BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneur Feature — Real Estate Doc
In this week’s Entrepreneur Feature, we speak to Ivan, the founder of Real Estate Doc, a start-up designed to digitalise the process of documentation for commercial retail businesses to streamline their workflows.
- What is Real Estate Doc and how did the idea come about?
Real Estate Doc is a digital documentation system, especially catered for commercial retail businesses. What we do — we will digitalise all your contracts, all your templates, make it paperless, and allow you to digitally sign and be able to record every single transaction onto the blockchain. We will take data, the metadata from each of these contracts and create analytics, useful business analytics for you to better run your business.
2. What is Real Estate Doc’s secret sauce?
For REAL ESTATE DOC, we have been very focused on digital contracts and electronic signing as well the document management system. We have been at this for approximately 2 years from our first start-up — Averspace. We have taken our technology that we understand and we know, we have used it and applied it to commercial businesses to provide not only business efficiency but also to increase sales productivity by up to 30%.
3. What projects has Real Estate Doc taken part in?
We are very proud to say that we are currently live on a couple of commercial buildings of FRASERS PROPERTY, Singapore. We have launched with them 2 months ago and they are currently reaping the benefits of our system.
We digitise their commercial retail leasing transactions to help them streamline workflows and render contracts paperless.
4. What are some of the challenges you faced and how do you overcome it?
Averspace is a C2C brand. We were bringing homeowners and home-seekers together and allowing them to transact on our platform through digital contracts and electronic signing and now we actually have payments with a tie up with Xfers. What was actually challenging was the challenges of building a marketplace and that’s about traffic. So we have actually built a decent amount of traffic so far and at the same time being able to make sense of the unit economics for a C2C platform. Now that’s usually a challenge when you get direct users to pay for your service. So that was the main challenge. But we were undaunted, we took our technology, what we knew, and we went to solution for businesses and hence that’s why we have actually moved and pivoted to REAL ESTATE DOC. So far things have been running pretty good for us, for REAL ESTATE DOC and we are very excited for this journey that we are moving towards.
5. What is your best memory at BLOCK71?
I think the community at BLOCK71 is the main reason why we’re here. We have met so many other start ups we are able to share our war stories. Most importantly, every single start up is solving a single problem or a couple of problems. I think the strength in this community is how we work together under the BLOCK71 umbrella. It is always good that if you’re solving a problem you’re able to find another business that can solve another problem for your client. So it’s that synergy that we get as a community and if I may say as a team.
6. Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Do not be afraid to change, do not be afraid to pivot. People say that failure is commonplace, I would rather say that failure is when you have given up. So don’t give up and you won’t fail.
7. What’s next for Real Estate Doc?
We are currently in negotiations, pretty exciting negotiations at this stage, to expand the use of our system — as to the details to what we will be doing with our clients, I’m sorry we can’t tell. At the same time, we are taking our products across to other developers, more managers whom we have taken interest in our product. That’s why we are talking to other developers not only just in Singapore but also across the Causeway as well.
If you are a commercial builder, property manager — we are going to take the paper work out of your hands, we are going to digitalise it. We are going to not only save you on administration cost, but also increase your sales productivity by 30%.
Reach us at realestatedoc.co or drop us an email at enquiries@realestatedoc.co. Thank you.
Watch the full video interview with Ivan from Real Estate Doc here:
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If you are inspired by this story and have a start-up idea of your own, you can also apply to join the BLOCK71 ecosystem at http://bit.ly/BLOCK71SGApply !
