UAE based, LandOrc, a new Tech solutions provider that facilitates lending for real estate industry by providing access to Decentralised Financing (DeFI) and utilising land titles in non-fungible token (NFT) form as a collateral, will use transactions on the Ethereum blockchain for greater trust, transparency and speed.
The value of the world’s real estate market reached US$280.6 trillion, the highest figure ever recorded by Savills’. With an annual increase of 6.2%, residential real estate accounted for the largest share (US$ 220.6 trillion) of the market. Commercial real estate (US$ 33.3 trillion) and agricultural and forestry real estate (US$ 27.1 trillion) made up the rest.
In 2017, the average global base lending rate was 11.53%, but it has since increased almost across the board in 2019 (11.57%). According to a 2020 KPMG report.
Digitalizing the real-estate market with NFTs + DeFI
Digitalization in the real estate market has been emerging. However, processes are often a time and labour-consuming affair and have often been seen as a stagnant investment for large corporations, especially those with assets in different countries.
“Property Developers need loans for development and this funding gap needed to be closed. In came the private lending sector to support, but alas, the Covid-19 pandemic led to a decline in both capacity and appetite to lend as companies shifted their focus on their existing businesses and bottom lines.”
“Furthermore, there is a dearth of transparency in processes causing volatility in property prices and coupled with slow transactions, the real estate market is in desperate need of a digital transformation. Complicating these are the snail-paced speed with which transactions occur,” said Damo, Chief Executive Officer of LandOrc.io.
The NFTs are built on blockchain, a distributed ledger technology currently being widely adopted for various applications. NFTs are essentially digital tokens that carry data and are stored in the immutable blockchain ledger.
NFTs optimize real estate processes by implementing it in infrastructural, architectural, or physical assets such as buildings and title or ownership deeds.
As NFTs can be digitally represented, tracing and tracking ownership and authenticity of the digitally represented asset is simplified to a fraction of the time taken in traditional processes.
Land NFT (LNFT) represents the land title on the blockchain allowing for tracking changes in ownership as it moves from the wallet, including placing it as collateral for lending.
Associated information like valuation, site location, and visuals, as well as vicinity analysis are brought on-chain via oracles and stored in the associated IPFS (InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol) for easy and secured access.
This allows for hybridized digital-physical land titles that makes authentication and tracking and tracing of ownership of properties a breeze.
LandOrc’s NFT + DEFI ecosystem features
- simplified complex real estate transaction processes
- shortened traditional real estate transaction processes from 4 months to 21 days
- ease of managing collateral due to traceability of ownership
- real estate lending options that are lower than locally accessible rate
“The time has come for property players to look into NFTs as a realistic and practical solution to circumvent the pain points that have been plaguing the industry for decades,” said Damodharan Vijayaragavan, Chief Executive Officer of LandOrc.io.
Decentralised Financing (DeFi), the process of using blockchain based financing, has grown to USD 87 billion in May 2021 based on Defi Pulse Data. Thus, providing a new source for bridging the real estate funding gap.
LandOrc enables DeFi participants to utilise LandOrc Tokens (LORC) as alternative financing for staking on property development projects. Members of the LandOrc ecosystem are involved in key decisions of the platform including the choice of projects for lending. The Land Governance Token (LGOV) can then be utilised to vote for the choices made in a transparent manner on the blockchain.
