An Interview with Mike Sullivan: CEO and Co-founder of Real Estate Chain

This past weekend I had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Sullivan, CEO of Real Estate Chain, a Boston based blockchain company looking to disrupt the real estate industry by leveraging the power of decentralized technologies. Mike has identified two primary challenges in real estate; disparate data sources, and misaligned incentives. Combined these challenges create a lot of misinformation and wasted time, resulting in real headaches for the very individuals the system is designed to serve. Real Estate Chain plans to solve these problems, in the process becoming one of blockchain’s most promising new projects.

So Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself and your upbringing.

Hi Tristan, my name is Mike Sullivan. I grew up in central Massachusetts in a small town called Westborough. My dad is a fifth-generation Boston-Irish, and my mom is Venezuelan. Since childhood, I have always had a strong entrepreneurial drive. This drive led me to my first business endeavors, landscaping and painting businesses, both of which I started in my home-town during consecutive summers. One constant throughout my life has been my love for both travel and nature. Some of my favorite things to do while spending time outdoors and in the woods are camping, trail running, mountain biking, backpacking, and meditating. In 2016, when I first decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge, I spent over six weeks in Peru on two separate occasions to hike and explore while also helping a close friend launch a travel business.

Would you mind sharing some of your professional background with us, and tell us a little more about your transition into the world of blockchain technology?

I studied computer science at The University of Vermont, GO Catamounts! After about a year and a half of studying Mechanical Engineering, it became apparent that there were tons of opportunities in Computer Science and I knew that is where I belonged.

After graduating, I launched my professional career focusing on engineering project management for a video company, IVC, where I worked for a few years. I managed multiple projects for the government, United Launch Alliance, Google X, and a bunch of other exciting companies around the world. The largest project I led was a $10 million government contract. After four years, I took the real entrepreneurial jump around the middle of 2016. I was doing some things with travel and VR/360 cameras, but this was all leisure work at first. I was having a lot of fun with VR and travel, but eventually, I had an “oh sh*t!” moment where I realized I needed a sound business with regular revenue.

Tell us about the history of Real Estate Chain and how it came to be.

With all of the VR camera experience I had along with a keen interest in real-estate, my business was born, ‘360 Props.’ We offered virtual staging, virtual tours, aerial photography, professional photography, 3D models and a plethora of other services. 360 Props became very successful and as time went on a colleague and I took all of our 3D models and integrated them with Wayfair’s 3D model furniture. Wayfair had scanned over 20,000 pieces of furniture that were with our 3D home models. We created an application that allowed users to add and take out any of Wayfair’s furniture to our virtual tours. This was the beginning stages of what would eventually become Real Estate Chain.

Since the end of 2016, I had been fascinated with blockchain while also doing some cryptocurrency trading on the side. I spent a considerable amount of time studying cryptocurrency, and in mid-2017 I started the Boston Cryptotalks Meetup. I began to think about how I could integrate 360 Props with blockchain. Around the end of 2017, Jack Liao (creator of Bitcoin Gold) — reached out to me and we met at the Boston Cryptotalks Meetup that I was organizing. Mr. Liao loved the idea of real estate on the blockchain so much that he extended his stay in Boston for an additional three days to discuss and plan the future of what would soon become REC. Mr. Laio was our first investor and is now an advisor for REC.

Tell us about some of the primary use cases for REC.

Real Estate Chain will be the ecosystem that binds together inter-country real estate protocols, giving greater accessibility to a wide world of potential property choices outside of your borders. We’re going to start with the Global residential real estate market, specifically new development properties. Real Estate Chain deals with organizing real estate information and lists of reputable people to allow everyone involved to work more efficiently together and make informed decisions. So there are two parts to that: information and people. So we decided to start with new data to develop our standards at the genesis of the real estate lifecycle, development properties. We are finalizing initial test locations now. Each country or area has different real estate politics, information structures, and rules. We need to take all these into account and create appropriate validation nodes in each region and expand strategically.

Tristan: What would you say are Real Estate Chain’s short-term priorities?

Mike: I believe one of the most critical short-term goals is having the right core team on-board. Also important will be creating strategic partnerships with real estate powerhouses in different countries and regions. We have potential partners in Korea, Hong-Kong, and Singapore. These early partners in specific areas can be huge keys to success. Also, having the right blockchain experts on your team can make or break a project. So our core team and regional partners are where a majority of my short-term focus lies.

What about some of the longer term strategic priorities?

The execution of building our systems specific to different regions and developing information standards so that the two countries can communicate while having the reliability of the REC blockchain to count on valid information, this includes engaging with the broader development community to build on top of our protocol to add further value to the stakeholders of the system. Developing relationships, networks, and validation nodes in various countries are where our focus is long-term.

You seem to already have a great core team and group of advisors in place, walk me through how your team is structured.

As the team started forming, we were incredibly active on the technical side of things. With such a strong technical side, we realized that we needed to bring in some key players who were familiar with the real estate data landscape. Fred Townes got involved and brought in one of his former colleagues, Ryan Fisch, with whom he worked with at Placester. Both of these guys have crucial experience with massive sets of real estate data. They are also very product focused and have built scalable technologies in this realm in the past. We need to understand this type of data better to know how REC would function. These guys are unbelievably important in our formation as a technology company. We then realized that we needed some players with real high-level expertise in real estate itself, to understand how these brokerages function and interact. Geoff Lewis (CBO) joined us having previously worked at the global real estate powerhouse, Re-Max, and has been a critical member of our leadership team.

How do you drive adoption to the platform?

We want to make our experience as enjoyable as possible. We’re focused on new residential development properties and their associated data. The people we will be targeting first are small and mid-cap developers, agents, data providers and producers who can provide good onboard data and we can incentivize with leads and global visibility. The geographic areas we will focus on first are still being carefully analyzed. It could be starting with US and Singapore or the US and Hong Kong to build the first internationally standardized bridge for real estate information and people.

Finally, what would you like the people to know about you and your company that communicates your vision for Real Estate Chain?

Fundamentally, our protocol is about empowering individuals, especially consumers. We are building with the intention of making a better world of real estate unfold as a result that’s more owner and consumer-centric.

This concludes the first interview of the Real Estate Chain Interview Series! Follow us on Medium and other social media channels to find out when the rest of the team interviews will be posted, in addition to upcoming news and more exciting content!

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