Strategic Alliances: Partnering with Real Estate and Legal Experts
By DeHub Team — 2022-07-04
In Q3 2022 we established partnerships with real estate and legal firms to support the property work we were undertaking in the Philippines.
Why we needed them
Because we are a software company, and property is not software.
At that point DeHub had registration with the Philippine SEC for real estate, construction and brokerage and was moving towards power of attorney over land in Palawan worth more than $15 million. Neither of those is a domain where competence transfers from building apps.
Land title, ownership history, transfer restrictions, foreign ownership rules, local practice — every one of those is specialist knowledge where being wrong is not recoverable by shipping a fix. You cannot iterate your way out of a defective title.
What the partnerships were for
Three things, none of them advisory in the vague sense.
Verification. Confirming that assets were what they were represented to be, and that the parties offering rights over them had the standing to do so. This is the single most common failure point in cross-border property and it is not detectable from the outside.
Structure. Determining how a tokenised sale could legitimately be organised — which entity holds what, how proceeds move, what obligations attach where.
Reading the regulator. Interpreting the Philippine SEC's position as it developed, which turned out to be the decisive one.
They did not save the venture
The tokenisation attempt failed. The SEC's position on the structure ended it and no adviser changed that.
It is worth being direct about what advisers buy you, because it is frequently oversold. They do not make a bad idea legal. They tell you which ideas are bad, at what cost you can find out, and when the answer has arrived.
What they did do
They meant we found out before, rather than after.
The Palawan venture ended as a project we stopped. It did not end as an enforcement action, an unwind, or a set of obligations to people who had bought into a structure that could not be delivered. Given how ambitious that attempt was and how badly it could have gone, ending cleanly is a materially different outcome from ending in the other direction.
The same instinct shaped everything else set up that quarter — real structures carrying real compliance obligations, rather than the loose arrangements a lot of projects were still operating under in 2022.
The general rule
Buy expertise before you need it, in domains where mistakes cannot be patched. Software has forgiving failure modes: you ship, you break something, you fix it in an hour. Regulated asset classes do not work that way, and the cost of learning that empirically is not something you can absorb twice.
We paid for advisers on a venture that did not proceed. That is the correct outcome for that spending, not a waste of it.
How to tell a good adviser from an expensive one
The distinction we learned to apply is whether they tell you things you do not want to hear, early, without being asked twice.
An adviser who confirms your plan is either agreeing because it is sound or agreeing because that is what the engagement rewards, and from the client's side those look identical until it is too late to matter. The useful ones raised objections we found irritating at the time, and several of those objections turned out to be the shape of the problem that eventually ended the venture.
The other test is whether they will put a position in writing. Verbal reassurance is free and unfalsifiable. A written opinion is a professional commitment, and the reluctance to give one is itself the answer.