Buying property either to live in or for investment is probably the biggest financial transaction you’ll ever do. So, as we approach the end of the second decade of the 21st century, why is the buying process still such a headache?
Let’s think of a few other ways you can invest your hard-earned cash where technology has helped to make your life easier.
You can invest directly in the stock market through your device: shares, managed funds, index funds. An artificial-intelligence investment platform can pick a balanced portfolio for you, like Sarwa (a fast-growing company destined for great things). You can follow successful traders through a social-trading platform, like eToro.
You can be set-up and investing within 10 minutes and you can do it all through your phone while watching Netflix on your sofa.
Now let’s compare that with buying a property.
Hours on listings sites, calling agents, waiting for call backs, waiting for keys for viewings, rescheduling viewings as something came up. And then once you’ve decided to buy: form-filling, signing, scanning, countersigning, scanning, emailing, calling, waiting for call backs, Whatsapping, emailing, rev1, rev2, forgetting which rev was the latest, misplaced paperwork, rev3… The reality is that the property purchase process has not evolved much in many places in 30 years.
We’ve evolved it.
We Share Property is an industry-branded investment platform that enables property buyers to buy and manage their portfolio through their device. We brand under our customer’s name and manage the end-to-end process on their behalf. Property investment takes minutes, not days.
The real estate industry risks getting left behind as other industries embrace innovation as a faster pace and seek to draw investors’ monies directly to them. Investors still like the tangibility of property ownership and that is its unique value proposition compared to other forms of investment. The industry must embrace technology in striving for better performance to maintain that advantage.