[ICO Watch] Quarteria – A Blockchain Powered Real Estate Marketplace

April 13, 2018 by Ramaa Mohan

Finding a half decent place to live in any city is becoming harder and harder by the minute. And upon finding one it takes quite a bit of back and forth between the tenant and owner before any agreement is signed and enacted.

There are many a slip between the cup and the lip when it comes to real estate because enhancing the true appeal of a property is a very common practice. On top of that, rent and actual prices for leases or sales are skyrocketing.

These are the problem statements that Quarteria, as a platform, is trying to solve. Quarteria is a platform that is proposing to take the world’s real estate industry and put it on the blockchain. The company has targeted two of the core problems they think will help move all the payments on to a decentralized system like the blockchain and they are; listing and marketing of properties worldwide and providing a decentralized escrow service.

How does it work?

Quarteria is a platform that is trying to integrate the entire world’s real estate industry under one umbrella. In turn, making it easier for interested buyers to buy or lease property anywhere in the world. The platform essentially is like an online listing service that is uniform for the entire world on which users can see houses and apartments that are up for lease, sale or auction in their real fiat and crypto valuation.

The platform is built and operated on the NEO platform and hence the in-house coin used in the platform too is XQT. And there are three key players on the Quarteria platform. They are; the buyers, the sellers, and the QuartMasters. Each player has a separate use case of the network.
The buyer’s use-case is pretty straightforward. They look for listings that may interest them on the network and zero in on a property that is within their budget and they are interested in.
The seller’s use-case is being able to post listings on the network with sufficient details, pictures and the asking price. The seller, on Quarteria, will have to specify the house’s price in both fiat and cryptocurrency.

The QuartMaster’s use-case is that of a regulator on a conventional escrow service. They are the holders of the in-house tokens (XQT) and act as the third party in the decentralized escrow service. It is the job of a QuartMaster to make sure that transactions are sufficiently validated and payments are taken out staking enough XQT.

The Blockchain Aspect

The use of the blockchain in this product is essentially what it was built and designed to do. All the transactions that take place on the platform are to be done on the blockchain, staking a sufficient number of XQT tokens.

The use of the blockchain in this particular product promotes transparency and proper accounting, both of which are fairly absent in the industry. By bringing in more transparency into the escrow of a property, it directly pinpoints where the decisions are made and this, in turn, makes sure that the exorbitant prices that are generally demanded are reduced. And a proper accounting of all finances to do with a particular property never hurt anyone.

The Verdict

The real estate industry is one of the most fraudulent and most opaque industry right now. At the same time, it is an industry that will always exist because of the human need for permanent or semi-permanent accommodation. The prices stated for showings, escrow services, etc are nothing less than exorbitant and the price just doesn’t seem to stop going up.

Bringing in the blockchain’s method of the distributed ledger will go a long way towards controlling those prices and cutting down on the cut that the middleman, that is usually levied at the cost of the buyer, gives the buyer more power.

The company’s vision of bringing the entire world’s real estate industry on a single blockchain may be slightly far-fetched, but if done in batches will prove to be one of the most lucrative and revolutionary products. According to the roadmap on Quarteria’s whitepaper, the company will be in a position to conduct its first sale by early 2019. This product will, by leaps and bounds, make it easier for real estate newbies to buy, sell and lease their properties, putting the power back in their rightful hands.

This is a product and platform to look out.