protect the living creatures, the drone can easily avoid them. It’s to make to easier to scan the home without anything getting in the way or needing to be digitally removed from the photos and video.)
Once the house is clear, the drone proceeds to enter every room of the house, and uses multi-spectral imaging to scan for any potential problems from the smallest cracks in the foundation to pipes leaking inside the walls to windows that need to be replaced. At the same time, ultra-high definition cameras are taking photos and 3D videos in every room that potential buyers can view online or “experience” with a virtual reality headset.
Once the drone has finished inside, it moves outside to scan and digitally capture your home’s exterior, yard, and roof. It again checks for any issues, while at the same collecting images to use in the automatically generated “home experience” that showcases your home in multiple mediums, including photo galleries, video walk-throughs, and full-VR tours that allow buyers to see every detail of every part of your home from anywhere in the world.
The whole process take less than fifteen minutes and all you had to do was open the door! As the drone flies away, you receive another alert that your home has passed the inspection. You’re happy to see that it has no major problems, and just three issues rated “areas of minimal concern” that won’t prevent it from being listed. Minutes later, you’re alerted that your “home experience’ has been created and is ready for review. You review it and can’t believe how good your home looks – and how fast this is happening. You didn’t even have to enter any information about your home. Everything was stored in the blockchain and any changes were confirmed by the drone scan and updated in the home’s profile.
All you have to do now is enter the price at which you want to list it – a price recommendation is provided by the service, but you can price as you wish. Once you’ve entered you price, you select “List Now” and just like that your home is on the market. Later that evening, you receive an alert that a buyer 2,000 miles away is interested in purchasing your home, confident in buying it without seeing it in person because of the guaranteed inspection and the full virtual reality tour they were able to take. They send an offer and the date that they would like to move in. Their offer looks great and you accept it, which generates a blockchain-based smart contract. Once they arrive at the house on the agreed-upon date, the smart contract initiates a payment transfer using secure cryptocurrency. No escrow account needed.
You can’t believe how different it was selling your house than buying it eleven years ago. Back then, there was an army of “middle-men” adding inefficiency at every step that took time and extracted money from you and the seller. Technology has made them all redundant now, from the appraiser to the real estate agent, and you couldn’t be happier about that. Especially since you were able to keep almost the entire sale price, except for the .25% fee you paid the company that sent the drone, guaranteed the inspection, and created the listing.
Everything I’ve described here is already technically possible, although not yet as seamless as described. In fact, the barriers to this happening are far more regulatory than technical. The multiple industries worth of vested interests that would actively prefer we don’t ever realize this future will certainly slow things down as well. Regardless, like in so many other areas, at some point the technology becomes too compelling to ignore and there will be a time when selling your home is as easy as ordering pizza is today!