Last week I met (virtually) with the Brisbane based software development start-up, Hutly (formerly known as Igloo) responsible for the development of a system called One Touch for RealWorks. They gave me a pre-launch preview of One Touch to discuss its suitability for our onsite managers. I was impressed and excited by what I saw, and am convinced this will rapidly become the industry standard for tenancy agreements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an\nAustralian first, this incredible system allows, at no cost, tenancy agreements\nto be issued and signed digitally. Once a lease agreement has been completed by\nthe onsite manager in RealWorks, they send this to the tenant as a digital link\ndirectly to their mobile phone. The tenant can open, and view the lease\nagreement exactly as they would see a paper-based agreement. However when it\ncomes to signing, they simply press a button and a code is issued to their\nmobile via text message. If they agree to the lease, they simply enter the code\ninto the form, and it\u2019s a done deal. The 2-factor verification serves as the digital\nequivalent of a legally binding signature, and proof of identity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Better still\nit means tenancy agreements can be securely and rapidly generated, issued,\nsigned returned and stored, all in a matter of seconds (literally), rather than\nhours or days as with paper based versions and from anywhere on earth. No downloading\nto a computer and trying to print; hunting around for a pen that works;\nscratching squiggle onto the form; scanning it back in; sending it back to your\nphone; and sending back to the agent. It\u2019s all done in seconds with a couple of\nkey strokes directly from the phone. It\u2019s such a simple concept, but the best\nones always are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Covid-19 Blockchain\nverification We will be rolling out the One Touch solution to all of our FULL plan onsite managers this week. We\u2019ll be running some demonstration video content to our managers explaining how to use the service also, so watch this space. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I met (virtually) with the Brisbane based software development start-up, Hutly (formerly known as Igloo) responsible for the development of a system called One Touch for RealWorks. They gave me a pre-launch preview of One Touch to discuss its suitability for our onsite managers. I was impressed and excited by what I saw, and am convinced this will rapidly become the industry standard for tenancy agreements. In an Australian first, this incredible system allows, at no cost, tenancy agreements to be issued and signed digitally. Once a lease agreement has been completed by the onsite manager in RealWorks, they send this to theRead More →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1094,"featured_media":476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mbp_gutenberg_autopost":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1094"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1703,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions\/1703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theonsitemanager.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/strong>The current\npandemic has already had a profound impact on the way we manage rentals. Already\nour managers are beginning to demand virtual tour services and videos so they\ncan showcase rentals to tenants from their homes, no longer being able to run\nopen homes, and social distancing making it undesirable to bring people through\nunits in general. Even this week, I noticed tenants were hesitant to touch my\nbusiness cards, choosing instead to take a photo of them on their phone. Even\nhanding paper based documentation to tenants can be a sticking point, so a\nconcept such as One Touch, which is entirely digital and requires no\nface-to-face engagement, is going to be absolutely vital for onsite managers\nmoving forward in the current landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/strong>The thing that\namazes me most about the One Touch system is the fact that the entire process\nis then encoded and stored on the Etherium blockchain. This was a fact the\ndevelopment team mentioned rather idly in passing, but I consider it an\nincredibly exciting innovation, the importance of which should not be overlooked.\nBlockchains (the most famous of which is Bitcoin) are a series of blocks (digital\ninformation) that store data in them in a continuous and unbroken chain, the\nfirst block in the blockchain, know as the \u2018Genesis Block\u2019 is the start of the\nchain and as more information is added to newly created blocks it builds upon\nthe chain, the blocks are linked one after the other chronologically. Each new\nblock also contains a hash of the previous blocks, meaning there is no possible\nway to alter the previous data in the blockchain without breaking the chain.\nThis ensures all data on the blockchain serves as a continuous and verifiable\nrecord over time that is impossible to alter retrospectively. It makes these One\nTouch lease agreements very secure and impossible to alter after they have been\nagreed to. No arguments can arise over terms, etc, being added in after-the-fact.\nBlockchains are an amazing innovation that arose from the GFC and the desire by\nrenegade programmers to create a decentralized peer-to-peer digital currency\nsystem that could function in a trustless environment. No central bank to keep\ntrack of people\u2019s account balances or transactions, instead everyone with a\ncopy of the blockchain has a provable record of such data that can\u2019t be altered\nby any single entity. Bitcoin is, of course, the proof-of-concept for this\nidea, Etherium builds upon this with more \u2018smarts\u2019 built into their blockchain\nincluding the ability to utilize the blockchain for application development,\nsmart contracts, resource allocations; things other than just digital currency transactions\n(as per Bitcoin), making Etherium an ideal choice for lease agreement verification.\nDespite being around for over a decade now, there still aren\u2019t that many examples\nof blockchains being used to solve real world problems so I was thrilled and\nvery proud to see this team of software developers from Brisbane working with\nthe REIQ to utilize Ethereum in this way. I believe One Touch will rapidly\nalter the landscape of tenancy agreements and become not just common place, but\nthe industry standard for lease agreements (and in future, probably other forms\ntoo such as sales contracts, offer documents, etc). <\/p>\n\n\n\n