Let's talk about real estate for a moment

So I was thinking the other day, and I want to say off the top that I’m fairly new to all this stuff, about some of the potential applications and use-cases of things like smart contracts and what part in that the AI development has got to play.

There is some fairly obvious potential for developing capabilities to use smart contracts in the land-titles, real-estate and conveyancing marketplace. The problem is that there is generally very little overlap between the areas of expertise, where you have people on the one side like real-estate agents, notaries, people doing property law and secured transactions, people doing conveyancing, and people operating the databases maintained by governments for land title registration, then over on the other side you’ve got people developing blockchain-based projects with distributed databases, cryptographers, people doing high-level coding, AI development like they are doing here at SingularityNET, people who are experts in developing good user-friendly interfaces and that sort of thing.

So I am thinking, although maybe the technologies involved are not mature enough to actually do something like this yet they are arguably mature enough to start moving towards it; what if you could have a secure distributed system for conveying title to land? All the building blocks for something like that are already in place. What’s needed is an AI sublayer so that you have an interface that someone like an experienced lawyer or notary (who is an expert is their area but knows nothing about the underlying technology) can actually use with confidence and convenience. So you have an underlying distributed network, something like Cardano or a future system with similar capabilities, then you have another layer that leverages AI to do the crucial busywork behind the scenes, and on top of that a good user interface for the people who work in the field.

Although there are a lot of regulatory issues to wade through and a lot of variety when it comes to how different jurisdictions deal with this sort of thing, the potential to provide enormous savings to customers is just staring me right in the face now, so to speak. The percentage cut that the middlemen get in real estate makes even the financial industry look downright pro-user. In the long term developments such as I’ve described have the potential to cut out the real-estate agents, notaries and even the lawyers to an enormous degree, or at least force some major downward pressure when it comes to service costs.

Something to think about if you ask me!