Blockchain real estate platform records $1.6M home sale in San Francisco

A venture capital fund co-founded by Michael Arrington sold a San Francisco property on the Propy platform

(Credit: Getty Images, iStock)
Propy's Natalia Karayaneva and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington (Credit: Getty Images, iStock)

Blockchain-based real estate platform Propy enabled the $1.6 million sale of a San Francisco property by a venture capital fund co-founded by Michael Arrington, the firm announced.

The traditional process to sell real estate is “arduous and broken,” said Arrington, a co-founder of online publisher CrunchFund who also invests in blockchain-based businesses through his $100 million firm Arrington XRP Capital.

“Blockchain’s main implications, after [virtual] money, is as a technology that enables ownership transfers,” Natalia Karayaneva, chief executive officer of Propy, told Yahoo Finance.

Propy recorded its first property sale entirely online in 2017 and has assisted in more than 60 transfers of real estate, the company’s spokespeople claim.

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The median price of homes sold on the Propy platform is $1.5 million, according to Karayaneva.

She expects that a majority of real estate transactions will close completely online within the next three years.

Propy is engaging county governments to provide them with blockchain-based, deed-transfer technology. “We don’t want to work against them,” Karayaneva told Yahoo Finance. “Either we help them or will eliminate them.”

Investors in Propy include the venture capital arm of the U.S. National Association of Realtors. [Yahoo Finance] – Mike Seemuth