Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract
buildwithtract.com
buildwithtract.com
Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems.
In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market.
A good rule of thumb is "if you think software can solve a problem, you probably don't understand the problem."
So there is (AFAIK) just one part of the process to buy a house that blockchains could address, and that is transfer of ownership. The rest of the process is an estate agent (realtor) communicating between buyer/seller/legal/etc to make it all happen. A tiny proportion would be solved 'on-chain'.
Maybe shouldn't need to be said, but people really need to _actually_ understand a problem before proposing a solution!
We're stuck at basic political questions like "should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?" At least Burnham knows what a Manchester is.
The issue is that its unsexy, not “profitable” and it requires land - not to mention that the timeframes needed will make “the next government” look better.
Our governments are recklessly short sighted, and to be fair, even if they were not, their progress would be undone by the disaffected electorate who can be easily convinced that the sitting government is spaffing money up the wall.
And preferably at prices lower than what an equivalent journey would cost by airplane.
This excludes corruption based inefficiencies like the PPE scandal.
Basically the train never stops- it just reorganizes.
(obviously this is something that, even if you could get it to work for large 100mph trains, is going to be horrifically vulnerable to the first accident)
This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population.
So there was relative political power in the working age, and a large/growing group to sell houses to. Further, pre-GFC there was a big trade-up market even for existing homeowners.
Now demographic & politic power in the west are in the hands of the older, homeowner retired/near retired baby boomers. Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong. Also this is why we keep electing dinosaurs in the US.
The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they own as a club to beat the two parties into submission and to stamp out any kind of populist opposition which wants to pursue policies which are oligarchy-unfriendly.
This includes any kind of reform which might interfere with the value of their property portfolios or redirect their streams of unearned rental income.
Its not just incentives. It can nuke entire economy if done not carefully.
Ideally new housing supply would be slowly increasing so that prices stop growing and there are incentives to invest into other assets but at the same time not reduce the wealth people have been building for many years.
But overall it seems like the world would be a much better and prosperous place if basic need like housing would be more of a commodity than a wealth driver.
If you have housing you can spend your income on building companies, wealth, experiments etc.
If you spend 30 years buying a place to live - obviously your hands are tight pretty badly.
You can only ever realize the gain of wealth of owning a home when you sell, which means you probably need a place to live now, so you rent, or buy another house. Maybe if you buy a smaller home than the one you moved out of you can pocket the difference, but because prices keep going up, that doesn’t seem very feasible either, less so if the home you sold wasn’t large to begin with.
I don’t get it. I much prefer owning to renting, and I have never considered owning a home more than a liability. In fact I need to annually make sure my insurance coverage is greater than the value of my home in case I get sued for some reason, just so “they” can’t come after my home.
I feel the same way about wills and people passing away. 95% of the time, by the time your parents die you’re either retired or close to it. I plan to provide for my kids when they’re least able to (college thru about age 30) and figure out after that if I want my last check to bounce or not.
We have such a backwards way of looking at wealth, it boggles my mind.
If you have a culture that denigrates failure rather than one that celebrates proactively trying to learn from it as this postmortem aims for then you're just going to be stuck
Someone let American health care startups know that. Not sure what any of them are doing, but it's not lowering health care prices for anyone.
Common silicon valley misconception, but when all you know is a hammer everything looks like a nail. This is similar to the app that was meant to solve a drinking water crisis in some African nation
It's a social and government and commercial problem, which for many reasons is not actually a problem to be solved because so many people WANT things exactly as they are.
Startups are about creating something that people want - and whilst people want a house, that's not what this startup idea is. I'm surprised it got funding.
A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think.
Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder:
House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it
Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK
The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall
None of the specific ones, but the general problem of startups that the UK is a poor environment for funding.
Source for million unbuilt homes: https://www.terraquest.co.uk/news-and-insights/more-than-a-m...
It's not sounding like a very simple to resolve problem :(
House builders essentially buy land, get planning, pay a bunch of sub-contractors to slap together a house and then sell it to some poor sap
Saying they build houses is a bit of a misnomer in my view
A simpler planning system would allow smaller developers to operate and they would buy, build and sell as fast as they can.
The reason big developers drip feed is that they have 100 identical houses in the pipeline so they don’t want the price to drop at all, because it affects the price of the houses in the pipeline.
The small developer sells quickly so that the cash is available for their next project.
