UK’s Housing Market Already Being Improved by Digital Technology, But Further Adoption is Needed

Asking prices for homes in the UK dropped sharply in November, with the average price of newly listed properties falling 1.4 per cent to £366,592, according to Rightmove.

Technology continues to advance at break-neck speed, seemingly altering and improving sectors across the board.

One sector that is seemingly dragging its feet a bit, however, is that of housing. The most utilised method of buying and selling in housing is much as it was years ago, with very few more technologically-savvy options used en masse. Housing still working this way does make sense, to a degree.

After all, house prices are rather subjective, as are peoples’ preferences for what they want in a new property. Humans make up the property market, and that can make it tough to apply functional tech to make improvements. Still, with all of the heavily advertised advancements in algorithms, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, there are some firms looking to improve the housing market with modern tech solutions.

Speeding Up the Selling Process by Going Online

The usual process of selling a house is to contact a real estate agent and then list and advertise the home. Nowadays, this isn’t just on their shop window or their website, with many turning to the usual online platforms to list for extra exposure. Provided that they put the work in to find buyers and advertise, they offer a service to hopefully get your property found and sold as quickly as they can. However, this remains the most common process of the still-slow process.

To speed things up, while ticking all the right boxes for sellers and the authorities, companies have set up online to simply buy houses for cash. Right now, the best way to sell your house for cash is online, and the process starts by just putting in the postcode. With a few more bits of information about the property, and automatic no-obligation cash offer is made to trigger the start of what could be a very quick sale for a reasonable price.

It’s Time for AI to Facilitate Home-Buying

Artificial intelligence is much more than a text generator that can produce some pretty surprising results with a few prompts, and yet, many businesses have been rather slow to adopt and infuse the efficiency-powering tech. One business that’s looking to bring AI to the housing market is Cardiff’s own Open Moove. From the ground up, they’ve built a new platform that delivers its AI-powered accountability system.

The creators say that their platform can revolutionise how buyers, sellers, and professionals within the housing market communicate and go through the motions. When a property is hooked into the system, all parties will be able to track milestones, see automatic updates, access the secure lifetime document marketplace, and even make use of the top-tier chat functionality. With the AI sales progression tool, the oft-complicated overlapping processes become much more straightforward.

Getting Real World Assets into the Digital World

Cryptocurrencies can be somewhat divisive, what with the price volatility and the number of famous and semi-famous launching and promotion less-than-reliable coins. However, the technologies that underpin them are potentially incredibly useful and game-changing for industries across the board. For the housing market, this might just come in the form of real world assets being represented on the blockchain.

These on-chain representations of, among other things, real estate are proving to be very popular among crypto natives and even major banks and funds. Tokenisation of property on the blockchain could make purchases and transfers of ownership tremendously more expedient. Due to how the blockchain operates, the technology would run everything needed automatically, verifying each step as it goes. The housing market could even become a peer-to-peer market on the blockchain.

Online platforms, AI, and the blockchain are rising to prominence as key ways to make the buying and selling of houses much easier. However, adoption of these technologies by the big names looks to be rather sluggish.

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UK’s Housing Market Already Being Improved by Digital Technology, But Further Adoption is Needed