On 6 March 2019, the sale of a recently refurbished, semidetached house in Gillingham had completed. The conveyance process had taken 22 weeks to complete against an initial estimate of six weeks. Together with HM Land Registry’s Digital Street and a consortium of other parties, we set out to explore how new technologies might improve the conveyance process.
We built a distributed ledger technology (a broad umbrella of technologies that includes blockchain) prototype, built on Corda, that would enable a digital transfer of the property that automatically updates the Land Register. The project successfully completed in March 2019, bringing the transaction time down from 22 weeks to just under 10 minutes.
In our white paper, co-authored with HM Land Registry and UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies, we explore the technology underpinning the prototype, provide further detail as to the process and components involved in the HM Land Registry project, and look at some of the wider applications of distributed ledger technologies to the real estate and construction industries. These applications may have a real, disruptive and valuable impact on your business. The full white paper can be found here.
