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Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most

Tract was founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis. Though there are problems software can fix, software cannot fix most problems because most problems are not software problems. In the case of real-estate, it is a mistake to assume general market inefficiency. For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market. A good rule of thumb is "if you think software can solve a problem, you probably don't understand the problem."

gilleain 3mo ago
Reminds me of an interview I saw at the height of the NFT/crypto craze, when the interviewee was challenged to come up with a use-case, and they threw out "buying a house". So there is (AFAIK) just one part of the process to buy a house that blockchains could address, and that is transfer of ownership. The rest of the process is an estate agent (realtor) communicating between buyer/seller/legal/etc to make it all happen. A tiny proportion would be solved 'on-chain'. Maybe shouldn't need to be said, but people really need to _actually_ understand a problem before proposing a solution!
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
  It doesn't even solve the ownership problem... any disputes still get settled in court just like a paper contract. In fact the database with which you store the contract is largely irrelevant to anything. If counterfeit contacts, MAYBE Blockchain has a use.... but even then it's debatable
- physicsguy 3mo ago
  Transfer of ownership is probably the least controversial part of owning a house in the UK too.
cryptopian 3mo ago
I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.
- pjc50 3mo ago
  You could apply clever modelling to work out what minimal set of upgrades would best increase capacity .. and then spend the next 30 years trying to get one line built. We're stuck at basic political questions like "should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?" At least Burnham knows what a Manchester is.
  - dijit 3mo ago
    we’re on year 70 of those 30 years. The issue is that its unsexy, not “profitable” and it requires land - not to mention that the timeframes needed will make “the next government” look better. Our governments are recklessly short sighted, and to be fair, even if they were not, their progress would be undone by the disaffected electorate who can be easily convinced that the sitting government is spaffing money up the wall.
    - cryptopian 3mo ago
      I find that when selling people on the idea of network upgrades, people find the solutions unintuitive because issues in one place are often caused by bottlenecks very far away. Half the North West and services as far as Scotland, Wales and East Anglia are stuffed because of a single mile of rail in central Manchester, so you have tell people in rural Derbyshire, "hey, Manchester needs more rail funding, it'll help you, promise". It will, but you have to know a bit about the whole network to understand why.
  - brabel 3mo ago
    If the system is just at capacity, but not beyond, it’s in fact well optimized. Empty trains are a loss to the company running it. Similar to airliners: they want every flight as full as possible. No company cares if it’s comfortable for the passengers since they either have no competition, or if they do it’s always the one offering the lowest price who wins. The passengers who want comfort can buy first class for a gigantic premium, and that is also well optimized: expensive enough to be profitable, cheap enough to actually sell tickets.
steveBK123 3mo ago
> For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market. This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population. So there was relative political power in the working age, and a large/growing group to sell houses to. Further, pre-GFC there was a big trade-up market even for existing homeowners. Now demographic & politic power in the west are in the hands of the older, homeowner retired/near retired baby boomers. Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong. Also this is why we keep electing dinosaurs in the US.
- pydry 3mo ago
  Boomers are a scapegoat, used a bit like immigrants, minorities and AI as an excuse for attacks on the working class. The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they own as a club to beat the two parties into submission and to stamp out any kind of populist opposition which wants to pursue policies which are oligarchy-unfriendly. This includes any kind of reform which might interfere with the value of their property portfolios or redirect their streams of unearned rental income.
  - steveBK123 3mo ago
    Boomers in the US are a scapegoat because they benefited during the great build out of housing in suburbs by moving there, and then became NIMBYs insisting everything remain "just so" now that they own all the houses.
  - 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
    The large pensionfunds are half of the oligarch class
- risyachka 3mo ago
88 3mo ago
Exactly this. Housing land supply in the UK is bottlenecked by politics (NIMBYism) and economics (private developers seeking to maximise profits) not software.
- jimnotgym 3mo ago
  Moreover, prime building land never gets put on the open market. People know people and approach them directly. Why would you give that kind of advantage up to a software company?
bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people
- guiriduro 3mo ago
  Maybe that's not as unlikely a prospect (or as bad an idea) as you might think. Do people know if there are relatively small idea-exploration pots of money (VC, angels, subsidies, startup and govt programmes) available in Europe/UK whereby a sufficiently well-qualified initial idea/plan, well-advised small founding team, and initially tested model can go to be funded for PMF exploration without being defocussed into hawking, door knocking and/or being dependent on 'who you know'?
  - bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
    I just feel that as the majority of the country scrat about in dead end jobs just to keep the heating on, finding out that this kind of money is just being frivolously pissed up walls.... It makes you question things
- redwood 3mo ago
  Is this representative of how many Europeans think about technology startups? If so it's very revealing. You have to be willing to take lot's of bets tobhave any chance that some of them will take off and transform your job market, your economy, or how you live. If you only do things that are sure things guess what... stasis. If you have a culture that denigrates failure rather than one that celebrates proactively trying to learn from it as this postmortem aims for then you're just going to be stuck
  - bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
    It's easy to say that from the worlds largest economy, but Britain can't even afford to run a single public service at pre-2008 levels in 2026
antisthenes 3mo ago
> A good rule of thumb is "if you think software can solve a problem, you probably don't understand the problem." Someone let American health care startups know that. Not sure what any of them are doing, but it's not lowering health care prices for anyone.

