Miguel Linera Alperi – AREX Real Estate

Miguel Alvarez De Linera Alperi is the CEO and Co-founder of AREX Real Estate. He graduated in a double bachelor in law and business administration at ICADE University in Madrid, he was in the team that won the CBRE Proptech Challenge in 2018 and that gave rise to AREX Real Estate. In everything related to Blockchain technology, he has actively been giving conferences in several universities and institutions for the past 2 years. Now, he’s also actively involved with FIBREE, the Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise, as Regional Co-chair in Spain.

During the last year, Denis and Miguel met on a few occasions during conferences and proptech competitions in Brussels, Paris and London.

“When you meet cool people it’s hard to not connect and keep in touch! I follow the progress of my peers and colleague entrepreneurs constantly. We might be developing competitive solutions, but we are all in the same boat here, pioneering a new emerging market — the more positive stories we collectively create, the bigger the growth of real estate tokenization as a whole, the more successful our companies will become.”

— Denis Petrovcic, CEO at Blocksquare

Q: Miguel, tell us a little bit about your background.

A: Since I was a child living in Oviedo, Asturias, I’ve always felt like I wanted to create and bring new projects to the world. That is why I started my first adventure in the “entrepreneurship field” when I was 15 and founded my first clothing brand. This attraction to entrepreneurship was what made me move to a bigger city and study law and business at ICADE University in Madrid. During my bachelors I started another clothing brand, Beikei, which is still running nowadays. Working on the clothing sector is an amazing experience, but what really caught my attention was how the proper use of technology could shape a better world for the future. That’s why since I dove deeper into the tech field, I started writing articles, giving conferences and lastly created my own tech company, AREX, in which I’m full time involved now.

Q: How did you get involved in blockchain?

A: For me it all started in the summer of 2013 when I read my first paper about Blockchain, but it wasn’t until a couple years later in 2016 when a good friend of mine began to speak to me about how he traded cryptos that I realized the potencial that the Blockchain technology could have in society. After that discussion, I built my own nodes, started trading cryptos and lastly got more interested in the technology behind the cryptos than in the cryptos themselves. This coincided with when I was moving to London for a summer internship in the banking sector. During this time me and two other extraordinary friends crafted the concept of what AREX would be a couple years later. With this idea on mind, we presented our project to the CBRE Proptech Challenge, we won it and since that day we’ve been working hard to make AREX a reality.

Q: How do you see blockchain technology impacting real estate?

A: Real Estate we could say that is the asset class that has the most influence over legislation, law and overall welfare of a country so I think there are two different answers to this question depending on the level of development of the economy in which the technology is to be implemented. Therefore, the goals searched with the implementation shall as well differ. In developing countries I think there exists a huge opportunity for Blockchain not only to provide transparency and security in Real Estate transactions, but also to grant access to new participants in the market. People in developing countries have to be granted property rights to be able to be part of the economy. In this sense, Blockchain registries is much easier and cost-efficient than building conventional “occidental-like” registries from scratch. In already developed countries I think that the use of Blockchain could lead to the reduction of a considerable number of the many intermediaries that take part in Real Estate transactions and that base their business models on the inefficiencies of the market. We at AREX are exploring ways to implement our solution in developing countries as well as keeping on building our platform for the developed ones.

Q: What are you focusing on right now?

A: Testing, learning and extracting KPIs to objectively prove the true value of the use of Blockchain in the Real Estate sector.

Q: What are your thoughts on the future of blockchain?

A: I think we still have 2 to 3 years in which many new projects will be born and many others will die. Although, the reality is that we are already seeing positive outcomes and successful studies of the application of the technology in many different fields such as logistics, the food industry, the banking sector and even Real Estate. My opinion is that time will tell the difference between the use cases where the use of Blockchain not only makes sense, but is also useful (economically and operationally speaking) and the ones where it’s not.

Q: One final thought for our community at Blocksquare?

A: Coming up with new ideas that aim to improve our existing society and the lives of others is never a waste of time. That’s why I invite our readers to explore, create, test and keep on making reality all the ambitious and “foolish” ideas that have taken humanity up to where we are today.