Ehab

The housing market is quite clearly broken, prices spiral out of control whilst the quality of the product remains the same or rises ever so slightly with regulation. The houses which do get built are of poor quality in comparison to what could be achieved, they have low environmental standards, aren’t built with the end user in mind and are simply unaffordable for a large portion of society. On the flipside, the technology to mass produce sustainable, customisable, modern and affordable homes exists but is primarily deployed by small developers who struggle to compete with the centrally controlled, speculative housing development model we have at the moment.

So why is the housing market broken? Part of the answer is that global residential development and investment is dominated by large companies and funds, with profit as their only incentive. They speculatively develop housing and they receive the enormous profits associated with this development, primarily because of an undersupply of housing, which incidentally they control. This undersupply is also linked to the boom-bust cycles of banks, who supply the development finance. When times are good lots of higher end, more profitable homes get built, when times are bad development becomes contracted. This continually creates an undersupply of affordable housing, which is the most in demand form of housing.

The lack of affordable housing has a direct negative impact on almost everyone. Inefficient houses have high bills which uncontrollably eat into the occupants budget, whilst at the same time being a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions directly affect all of as as the impacts of climate change are realised. Rising costs of housing force people to make spending cuts elsewhere in their lives, for many this could be money spent on education, healthier food, or any of the products that make for a better more fulfilling life. Expensive housing prices people out of their communities and forces them to move elsewhere, this breaks apart the foundation of lively bustling cities and turns them into anonymous places filled with empty apartments.

This is an unacceptable state of affairs. Whilst people have no choice over what homes are built and at what price, the problem will only get worse.

Ehab is a blockchain based platform which can decentralise the development and financing of residential property. Our platform provides a collaboration oriented ecosystem which allows any number of stakeholders to co-create the housing they need and can afford. This can range from hyper-affordable apartment buildings, to community focused semi-rural developments, to more luxurious custom homes. The key to this solution is that the system is completely flexible, and can be adapted to any situation and utilised by any number or combination of stakeholders.

Individuals, organisations, schools, local government or even whole cities can create a project and associated crowdfunding campaign, to bring together investors and the community to fund new housing developments. All of the homes are built to the highest environmental standard to make the houses truly affordable and sustainable. All the stakeholders have input from the start to make sure the project maximises the benefits for the people who will be living there.

The platform is demand oriented, no homes get built speculatively, this therefore will mean that housing needs are being directly met.

By raising funds from the crowd the project can avoid the higher costs of traditional development finance. The crowd, both local and global, can then share in the profits of the development.

The partners hosted on the platform will all have sustainable or innovative housing development systems, this will help these smaller companies achieve scale and bring their housing technologies into the mainstream, therefore bringing down costs even further.

Built on top of Ethereum smart contracts, every transaction and contract - between all the parties: landowners, developers, buyers, investors, architects, government - gets registered to the blockchain. This makes the project development process safe, transparent and auditable by everyone.

Our vision is to completely overturn the existing order and create a system for housing development which allows people to have a say in how their homes, neighbourhoods, towns and cities are created.