BeFund

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company has been providing a wide range of real estate services for a long time: purchase, sale, short-term and long-term rental. We work on the territory of Canada, but the geography of our customers has no boundaries. I am the owner of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire BeFund, and what were your goals?

We hired BeFund specialists to implement a project with automated smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, which we began to implement in our company's activities as promising and reliable analogues of ordinary transactions with our clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Avivi Company was recommended to us as a strong specialist by previous contractors who developed our website but could not fulfill the new task. Real estate transactions are always inextricably linked with documents between the company and clients: sales contracts, lease contracts, and much more. Our economists estimate that deal servicing costs are between 5% and 12% of the value of each deal, which is extremely unprofitable for us. Therefore, our company decided to introduce modern smart contracts, as an analogue of conventional agreements, to save money, increase the reliability of information, automate monotonous business processes, increase the level of confidentiality for customers, as they may wish, and in general — for business development through the use of modern technologies.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

In general, the project consists of a decentralized application for managing smart contracts and actually several separate smart contracts created on Solidity. The idea is that short-term or long-term lease contracts are linked to specific real estate objects, which means they can be automatically executed at a certain frequency. At the time of our cooperation, the value of real estate in Canada began to rise rapidly, so the actual data should be used to calculate the amounts in the contract. Therefore, it was necessary not only to develop, but also to automate smart contracts that should independently update information on the market value of real estate through a network of decentralized oracles. It was already an order of magnitude more difficult task.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

I worked directly with the BeFund project manager. It was he who coordinated the deadlines for me, monitored the progress of the project, promptly notified me of changes and provided reports. In general, the team consisted of a manager, a designer, a front-end developer and from 1 to 3 Solidity developers at various stages of the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

After the introduction of smart contracts, the costs of servicing agreements were sharply reduced due to the elimination of moments related to the work of intermediaries. The time of working with agreements has also been reduced. Many of our customers liked the innovation when we offered to conclude a smart contract instead of a regular agreement, because it has a number of advantages and performance guarantees.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

At the very beginning, we drew up a project implementation plan and a schedule of mandatory communications. During our work, we had an additional need for conferences, and the BeFund manager always adjusted the schedule in accordance with these needs.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I was most impressed by the ability of BeFund specialists to make complex things simple and talk about it in an accessible way. In general, blockchain is an extremely difficult technology to understand. But the development team argued for each decision and the need for it.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

BeFund fulfilled all the terms of the technical task, which were formed at the beginning of the cooperation. No improvements are required at this stage. However, in the future, we have ideas for creating smart contracts for other business processes