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Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

buildwithtract.com

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Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#31

Post by 88 »

brudgers wrote: post #2

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 ar…

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

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#32

Post by SilverBirch »

I think this is such a great example of misunderstanding a political problem as a technical problem, and misunderstanding twitter as real life.

> the political winds seemed favourable

Sorry. How? Some libertarians on twitter were in favour. But if you have spent any time paying attention to British politics at all you would note the incredible sway the elderly have over politics. Even the people who are pro-building aren't stupid enough to think you're going to achieve that by building on green belt land, so this idea of an uplift of 140x is just farcical. Half of British debate on house building is disingenuously accusing your opposition of concreting over the green belt, whilst disingenuously promising you can build millions of new homes without concreting over the greenbelt.

The problem with building in the UK is mainly planning permission. In the UK is you need approval from the local council and the local council is elected by Nimby pensioners. So you can't get approval. That's it. That's the problem. That's a political problem that you can solve by getting central government to remove local governments ability to block projects. Or by running targeted political campaigns in local areas to get specific things approved. Not by automating the form your fill in to get your planning application rejected.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#33

Post by vintermann »

brabel wrote: post #24
tnolet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 6% to 10% increase in housing cost due to immigration in the UK since 1990. Total increase ~150%. So marginal impact.[1] But nice populist dog whistle. 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-and-hou...

That is not what the report says at all !! > Over the same period, total population growth in the UK has been approximately 20%, again close to the cross-country average in our sample. Immigration, therefore, accounts for roughly half of the UK’s population growth over the last three decades. Population growth has nothing to do with price increases? If it does, then half of the increase being due to immigration seems…

> Population growth has nothing to do with price increases?

People don't make prices increase, people times money makes prices increase. They're not entirely without money of course, but I don't think it's boat people outbidding you for the homes you want.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#34

Post by blitzar »

mellosouls wrote: post #11

Depressing that the main lesson learned is "Move to the US", the others also pretty standard HN/PG/SV tropes I think. A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think. Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder: https://www.henrydashwood.com/

"Fixing" the UK housing market from the US seems ... suboptimal.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#35

Post by sjducb »

youngtaff wrote: post #13
mellosouls wrote: post #11

Depressing that the main lesson learned is "Move to the US", the others also pretty standard HN/PG/SV tropes I think. A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think. Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder: https://www.henrydashwood.com/

But what problem does move to the US actually solve in this case? House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall

They get away with drip feeding because there’s no competition, because it’s really hard to get permission.

A simpler planning system would allow smaller developers to operate and they would buy, build and sell as fast as they can.

The reason big developers drip feed is that they have 100 identical houses in the pipeline so they don’t want the price to drop at all, because it affects the price of the houses in the pipeline.

The small developer sells quickly so that the cash is available for their next project.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#36

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

cryptopian wrote: post #5
brudgers wrote: post #2

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 ar…

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.

Actually- there is.. if you give up on the idea of "stopping at the station".. you just pick up a car that raced ahead and up to speed- and drop a car that gets left behind and pulls into the station.. okay maybe not with the UK-Rail..

Basically the train never stops- it just reorganizes.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#37

Post by blitzar »

vintermann wrote: post #28
blitzar wrote: post #16

> Between May 2023 and March 2025, Tract attempted to build a venture-backed company to address Britain’s housing crisis by improving the planning permission process. After raising a £744,000 pre-seed round in April 2024, we explored several business models: a site-sourcing tool for developers (Tract Source), a free land-appraisal tool for landowners (Attract), becoming tech-enabled land promoters ourselves, and fina…

Makes you wonder about their "get to the US" lesson learned.

Burning a million dollars isn't cool. You know what is? Burning a billion dollars.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#38

Post by kakacik »

tnolet wrote: post #7
axod wrote: post #4

" Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult. " Nothing to do with millions of new people arriving wanting to live somewhere?

About 6% to 10% increase in housing cost due to immigration in the UK since 1990. Total increase ~150%. So marginal impact.[1] But nice populist dog whistle. 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-and-hou...

Not sure why the need for immediate attack, another thing that happened literally everywhere is - there are way more people in big towns, which have extremely limited and sort of static supply even while continuously growing on outskirts.

Guess what - almost all folks complaining (also here seen on many occasions) want short commute to their well paid work, nobody ain't commute for 2h every day. Those few places are even more limited. Guess where most immigrants go to and stay there - its not your backwardish xenophobic bucolic little villages in the middle of nowhere with old empty houses breaking down. You won't hear folks living there complaining old properties nobody wants are too expensive.

I can go on and on and on, making stats like that beyond useless. We all see actual effects. All is connected and continuously influencing other parts of whole, including immigration and other stuff. Current situation on any market is the living proof of that.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#39

Post by nickdothutton »

Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that looks like something else, but is in-fact an information problem in-disguise as something else. However I do not think the UK housing crisis is an information problem, either plainly or in-disguise.

Re: Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract

#40

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

pydry wrote: post #19
steveBK123 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

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 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…

The large pensionfunds are half of the oligarch class
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