kodehyve establishes new industry standard for e-signatures in the real estate sector, powered by Amazon Web Services

kodehyve
7 min readMay 11, 2022

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From left to right: Jean-Paul Scheuren, President of CIGDL, Fabrice Aresu, CEO of LuxTrust and Felix Hemmerling, Co-founder and CEO of kodehyve, Photo Credits © Zan Productions
  • Luxembourg-based kodehyve launches an innovative e-signature platform specifically tailored to the real estate sector, enabling users to sign legal documents in a compliant, secure, and standardised manner.
  • After developing the solution in its home market in collaboration with Chambre Immobilière and LuxTrust, the startup plans to internationally roll out the platform that is powered by Amazon Web Services as part of its data-driven infrastructure for real estate professionals.

Launched in early 2020, kodehyve aims to accelerate the development of commercial and residential real estate projects by improving the collaboration between the numerous participants in the market. After successfully raising €1m in seed financing by private equity investors in the spring of 2021 and offering its data-driven infrastructure to a growing number of clients, kodehyve today announces a new milestone in the development of its sector-specific suite of digital tools: the launch of an e-signature platform that is set to become the industry standard for reviewing, editing, and signing legally binding documents in the Luxembourgish market and beyond.

A new standard for making legal paperwork in real estate easier and more efficient

Based on extensive customer research, kodehyve has identified e-signatures and the digital handling of legal documents in a compliant way to be two of the most pressing needs among real estate professionals. The real estate ecosystem called for a solution that optimally connects all stakeholders, enabling users to manage and approve documentation online in a secure, transparent, and collaborative manner while also ensuring that all required legal information is provided. In partnership with the Real Estate Chamber of Luxembourg (Chambre Immobilière du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, CIGDL), kodehyve has developed an e-signature platform that caters to the particular needs of property developers, agencies, architectural and engineering firms, end-customers, and subcontractors alike.

By using kodehyve’s e-signature platform, users can reduce the complexity of dealing with numerous stakeholders involved in a variety of legally required processes. To simplify the signing of agreements, real estate professionals can, for example, pick from a wide range of standardised contracts officially approved by the CIGDL in addition to using their own contracts and templates — one of the key elements that differentiates the newly launched solution from existing e-signature platforms.

Numerous benefits for users

Kodehyve’s e-signature solution ensures full compliance under existing European Union (EU) laws, adhering to the “electronic identification, authentication, and trust services” (eIDAS) regulation for electronic signatures and transactions in the EU internal market. The modular platform also includes holistic audit trails, which guarantee the traceability of all changes made and steps taken when managing documentation. Access to pre-approved document templates and associated workflows in a compliant environment are amongst the main value propositions kodehyve’s solution offers to the real estate market. According to kodehyve user data, using a streamlined e-signature process instead of handling documents offline saves real estate professionals an average of 16–24€ in costs per transaction, improves productivity by more than 85%, and reduces errors due to incomplete data by up to 80%.

Overall, the e-signature platform guarantees equal access to legal documents and a simplification of required procedures for all stakeholders within the real estate ecosystem, including real estate funds, engineering offices, insurance companies, banks, and governmental authorities. By using kodehyve‘s e-signature platform, all parties involved in a real estate transaction or development project can from now on not only significantly speed up and optimise their processes in a secure and compliant way but also help to protect the environment: more than 170 kg of wood, 4,000 litres of water, and 400 kg of CO2 are saved when handling 500+ documents digitally.

Ready for international rollout

For developing its standardised e-signature platform for the Luxembourgish market in collaboration with CIGDL, kodehyve chose to work with two other market-leading organisations: The digital tool is built on the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and also uses existing services by online trust service provider LuxTrust. Using AWS for hosting and AWS serverless technologies, enables kodehyve to leverage a state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure that ensures technical stability, security, scalability, and 99.99% server uptime. By adding LuxTrust’s well established online identification solutions, real estate professionals can rely on a simple and advanced e-signature. The LuxTrust “e-seal” adds a key component to the platform by disabling the possibility of altering documents after they were signed, adding an extra layer of security and user confidence.

Kodehyve‘s e-signature platform has tremendous international growth potential. Given the nature of the real estate market, the platform accommodates transactions for both local as well as international signatories, including foreign investors and subcontractors, amongst others. As kodehyve’s data-driven infrastructure is highly customisable, the company is planning to roll out and scale its solution to other countries after launching in Luxembourg. Having developed a cutting-edge, vertical software solution with leading partners for becoming the industry standard in a specific market represents a promising starting point for the international expansion of kodehyve, providing its e-signature platform and other existing tools for real estate professionals (including planning & workflow management, financial data analysis, AML/KYC, billing, and more) in a localised manner to more clients around the world. With Luxembourg being one of the most diverse and multi-linguistic countries in the world (52.5% Luxembourgers and 47.4% inhabitants of foreign nationality), the e-signature platform is currently available in English, French, German and Luxembourgish. Portuguese and other languages will be added to the platform shortly.

