Not long ago I sold a house. A few weeks later, I bought one. re-qi exists because of what happened in between.
The physical handoff was the easy part. Keys in an envelope, garage remotes in a kitchen drawer, a folder of appliance manuals the buyers probably never opened. That ritual has been refined over generations and it works.
Then there was the other list, the one nobody asked me for. The doorbell camera. The smart locks. The thermostat. The garage controller. The irrigation system. The solar monitoring. The alarm. A decade of accounts, apps, and passwords, each one a key to the house I was about to hand to strangers. My agent didn’t ask about it. The title company didn’t ask about it. The contract, which specified the fate of the curtain rods, said nothing about who could open the front door from a phone.
So I sat at the kitchen table the night before closing, trying to reconstruct from memory every device I’d ever connected, resetting and unpairing one at a time, and the whole way through a single question kept nagging at me: what am I missing? Weeks after the sale, I still couldn’t have told you with certainty that I’d found everything. For all I knew, I could still open the garage of a house I no longer owned. I didn’t want that ability. I had no way to prove I’d given it up.
Then I stood on the other side of the table. In the house I bought, the thermostat greeted us with someone else’s schedule. The alarm panel was registered to the previous owner’s email. The doorbell wouldn’t take a new account because it was still bound to the old one, and the manufacturer wanted a proof of purchase I’d never been given. And under all the small frustrations sat a much less small question: what can they still see? Whose phone lights up when someone rings my doorbell?
Here is what struck me most. Everything else about those two transactions was extraordinarily rigorous. The title was searched back decades. The money moved through escrow under the eye of a neutral third party. Signatures were notarized, wires were verified, every contingency had a form and a deadline. We have spent a century building a legal machine that lets two strangers exchange the largest asset of their lives safely, and it works so well we take it for granted.
And then the digital keys, the cameras inside the home and the locks on its doors, change hands on a sticky note. If at all.
That gap felt antiquated the moment I noticed it, the way handwritten deeds must have felt once title companies existed. It was crying out for a solution that is simple for every party, elegant enough that people actually use it, and legally binding: a written condition of the sale, not a favor the seller may or may not get around to. And it belongs inside the escrow process, alongside the title transfer and the home warranty, handled by a neutral custodian with a chain of custody. Not another app bolted on after closing.
That is what re-qi is. The seller hands off each device once, before closing. We hold and verify the credentials in escrow. On closing day, everything is reassigned to the buyer, the seller’s access is severed, verified where vendors allow it and attested where they don’t, and both sides get a timestamped certificate in the closing package. The seller is released from a liability they previously had no way to document. The buyer gets to be genuinely alone in their new home, with the record to show it.
We’re onboarding our first wave of home buyers, agents, and title partners now. If any part of this story is yours, if you’ve reset devices at a kitchen table at midnight or wondered whose phone your doorbell rings, I’d love to have you with us. Start a handoff, or write to me directly.
Drew
Founder, re-qi