The Project
Bloqable’s mission is to use the latest software programming technologies and on-demand IT platforms to improve the the speed and accuracy of the real estate transaction process in the U.S. The advent of distributed ledger technologies, also known as blockchain, allows for super secure storage of foundational economic building blocks like public land records. In the U.S. land records keeping is the responsibility of Land Record Offices usually reporting under the auspices of a county (or county equivalent) Clerk of the Court or other constitutionally elected officer. Land Records administrators put the highest premium on precision in their work processes, and accepted land records cannot be allowed to be tampered with. Land record fraud has always been a challenge for legal authorities, and one of the most prevalent white collar crime problems tracked by the FBI today is land record creation fraud. Today’s cryptography, networking, and hashing technologies, when used in combination, can provide access to data that is virtually impossible to change or modify by malicious actors.
The smart land records created with Bloqable’s software, once verified by the proper levels of authority, are submitted to a super secure immutable ledger. These records can be accessed, searched, viewed, saved to file and forwarded by users but they cannot be tampered with or changed in the system. When new information is ready to be added to a given piece of property’s smart land record, an append-only new smart land record for that property supersedes the older record, but the older record still exists on the immutable ledger. Users of smart land records will always be presented with the most recent record for a given property, but the previous records are always available for historical traceability and auditing purposes. Bloqable’s application of immutable ledger technology to smart land records takes advantage of the technology’s hyper security, its traceability of provenance, and its transparency. These benefits make immutable ledgers and blockchain technology tailor made for modern land record storage.
Land Records Process Digitization:
As technology continues to improve, every day more and more human interactions and business processes (whether human to human, human to machine, or machine to machine), can be turned into digital objects, or digitized. Once a component step of a given business process is digitized, it can be manipulated by programming code and made ready for automation. This automation of even very complex business processes, such as land record abstraction, leads to the streamlining of human interaction, which allows getting things done quicker, with fewer errors, and costing fewer resources and money.
Transaction processes like real estate transactions can be broken down into distinct steps. Today many interactive and interrelated steps can be transformed into digital objects. However, it takes serious effort to properly understand any business process in step-by-step fashion that then allows for the exploration of whether changing existing analog processes into new, more efficient digital processes is worth the effort. Bloqable worked closely with Wise County and the City of Norton to map out in detail human record search processes that are candidates for digital transformation and the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence technology. We work to analyze end-to-end transaction processes to ensure the most efficient design of the land records transformation process.
Training Smart Land Records Creators
Bloqable partnered with Old Dominion University’s graduate program in Industrial Design and Technology to create an e-learning course for workforce development as part of a broader curriculum teaching Wise County and the City of Norton land records office personnel on the fundamentals of smart land record creation using Bloqable’s software. Participants in this workforce development project, funded by a grant through the Virginia Coal Economic Development Authority, learn the fundamentals of searching the public land records database, and then extracting the required information from deeds and other legal documents to build a smart land record. They then interface with Bloqable’s smart land record creation software to build a smart land record draft. Smart land records drafts are then submitted for validation by Master Deputy Clerks with professional abstractor experience. Twenty smart land record creators from the greater Southwest Virginia region were trained during the first phase of the Project and are building up the smart land records repository for public access.
Building the Smart Land Records Repository
The objective of the smart land records creation is to afford the public and professional land record users faster, easier, more efficient, and, therefore, better access to public land record data. Easier access makes for quicker decision making during the real estate buying and selling process. It also significantly reduces the need for in-person visits to the Land Records Office, an important benefit during a pandemic.
As the land records office workforce creates the smart land records, they carefully review drafts before submitting them for validation. Checks are made on all appropriate encumbrances, easements, and the chain of historical transactions that make up a smart land record.
Checked records are forwarded to Deputy Master Clerks of the Court with significant land record abstracting experience for another round of checks and validation.
Once a smart land record is deemed to meet the required levels of precision and accuracy by the validator, the record is validated and placed on the smart land record repository - an immutable ledger - for public and professional access. Wise County and the City of Norton aim to have the large majority of residential properties located in their area to have updated smart records associated with them by the end of 2023.
Using the Smart Land Records
Public and professional users of the Wise County and City of Norton land records databases can access these smart land records working through the Land Records Office personnel. Users will be able to:
Search smart land record properties by situs - or street - address, property identification number, short legal description, or owner(s) name.
Read or save smart land records to file for forwarding or printing the smart land records of interest.
The layout of the smart land record is immediately intuitive and logically ordered. We think public users will quickly appreciate the ease of use of the information provided in the smart land record. We anticipate professional abstractors and other commercial land record system users to take time to ensure their comfort with the information presented, but once they are confident in the substance of the smart land record information, we think they will benefit greatly from the the almost instant access to records that normally take hours to produce.