“Our team at kodehyve is building the operating system for the real estate sector. With the suite of tools that our plug-and-play infrastructure platform already offered, developing a solution for e-signatures was the next logical step for us. We are more than excited to be able to now serve and empower the 250+ members of Chambre Immobilière in Luxembourg with a state-of-the-art digital tool that combines a smooth user experience with the stability and security of our partners Amazon Web Services and LuxTrust.” — Felix Hemmerling, Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairman of kodehyve

“Launching this ambitious online solution for an entire industry perfectly illustrates how a variety of market-leading experts can come together, form synergies, and accelerate the digital development of various stakeholders by leveraging the latest software technologies. At AWS, it is our mission to support innovative companies with our cloud solutions, enabling them to build the future. It is kodehyve’s goal to transform the real estate market by making it substantially more digital. By providing new industry standards like the e-signature platform, they are getting one big step closer, and we are glad to play a role in that.” — Veronica Ostring, AWS Account Manager

ABOUT KODEHYVE

kodehyve is a leading international provider of digital solutions for the real estate industry. The technology company was founded by Felix Hemmerling (CEO) and Julien Casse (CTO) in 2020 with the goal to build a data-driven collaboration infrastructure that serves real estate professionals and their clients to improve the development of commercial and residential projects. By largely replacing inefficient workflows, transparency issues, and outdated customer experiences, kodehyve effectively empowers all stakeholders in the real estate industry to more efficiently plan, manage, and analyse their construction and commercialisation projects.

Through the careful selection of powerful in-house modules and third-party APIs within the areas of project management, customer relationship management as well as business intelligence, kodehyve offers plug-and-play software solutions that are secure, compliant, and tailored to the real estate market. Providing a high-quality white-labelled platform in the customers’ look-and-feel, features available include task and deadline management, information and document exchange flows, customer onboarding, e-signatures, KYC and AML checks, billing, live chat, budgeting, financial & data analysis, and more.

Based in Luxembourg, kodehyve currently employs 12 team members and serves a growing number of clients in Europe. To fulfil its mission, kodehyve works with strategic partners such as Amazon Web Services, LuxTrust, European Proptech Association, LuxPropTech, and Chambre immobilière du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg. The technology company graduated from the “Fit4Start” acceleration programme by the Luxembourg Ministry of Economy in 2022, including financing of €150k. To learn more about kodehyve, visit kodehyve.com.

ABOUT AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS)

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 27 more Availability Zones and nine more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

ABOUT LUXTRUST

Since its inception, LuxTrust has been equipping clients and businesses with complete, tailor-made digital solutions to digitise processes and enhance overall security. Certified in accordance with the eIDAS regulation and thus acting in compliance with the latest European regulations (PSD2, GDPR, ETSI, AML), LuxTrust operates services relating to the identification and authentication of natural persons, the creation and management of electronic certificates (required to sign electronically), and the creation and validation of electronic signatures and seals. LuxTrust is an eIDAS Qualified Trust Service Provider published in the EU Trusted List and a Certification Authority. To learn more about LuxTrust, visit luxtrust.com.

ABOUT CHAMBRE IMMOBILIÈRE

For nearly 50 years, the Chambre Immobilière du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg (CIGDL) has been an independent, non-profit organisation whose main mission is to guarantee quality relations between its members and their clients for enhancing the Luxembourgish real estate sector. The federation gathers more than 250 real estate companies and experts, ranging from the three main professions of the sector: real estate agents, property managers, and promoters. By signing the CIGDL charter, they commit themselves to provide high quality services, aiming at fully satisfying their customers, within the framework of a strict code of ethics. To learn more about CIGDL, visit chambre-immobiliere.lu.

PRESS CONTACT

Felix Hemmerling

Co-Founder & CEO

felix@kodehyve.com | Linkedin | Twitter

WEBSITE & SOCIAL MEDIA

kodehyve.com | Linkedin | Twitter | Crunchbase | Medium | Y.at | Instagram | Facebook

PRESS ROOM & MEDIA KIT

kodehyve media & press kit

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kodehyve

We’re a software venture removing inefficiencies & increasing transparency in real estate transactions & property management.