CFD 477 – Blockchain Real Estate

September 27th, 2018

Matthew is the CEO and Founder of QuantmRE, a cryptocurrency startup that supports homeowners by helping them sell a fraction of the equity in their home without taking on more debt.

A seasoned entrepreneur, Matthew has a proven track record in real estate innovation through his experiences as Co-Founder of the $50M Secured Real Estate Income Strategies Fund, and as Founder and President of Crowdventure.com, a real estate crowdfunding company.

Previously a stockbroker and corporate financier in the City of London, he worked with Richard Branson’s corporate finance team, was appointed Director and Trustee of Virgin’s London Air Ambulance, is a helicopter pilot in his spare time and is the host of his own podcast, “Hooked On Startups.”

Podcast Highlights 

  • Who is Matthew Sullivan?

The question is are you born an entrepreneur or do you become one? Matthew wasn’t one of those people who were entrepreneurs at the age of 7, but he has always been fascinated with challenges that were not the focus of his current job. He realized that he was essentially unemployable at that point.

  • Solving Problems

Finance is essentially a set of rules and processes and you can navigate that world the same way as technology. There are a lot of similarities between crowdfunding and the blockchain.

Real estate is great because it is real and tangible, it’s something that we often take for granted. Combining real estate and technology comes with a lot of opportunities to create new efficiencies and increase the value of real estate as an asset class.

Real estate is a tool, but it’s often slow and cumbersome. QuantumRE is trying to change that by creating a new asset, blockchain real estate.

  • The Impact of Blockchain Real Estate

When the blockchain was first introduced, most people didn’t see the importance of it, including Matthew. The blockchain is basically a layer of truth that cannot be changed, altered, or influenced. It means that you don’t require a third party to ensure an element of trust. The blockchain turns all of that trust infrastructure into programming language that ensures certain events will happen without any outside trust requirements.

For real estate, if you could automate the process of buying a home you can increase the liquidity of real estate immediately and make international transactions more easily.

The real friction with real estate is the time and the processes that are involved with changing ownership, and the reason for that is the world that it evolved. Blockchain technology will take real estate from analog to digital and eliminate the need for trusted third parties.

Cryptocurrencies are a way of exchanging value on the blockchain, the key to the blockchain becoming widely adopted is people trusting the stability of future cryptocurrencies. QuantumRE plans to issue its own cryptocurrency that is backed by a portion of the equity in your home.

The issues with HELOC’s is that lenders often stipulate how you spend the money, with QuantumRE the money is yours to spend as you want. It can actually be an additional source of funds for people who have reached the limit of their ability to borrow but still have equity in their property.

  • Where did QuatumRE come from?

Start by looking at the problem you are trying to solve. Great ideas are nice, but they don’t matter much without solving a specific problem. The issue with Bitcoin was that it was unpredictable and hard to understand what it was backed by. The solution Matthew came up with was blockchain real estate, a new cryptocurrency backed directly by real estate.

  • Matthew’s Takeaway

Fear is a temporary lack of information. The thing that stops people from doing something is fear, the thing that solves the problem is to start doing something. You need a certain amount of naïveté to start a business, if you knew everything you may not start anything and then you wouldn’t learn anything. Get the shovel dirty. You should treat your business like a project and a learning experience until it becomes successful, so if it doesn’t work out you can go back and start again.

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