The Cross-Border Real Estate market has been a growing trend over the last 20 years. In 2017, nearly $400 billion USD worth of properties were purchased by foreign buyers in both residential and commercial real estate. In the same year, $150 billion USD was spent by Chinese citizens buying properties in the US, Canada, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE, and Australia. These reports reflect the positive outlook for overseas real estate investment.

Meanwhile, property developers and brokers worldwide are facing multiple barriers when trying to sell abroad. Certain difficulties like fragmented data listings, lack of a standard protocol for international real estate transactions, processing of cross-border transactions, and ineffective customer KYC process immobilize them from closing deals. Property buyers are facing the same amount of problems by having to go through multiple layers of intermediaries, only adding more cost and time to the purchase. Buyers also rely on either money remittance centers or international bank transfers for their payments which are both inefficient and expensive.

That is how we came up with AQWIRE: a cross-border real estate marketplace powered by Smart Contracts and Blockchain Technology. AQWIRE enables property developers, brokers, and agents from all around the world to sell their units and extend their reach to the global market. This gives property buyers access to a wide variety of units across the world, bypassing multiple levels of intermediaries and ultimately reducing the time and cost to acquire a unit.

AQWIRE fully utilizes Smart Contract technology to process cross-border real-estate transactions. The platform is engineered to remove many of the roadblocks endemic with international real-estate. Blockchain and Smart Contracts are uniquely helpful and provides the following benefits:

• Processing Documents (translations, legal, etc.)
• Automates the verification of transactions, thus reducing unnecessary intermediaries.
• Efficient and reliable property search process through a blockchain-enabled international listing platform.
• Escrow transactions, title registry, and transfers.
• The key terms of the sales agreement are recorded on the blockchain and this becomes the smart contract.
• Booking and reservations, payments validations, and blockchain KYC.

The AQWIRE platform is a project developed by Qwikwire Billing Systems Inc., the leading cross-border payments solution in Southeast Asia. Qwikwire has already processed $15M USD worth of real estate payments alone since 2016 and is projected to process $30M USD by the end of 2018.

AQWIRE is designed to work perfectly well with Qwikwire’s payment facilities. Qwikwire can receive different types of property payments such as Reservation fee, Monthly Amortization, and Association dues. Qwikwire will enable AQWIRE to process E-checks, Debit/Credit card, and Crypto payments but will only accept fiat during the early stage of development.