Louis and Arlene Byrd are a married couple that bought a home a few years back. The trouble was that their purchase didn’t satisfy them. This led them to create their own real estate company on the blockchain.
Louis and Arlene Byrd Establish Blockchain Real Estate Firm
Known as Kataba, the company came about after the couple said their home was too “racially segregated.” They dealt with several bad contractors and other issues that caused them to sell the property at a huge loss. Louis Byrd commented in an interview:
We also ended up dealing with one of the nation’s largest mortgage servicers that violated a lot of things related to that loan product, and we’re in an ongoing litigation with that right now as we speak. We were able to sell that house in the ‘as is’ condition, meaning that we weren’t able to actually benefit from the housing.
They eventually bought a separate home which they felt was solid, but within two weeks, the property had turned into a nightmare for the couple. Louis said:
Long story short, we ended up buying a lemon. We did everything right. We did the inspections. We toured the house. We looked at the seller’s disclosure. The seller basically said that they did all this work, and we ended up finding out two weeks in we had a major leak coming from our third floor. It turned out to be a simple repair that could have easily cost about $15, and maybe 20 minutes of time to fix, but [it] turned into a $2,500 repair.
After six months, the pair had spent over $10K on repairs. This led them to believe that the real estate industry was in desperate need of change, and they had the initiative to create that change. Louis said:
We said there has to be a better way to do real estate with more transparency and more honesty in the process.
The goal of their new firm Kataba is to erase all doubts about a property’s state or condition. The company also seeks to make homebuying considerably easier. The closing process can be completed within mere minutes instead of hours. There are also larger opportunities for financing granted someone can’t pay for a home in cash.
Boosting Access for All
Louis said:
Our digital ledger, that’s probably the most important part because the goal for Kataba is for it to be doing the full experience for home buying where you can shop, buy, sell, and then upkeep. We’re launching with the upkeep aspect because since it is a marketplace, you [must] have people there for people to come and buy. So, we’re starting with existing homeowners so they can have this ledger block system where they can go in and input this data.