Blockchain Home Registry (BHR) is on a mission to return home data to the people
Blockchain Home Registry, built by the team behind Torri Homes, aims to offer consumers incentives for providing property data.
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The Blockchain Home Registry is a national real estate data resource for agents and consumers.
Platforms: Browser; The iOS app
Ideal for: Brokerage; agents; home owners; lenders; inspectors
Top selling points:
- Incentivized home data input
- Comprehensive housing information reports
- Wide selection of utility items
- Puts agents, owners in control of data
- Data sharing options
Top concern:
The company’s use of Blockchain to secure home data may cause those unaware of its benefits to hesitate to submit data. It’s an unfortunate stigma on a very proven and useful technology, but the company might want to consider how it’s used in their marketing.
What you should know:
Blockchain Home Registry, or BHR, is designed, as the company puts it, to “collect the world’s real estate data and make it accessible.” Consumers can claim their home by entering the details, from equipment types to neighborhood amenities.
In return, they will be issued an NFT that ensures their right to the information and justifies their compensation if someone wants to access the home’s data. Use cases span agents using for marketing, home warranty companies, appraisal firms, risk evaluation, insurance underwriting or mortgage auto financing, for example.
Agents can use BHR in turn to produce comprehensive real-world reports on each home submitted, whether for comps, marketing, opinions on value, etc. The overall goal of the software is to put control of housing data back into the hands of the people who actually own it.
I admit I’m more in love with the concept than the product itself. The two are not always the same. There’s a smart team behind BHR, the guys who built Torri Homes, an online real estate agency. Like me and countless others, they found the multi-listing service model to be a woefully outdated middleman barrier clinging to an idea that crumbles under their grasp. But to its credit, it managed to position itself as the industry’s premier property information entity, and overall, it has never let us forget it.
Of course, title companies have a lot of real estate information as well. That’s why BHR partnered with a major to help users of the software build comprehensive property profiles for when they “claim” their home. Zillow also has a mechanism for this, but I’ve never been able to correct a couple of errors in the home’s information. And also, the goal is different. Zillow turns its data into leads for agents, while BHR offers direct incentives to consumers in the form of, ultimately, actual compensation. Users are given $Home Rewards for submitting their data and these points will lead to payments and can be used as such to unlock future features.
The company is still working out the related details, but I take some issue with the idea that I can bypass the use of rewards and direct pay for the home’s real report. It kind of detracts from the owners’ altruistic stance of “making home data available” and instead suggests that it’s available to whoever will pay for it. I agree that entering data to earn rewards only makes my report more valuable. And for agents who want a report for marketing purposes, $50 is pretty cheap and deductible.
However, owners can lock their homes with a BHR-issued NFT. It’s not a silly piece of art or an obscure image, but rather a legitimate digital token denoting ownership. Entering information is easy using a collapsible series of categorized menus with headings such as “Interior”, “Features” and “Exterior”. The housing reports contain all kinds of ancillary data that drive value, such as market trends, ownership history, location analysis, climate and weather and some value estimates from, smartly, a variety of sources. BHR said it wants as many opinions of value as possible.
The company told me that future data to be made available includes permit history, zoning, Airbnb/VRBO/rental potential, unit details/recalls, broadband speeds, insurance claim history and solar potential.
Where does Blockchain come in? Well, as of now it is used as a primary protection for BHR’s servers, in the same way that ShelterZoom and Propy leverage it. The data exists in a secure, “traditional” environment while being made redundant in the blockchain.
It should be noted that blockchain is not some form of esoteric vaporware, and it deserves to be defended when associated with crypto exchanges and other such shady businesses. These are areas of use for blockchain. Indeed, once mainstream, there are few better uses for it than recording real estate transactions.
Using BHR is generally straightforward, reflecting the company’s desire to make data easy to enter and easy to share. The reports are comprehensive and useful, offering a much more streamlined process than manually tracking down the various components. I also dig how it involves consumers in its mission, the forgotten entity when it comes to proptech plays centered around real estate data. And as the home becomes increasingly valuable as a source of business information, it’s important that real estate doesn’t forget who actually owns it.
Have a technology product you want to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe entered commercial real estate at the beginning of the dot-com boom, helping numerous commercial real estate companies strengthen their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through software and technology reviews for Inman.
