The second owner receives the building without the people who designed, installed, and handed it over. Bassem Hamdy described the result bluntly: the new owner may not know what was bought, what sits behind a wall, or which record explains an installed asset.
BricksChain began with that owner problem in 2018. Files may exist somewhere, but a retained file is not the same as usable building information. Software expires and formats change.
Use the second-owner test
Bassem Hamdy discussed warranties, maintenance, replacement, hazardous materials, and later ownership changes as decisions that depend on asset history. He also compared building records with vehicle history reports, which can give a buyer a clearer account of a far less expensive asset.
The comparison suggests a useful test for handover. Could a future owner identify what was installed, where it was installed, who supplied it, what warranty applied, and what changed after completion without reopening the original project investigation?
If the answer lives only in a specialist model, an old database, or a project participant's memory, the record has not traveled with the building.
Handover and history are different records
Bassem Hamdy described two product ideas. Handover was intended to assemble operating and maintenance information about what was designed, built, and installed. Chronicle was intended to preserve major shared outputs from the beginning of the project.
That distinction is useful beyond the product. Closeout identifies what the owner received. A project history also shows how the information changed, who confirmed it, and which later event should be connected to it.
An RFI showed why both views matter. The question and answer can pass among a subcontractor, contractor, designer, and owner, each with a different system. Bassem proposed a shared transaction record beneath those tools so the parties could see the same event without declaring one company's application the only legal record.
Keep familiar tools, preserve transferable data
Bassem Hamdy did not expect every participant to abandon its current interface. He described integrations with project platforms, spreadsheets, databases, and messaging tools. BricksChain was meant to hold transactions underneath those workflows rather than create every transaction through a new front end.
That approach still depends on governance. The participants need to agree which information enters the shared record, who may correct it, how a later owner receives the relevant portion, and what responsibility attaches to the data.
Bassem made the owner requirement plain when he said owners may not need Revit itself. “They just need the data inside of Revit.” A durable record has to outlive the application used to author it.
Plain language comes before prediction
Bassem Hamdy's 2018 roadmap also included a common vocabulary, recall matching, and later machine-learning uses. He asked, “How will we teach a machine what we can't teach each other?”
At the time of the episode, data intake for the pilots was still highly manual, some integrations were incomplete, and the predictive ideas were early. Those limits strengthen the question rather than weaken it. Before asking a system to find a pattern, the industry has to name the same asset and event consistently enough to compare them.
Choose one critical asset and answer the second-owner questions now: what is it, where is it, what changed, which source confirms the record, and how would that information transfer with the building? The search will show whether the owner has a lifecycle record or only a collection of project files.
Bassem closed by calling for “breaking down the walls between the key players and the processes.” For building data, that begins with a record the next owner can actually receive and use.
