Homelend aims to create a peer-to-peer mortgage lending platform using blockchain technology. As the mortgage lending market is currently $31 trillion, the team behind the project sees a great deal of potential. $14 trillion of this is just within the United States mortgage market.

Despite the enormous size of the mortgage market, the industry has not changed much over the years, leading to a lending system that is primitive in nature. The team at Homelend noticed that the process of applying for and getting a mortgage is lengthy and complex, as well as almost entirely paper based. There are also numerous intermediaries involved, slowing down the process while also increasing costs for lenders and borrowers alike.

Additionally, it is largely impossible for new young borrowers to get a mortgage with the current system. This excludes millions of individuals who are creditworthy from getting a mortgage just because of the system’s assessment criteria that the Homelend team sees as outdated.

What Will the Homelend Platform Do?

Homelend is a mortgage crowdfunding platform of a decentralized and peer-to-peer nature with two main purposes. The team hopes to modernize the current lending system, making it more customer focused while also improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, the team hopes to expand the opportunities for owning a home for the latest generation of borrowers, working to meet their distinct needs and lifestyle.

How Will Homelend Work?

Homelend will use a combination of smart contracts and distributed ledger technology to connect individual lenders and borrowers via an end-to-end platform. That platform will automate and streamline the process of mortgage origination for all parties involved.

What Will Some Advantages of Homelend Be?

In addition to the ability to resolve the issues mentioned above, the Homelend platform will provide some other important advantages. One of the most obvious benefits of Homelend is its ability to turn a lengthy, manual, and paper-intensive mortgage process into an efficient, streamlined, and mostly paperless one. Homelend achieves this by embedding business logic that is predefined into smart contracts and digitizing documentation. The platform will also get rid of unnecessary processes. The result will be an automatically executed end-to-end process of origination that takes less than 20 days instead of about 50.

The Homelend lending process will also be fair, transparent, and user friendly. Borrowers can use the platform to apply for a loan with ease, then track the status of their application, and even interact with various lenders directly.

The price of getting a mortgage will dramatically decrease with Homelend thanks to the lack of a middleman and the overall streamlined process that focuses on cost-effectiveness. Because of DLT’s transparency, security, and immutability, banks are no longer required to act as middlemen for recording transactions.

Finally, the process of getting a mortgage with Homelend will be secure and trusted since paper-based processes and centralization combine to cause vulnerability and insecurity. Smart contracts and DLT make it possible for transparency and security, even with large transactions like those involved in mortgages.

What Is the Homelend Token, and When Is the Sale?

The Homelend token, HMD, powers the platform. The main functionality of the token is providing platform access. It also is important in allowing for the user-friendly, quick, and smooth workflow. It is possible to convert all tokens to or from HMD. There is a total supply of 250 million HMD, and it is an ERC-20 token.

The dates for the crowdsale are to be announced, but the presale began on March 1, 2018. The tentative start date for the public sale is June 2018. During the sale, the HMD token’s face value is 1 ETH for 1,600 HMD, and Homelend will accept ETH, USD, or BTC for purchases. There is a soft cap of $5 million USD and a hard cap of $30 million USD. There will also be bonuses for purchases made with ETH. The first week of the sale will include a 20 percent bonus, which drops to 15 percent the second week and 10 percent the third week.

Twenty-eight percent of the tokens were allocated for the presale and 36 percent are for the public sale. Twenty percent sits in a reserve fund, with 8 percent being reserved for the founders and another 8 percent for the advisors and the bounty program. Proceeds from the sale will be divided into development, marketing and community building, and general administration at proportions of 40, 35, and 25 percent, respectively.

What Does the Homelend Roadmap Look Like?

Homelend began in 2016 when the founders incorporated a new company. In 2017, the founders bootstrapped the project thanks to $1 million USD in contributions. Later in 2017, it added on a team of experts in finance and technology and began designs for the platform’s architecture and concept. It then completed a first MVP based on the client-server infrastructure, followed by a second MVP based on the distributed ledger technology.

So far in 2018, the team incorporated DMC Homelend AG in Zug, Switzerland; completed the technical and business white papers; completed the Token Generation Event; and began the presale.

Next on the roadmap will be the TGE Public crowdfunding and onboarding of additional finance and technology experts. After this, the team will complete the beta version with HMD basic functionalities with a pure crowdfunding lending mechanism. From there, the team will develop beta versions for the auction lending and pooling mechanisms. 2019 will see testing of the 1.0 platform version on the testnet with a QA team. The team will begin developing a smart agent for Homelend investment abilities and expand the platform to additional markets.

Conclusion

Homelend brings blockchain technology to the mortgage industry, aiming to help both lenders and borrowers. With the platform, the team hopes to resolve issues currently plaguing mortgage lending, including a reliance on paper methods and the use of intermediaries, which increase costs and slow down the process. Homelend has the potential for success thanks to the large size of the mortgage lending market and its ability to solve a problem many potential homeowners experience.