So they'd expedite things to avoid risk surely? Doesn't make sense
My town has a population of 15000 people, ~250 houses are sold per year and there is a development with permission to build ~400 new homes.
This has never happened once... There are plenty of developments built bigger than that that do t cause a crash
Besides that, they sell plots before they're even built so why are they drip feeding in those cases? You'd be racing to get it built before materials cost rise even more
If house prices fall, or even stagnate, it'll start a chain reaction that leads to recession.
Its basically free economic growth, and UK made it's money largely from empire anyway, so now the empire has largely fallen it's no surprise the country has been cutting public services for nearly 20 years and still isn't breaking even
I've tried at various points over the past 2 decades and can confirm: trying to sell startup software into the UK (and European) market is much harder than in the US.
Most businesses are not open to buying from an upstart even if the proposition seems attractive. There is a 'safety in numbers' mentality (markedly less so in the UK than in other parts of Western Europe but still much more than in the US).
It makes securing the first 10 customers ever more challenging. It is not a trope I'd say, its just a lesson that keeps being relearnt.
It's very depressing, but at least I don't work for them. That would square my depression.
They seemingly learned a lot. Unfortunately a lot of what they learnt should have been obvious from the start.
It shouldn’t take two years to figure out you need to speak to your customers and bring in revenue.
If their real motivation was "to fix Britain's housing crisis", brownfield sites can be converted into residential use much more quickly and easily, and there is a lot of pre-existing support to make this easier - see e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/brownfield-land-registers .
11 months, 4 pivots (of course one was to Ai) and a cash burn of ~£70,000 per month (approx $100,000) - if you can give me the details of the mark they got £744,000 from, I have a bridge to sell them.
They do say fail fast.
Nothing to do with millions of new people arriving wanting to live somewhere?
But nice populist dog whistle.
1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-and-hou...
Thats an ideological accusation that can be just as easily aimed at the left.
> Over the same period, total population growth in the UK has been approximately 20%, again close to the cross-country average in our sample. Immigration, therefore, accounts for roughly half of the UK’s population growth over the last three decades.
Population growth has nothing to do with price increases? If it does, then half of the increase being due to immigration seems quite significant.
> most credible estimates suggest that a one-percentage-point increase in the immigrant share of the population increases house prices by between 0 and 3%. Rent effects are typically slightly smaller.
> The increase in the immigrant shares since the mid-1990s (around 10 percentage points) and overall population growth are close to OECD averages.
It’s hard to believe a range including “no effect whatsoever” when you add people to a neighborhood. But assuming a more reasonable 2%, that would mean 20% higher prices attributed to immigration alone. Where did you get at most 10%??
People don't make prices increase, people times money makes prices increase. They're not entirely without money of course, but I don't think it's boat people outbidding you for the homes you want.
Guess what - almost all folks complaining (also here seen on many occasions) want short commute to their well paid work, nobody ain't commute for 2h every day. Those few places are even more limited. Guess where most immigrants go to and stay there - its not your backwardish xenophobic bucolic little villages in the middle of nowhere with old empty houses breaking down. You won't hear folks living there complaining old properties nobody wants are too expensive.
I can go on and on and on, making stats like that beyond useless. We all see actual effects. All is connected and continuously influencing other parts of whole, including immigration and other stuff. Current situation on any market is the living proof of that.
The UK population grew from about 58.9 million in 2000 to 69 million in 2025 - an increase of roughly 10 million people. The large majority of that came from immigration.
And you don't think having to house an extra 10 million people is a reason for the housing crisis?
I would suggest you do your own research, and use your own logic and reason rather than blindly accepting government reports into why what they're doing is brilliant.
> the political winds seemed favourable
Sorry. How? Some libertarians on twitter were in favour. But if you have spent any time paying attention to British politics at all you would note the incredible sway the elderly have over politics. Even the people who are pro-building aren't stupid enough to think you're going to achieve that by building on green belt land, so this idea of an uplift of 140x is just farcical. Half of British debate on house building is disingenuously accusing your opposition of concreting over the green belt, whilst disingenuously promising you can build millions of new homes without concreting over the greenbelt.
The problem with building in the UK is mainly planning permission. In the UK is you need approval from the local council and the local council is elected by Nimby pensioners. So you can't get approval. That's it. That's the problem. That's a political problem that you can solve by getting central government to remove local governments ability to block projects. Or by running targeted political campaigns in local areas to get specific things approved. Not by automating the form your fill in to get your planning application rejected.