By: Yusuf Ozdalga, London Partner, QED Investors
Real estate is one of those unique asset classes that has various forms of appeal to almost everybody. When you get right down to it, real estate appeals to our deepest rooted instincts of shelter, security and community. In an evolutionary sense, it even transcends our mammalian roots and gets deep down into our reptilian brain.
It is no coincidence that Abraham Harold Maslow (20th century American psychologist famous for framing a hierarchy of needs for psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human desires) put shelter right at the bottom of his pyramid, right above fundamental physiological needs such as breathing, water, food and sex.
While real estate has such fundamental appeal to humans, real estate investing takes this desire for safety and builds on it with complicated terms like gross yield, net yield, return on investment, and leverage to name just a bit of the jargon that usually goes along with real estate investing. So yes, as we start investing in real estate we transcend the reptilian brain, and start engaging our frontal lobe with cash flow projections and predictions around which country or which city will see rental incomes rise.
In this context, it is no surprise that real estate is the single biggest asset class in the world. Just to take the UK as an example (otherwise the numbers simply get too big!) UK residential real estate is an asset class of GBP 7.4 trillion. Buy to let investing (where landlords buy property for renting, also knows as BTL) equates to a “small” subset of GBP 1.4 trillion. Just to put this in context, the FTSE all-share index (in effect the value of all publicly traded companies in UK, many of which are international and operate globally) is GBP 2.4 trillion and the value of all loans outstanding to UK SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) is about GBP 0.18 trillion, or 180 billion.
But while real estate is big, and appeals to both our analytic and primal instincts, it is one of the least liquid asset classes out there. One can trade shares on the FTSE in a a matter of milliseconds, exchanging ownership in AstraZeneca with ownership in Unilever in an instant. Business loans can be traded in a matter of hours. However, trading real estate can take months in the UK. So ironically, the biggest asset class is also the one that is least liquid.
This is exactly where GetGround and companies like them operating at the intersection of Fintech and Proptech come into the picture. There is no intrinsic reason why trading real estate should take months – in fact, many of the constraints that slow down this process, which at times can be outright frustrating, can be solved with technology. And this is exactly what GetGround does: Turning the currently slow and arduous process of owning and investing in real estate into one that is smooth, simple, and secure.
At its core, GetGround enables its customers to buy, incorporate, bank, fund, and manage their property with just a few clicks of their mouse. Let’s now examine each of these five steps in more detail, and why each one is so important.
First and foremost, the process of buying property involves tons of documents, legal agreements, searches, negotiations, etc. We will examine what GetGround does in more detail on the buying side in a future blog, but suffice it to say that the process just asks for standardization, and with its technology driven approach GetGround can standardize all these documents giving confidence to all parties that are involved in the transaction. More importantly, as GetGround is positioned in the centre of the ecosystem, there are tons of so called network effects where GetGround can leverage its central position to help its customers buy the right property.
Secondly, and this is one of the platform’s core features, GetGround helps landlords incorporate their property. Many of us take companies for granted as something that has always been part of human life, but as Yuval Noah Harari states so elegantly in his book Sapiens, companies are nothing more than a shared fiction that humans all subscribe to. But while companies may be nothing more than a creation of our collective imagination, they have very real financial benefits in real life. When applied to properties, these benefits include more efficient tax structures, better inheritance planning, more standardized and easily exchangeable ownership structures to name just a few. Hence, GetGround has built a product (including direct API connections to the UK Companies House) that enables their customers to incorporate a company with a few clicks, and put their property into this company, all with automatically generated, customized, and standardized legal documents.
The third benefit follows logically from the first two: Once a landlord has bought a property and put it inside their newly incorporated company, it only makes sense to open a bank or e-money account dedicated to that company and property for collecting all the rental income into one dedicated place. This makes it very easy for the landlord to track all their rental payments affiliated with one company in one place, which in turn makes things like tax filing and expense tracking much easier.
Funding the property is then the fourth area where GetGround helps, and it does so by connecting its landlords to all the various banks and lenders that are looking to deploy their balance sheets to fund these properties with specialized BTL mortgages. BTL mortgages are one of the fastest growing segments in the UK mortgage market, and GetGround creates the ideal platform where lenders and landlords can meet. From the landlord’s perspective, they have just acquired a property and they appreciate the introduction to lenders, whereas from the bank’s perspective, the standardized documents and e-money account GetGround provides makes everything more standardized and secure, all accessible in one centralized platform.
Finally, in terms of managing the property, there are tons of needs ranging from furniture removal to renovation that need to take place, along with financial management needs such as tax filing. GetGround is in an ideal position to either provide these services in an automated manner, or connect its customers to the experts that are needed in each different situation.
When all is said and done, step by step and click by click, GetGround is digitizing and simplifying the process of owning property, taking us all closer to that utopia where we can buy and sell property in a matter of minutes and hours instead of weeks and months. This is the power of technology and data connectivity applied to one of the oldest and most primal industries known to humans, and it is a real privilege to be part of this epic transformation.
Wanda Rich has been the Editor-in-Chief of Global Banking & Finance Review since 2011, playing a pivotal role in shaping the publication’s content and direction. Under her leadership, the magazine has expanded its global reach and established itself as a trusted source of information and analysis across various financial sectors. She is known for conducting exclusive interviews with industry leaders and oversees the Global Banking & Finance Awards, which recognize innovation and leadership in finance. In addition to Global Banking & Finance Review, Wanda also serves as editor for numerous other platforms, including Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune.