Making property transactions better for everyone – from estate agents to conveyancers, brokers to lenders and all other parties in between: Coadjute

Today, the property buying process can be slow, complex, and costly for both buyers and sellers as well as the businesses that serve them. This is not caused by the companies themselves, but by the lack of connectivity between them. Coadjute was formed to change this. Coadjute’s Network is uniquely designed to sit behind the front-end systems businesses already use, linking them together rather than replacing them. This means that users can continue to use their existing property software while benefiting from Coadjute’s network: connecting them to the parties involved in property transactions without replacing their systems. Additionally, Coadjute doesn’t hold any of your data. In fact, the company can’t even see it. Each party remains in control of their data and only shares information when permitted with other parties involved in the property deal.

Proptech has driven innovation across the property market

Whilst there are a lot of proptech solutions built on legacy systems which don’t truly transform the property market, there have been some tech advances in the industry over the years. It hasn’t been all doom and gloom.

For instance, let’s briefly imagine a world where over 95% of home buyers didn't search for their new property online and instead walked down to the estate agent’s window to see the latest properties. Digital identity is another one, with buyers and sellers able to verify their identity online using secure ID services.

HM Land Registry announced their 2022+ Strategy with the intention of adopting fully digital services and to transform land registration in England and Wales to ultimately deliver improvements for homeowners.

A fully digital property market is coming; it just needs to be joined up with the right thinking.

Yes, the speed of property transactions still needs addressing

The time it takes to complete a property transaction in the UK is only getting longer, and longer. In August 2022 it was up to 153 days on average and unfortunately that number continues to rise.

One of the reasons the time to complete continues to escalate is because very few have attempted to develop a solution for the entire transaction process. The prospect is a daunting one when you consider the plethora of moving parts and stages involved from start to finish in buying a house.

Not to knock the achievements of tech solutions thus far, there have been undeniable benefits to estate agents, conveyancers, and buyers/sellers alike. However, if we continue to focus on solutions in silos we’ll only achieve so much. This is why we need to look outside of our silos and think of the market as a whole.

Open vs closed systems

More needs to be done to bring all transaction parties together.

One of the main reasons that past attempts to bring the property market together have not been successful is because they used closed systems (or databases), that have contributed to the fragmentation we now experience in the property market.

With closed systems, individual (otherwise known as proprietary) solutions were created for each software platform, allowing them to access a central store of data. This ended up being a needlessly complex and cumbersome solution which made property transactions even less efficient. Users found themselves having to use new software, add steps to their process, and fix data entry errors, all for little benefit.

This is where Coadjute comes in. The key to true industry-wide change is to tackle the underlying issue of fragmentation by connecting existing systems so the people that use them can work together. This means that no matter your role in the home moving process, you can continue to use your existing software to perform your role.

Coadjute – integration over separation

The notion that ‘new technology doesn’t help to speed up the property transaction process’ is a myth, pure and simple – an opinion that is echoed by many of the partners that Coadjute is working with in this space. Whether you take individual platforms that have made the day-to-day lives of estate agents or conveyancers easier, or those addressing the transaction process more generally, they’ve all helped get us to where we are today.

That being said, as Coadjute’s partners have told it, what the property industry must endeavor to avoid is becoming saturated with myriad Proptechs. With each new solution comes a different standard for collecting and storing data, solving one problem and creating another.

The big bang moment that unlocks considerable improvements in reducing the time it takes to complete a home-purchase will come once the problem of market fragmentation has been resolved.

At Coadjute, this is exactly what they are trying to do.

Distributed Ledger Technology

Repeat after me; centralized and decentralized ledgers and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). No, it’s not a terrible attempt at a tongue twister, however were you to stop the next person you cross in the street and ask them to tell you the difference between centralized and decentralized ledgers, they may well struggle to give you an answer. How can we blame them? Where do you start when a Google search of “DLT explained' throws over a million results?

It’s something we can empathize with at Coadjute. The company’s very own solution for the property market is built on the R3 Corda Enterprise DLT, the very same technology used by banks and financial market infrastructure providers across the globe. But sometimes bridging that gap between an understandings of blockchain versus Distributed Ledger Technology is a tough one to navigate.

“Our technology works behind the scenes to connect the systems you already use, enabling everyone to see the same information, at the same time, and work together to achieve the same goals.”