gilleain 3mo ago

Reminds me of an interview I saw at the height of the NFT/crypto craze, when the interviewee was challenged to come up with a use-case, and they threw out "buying a house". So there is (AFAIK) just one part of the process to buy a house that blockchains could address, and that is transfer of ownership. The rest of the process is an estate agent (realtor) communicating between buyer/seller/legal/etc to make it all happen. A tiny proportion would be solved 'on-chain'. Maybe shouldn't need to be said, but people really need to _actually_ understand a problem before proposing a solution!

bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
It doesn't even solve the ownership problem... any disputes still get settled in court just like a paper contract. In fact the database with which you store the contract is largely irrelevant to anything. If counterfeit contacts, MAYBE Blockchain has a use.... but even then it's debatable
physicsguy 3mo ago
Transfer of ownership is probably the least controversial part of owning a house in the UK too.

cryptopian 3mo ago

I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.

pjc50 3mo ago
You could apply clever modelling to work out what minimal set of upgrades would best increase capacity .. and then spend the next 30 years trying to get one line built. We're stuck at basic political questions like "should there be efficient trains between London and Manchester?" At least Burnham knows what a Manchester is.
- dijit 3mo ago
  we’re on year 70 of those 30 years. The issue is that its unsexy, not “profitable” and it requires land - not to mention that the timeframes needed will make “the next government” look better. Our governments are recklessly short sighted, and to be fair, even if they were not, their progress would be undone by the disaffected electorate who can be easily convinced that the sitting government is spaffing money up the wall.
  - cryptopian 3mo ago
    I find that when selling people on the idea of network upgrades, people find the solutions unintuitive because issues in one place are often caused by bottlenecks very far away. Half the North West and services as far as Scotland, Wales and East Anglia are stuffed because of a single mile of rail in central Manchester, so you have tell people in rural Derbyshire, "hey, Manchester needs more rail funding, it'll help you, promise". It will, but you have to know a bit about the whole network to understand why.
- brabel 3mo ago
  If the system is just at capacity, but not beyond, it’s in fact well optimized. Empty trains are a loss to the company running it. Similar to airliners: they want every flight as full as possible. No company cares if it’s comfortable for the passengers since they either have no competition, or if they do it’s always the one offering the lowest price who wins. The passengers who want comfort can buy first class for a gigantic premium, and that is also well optimized: expensive enough to be profitable, cheap enough to actually sell tickets.

steveBK123 3mo ago

> For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market. This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population. So there was relative political power in the working age, and a large/growing group to sell houses to. Further, pre-GFC there was a big trade-up market even for existing homeowners. Now demographic & politic power in the west are in the hands of the older, homeowner retired/near retired baby boomers. Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong. Also this is why we keep electing dinosaurs in the US.

pydry 3mo ago
Boomers are a scapegoat, used a bit like immigrants, minorities and AI as an excuse for attacks on the working class. The US is an plutocratic oligarchy, not a boomerocracy: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 The candidates which would pursue popular policies tend to get nixed via underhanded political means before ascending to higher office. The oligarchy uses campaign financing and the media they own as a club to beat the two parties into submission and to stamp out any kind of populist opposition which wants to pursue policies which are oligarchy-unfriendly. This includes any kind of reform which might interfere with the value of their property portfolios or redirect their streams of unearned rental income.
- steveBK123 3mo ago
  Boomers in the US are a scapegoat because they benefited during the great build out of housing in suburbs by moving there, and then became NIMBYs insisting everything remain "just so" now that they own all the houses.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
  The large pensionfunds are half of the oligarch class
risyachka 3mo ago

88 3mo ago

Exactly this. Housing land supply in the UK is bottlenecked by politics (NIMBYism) and economics (private developers seeking to maximise profits) not software.

jimnotgym 3mo ago
Moreover, prime building land never gets put on the open market. People know people and approach them directly. Why would you give that kind of advantage up to a software company?

bcjdjsndon 3mo ago

Man I wish I had half a million to blow "exploring business models"... There is definitely too much money in the hands of stupid rich people

guiriduro 3mo ago
Maybe that's not as unlikely a prospect (or as bad an idea) as you might think. Do people know if there are relatively small idea-exploration pots of money (VC, angels, subsidies, startup and govt programmes) available in Europe/UK whereby a sufficiently well-qualified initial idea/plan, well-advised small founding team, and initially tested model can go to be funded for PMF exploration without being defocussed into hawking, door knocking and/or being dependent on 'who you know'?
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
  I just feel that as the majority of the country scrat about in dead end jobs just to keep the heating on, finding out that this kind of money is just being frivolously pissed up walls.... It makes you question things
redwood 3mo ago
Is this representative of how many Europeans think about technology startups? If so it's very revealing. You have to be willing to take lot's of bets tobhave any chance that some of them will take off and transform your job market, your economy, or how you live. If you only do things that are sure things guess what... stasis. If you have a culture that denigrates failure rather than one that celebrates proactively trying to learn from it as this postmortem aims for then you're just going to be stuck
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
  It's easy to say that from the worlds largest economy, but Britain can't even afford to run a single public service at pre-2008 levels in 2026

antisthenes 3mo ago

> A good rule of thumb is "if you think software can solve a problem, you probably don't understand the problem." Someone let American health care startups know that. Not sure what any of them are doing, but it's not lowering health care prices for anyone.