AQwire (QEY)

What is AQwire

AQWIRE is a marketplace designed to handle international property transactions, from hotel bookings to residential and commercial real estate rental and purchase. It allows brokers and property developers to gain access to foreign clients and buyers anywhere in the world. This will help expand their customer base and give them a foothold in the fast growing cross-border real estate market, which hit nearly $400B USD in 2017. With AQWIRE, brokers can now sell or book discounted units to customers and travelers all over the world via Smart Contracts. The platform also works for rentals and time-sharing agreements. AQWIRE connects buyers directly to brokers and property developers for the best deals in the world’s fastest growing real estate markets.

The QEY token will allow network participants to verify the authenticity and validity of data on the blockchain. The QEY token will be needed to initiate a transaction on AQWIRE’s decentralized application. The platform can directly integrate with both cryptocurrency and traditional payment gateways. The payments layer API will enable off-chain transactions to update on-chain in real time, validating transactions on both ends.

Background

The pace of globalization is accelerating as investors around the world are looking for new sources of growth. Investment in property has always been desired by investors because it provides them with an opportunity to acquire substantial yield in terms of capital appreciation and income generation. Acquiring real estate overseas as an investment vehicle has been a growing trend in recent years. With the rise of sharing economy, the initial capital can be recouped at a much faster pace.

The overseas property market is significant and growing. In the last seven years, the demand for international real estate transactions has increased from $70 billion to $370 billion. Individual and corporate investors from China alone have spent an estimated $150 billion in real estate overseas as of the year 2017. The increase in demand for overseas real estate from Chinese investors is driven by factors such as their natural affinity to property, the volatility of domestic financial assets, and the growth in information flow which increases their knowledge as an investor class. The increasing number of upper and middle class in China has led to the procurement of real estate in Canada, the US, Australia, and South-East Asia. Investors from other countries such as South Korea and Japan have also increased their spending on overseas real estate property.

Also, the real estate market in the Philippines has experienced exponential growth for the last 7 years due the country’s rating as “investment grade” by several international rating agencies. One of the key factors contributing to real estate spending is the continuing massive urban migration and strong consumer purchasing power generated by dollar-earners like the Overseas Filipinos workers (OFWs) and the business process outsourcing (BPO) companies. Other factors include increased infrastructure spending by the current administration, a resurgence in manufacturing, stronger consumer spending, and the increase in tourist arrivals. With this information at hand, it is reasonable to assume that the outlook for overseas real estate investment is very positive.

While we initially plan to list all the major developers in the Philippines first, AQWIRE is not just a Philippine play. Our goal is to empower property developers and brokers all over the world to have access to foreign buyers. AQWIRE is scheduled to expand in Vietnam and Thailand in the 4th quarter of 2018. Qwikwire also started processing cross-border payments for a client in Singapore in 2017.

QWIKWIRE

AQWIRE is not just a marketplace listing platform, it can also process cross-border transactions, thanks to Qwikwire’s payments API. Qwikwire is now the leading cross-border payments platform for real estate transactions in South-East Asia.

Qwikwire Inc. is a US based company founded in San Jose, CA in 2013. The company initially started as a cross-border payroll service for freelancers, then pivoted to enterprise payments in 2015. In January of 2016, Qwikwire launched its new cross-border billing and invoicing platform after almost a year of product development and beta testing with the first two clients. The new product gained immediate traction and volume grew by nearly 30% month-on-month for the next 12 months. By May of 2017, the company became profitable, only 17 months after the launch of the new product even though the team tripled in size and moved to a larger office. Qwikwire has processed over $16M USD in GMV since 2016. It is projected to hit a volume of $30M USD in 2018 alone.