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Last reviewed: 9 April 2026 · Spot something wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it.

He demolished a building, rebuilt it, then spent 2,600 hours learning how to run it.

Homes carry money and emotion. When that goes wrong, it gets toxic fast.

Building Trust exists to reduce friction and align leaseholders, freeholders, and managing agents. Most leasehold disputes are misalignment, not malice. They run on the same lease, the same statute, and the same building. We give every side the same facts so the conversation lands somewhere reasonable, fast. The fight is rarely about the lease itself. It's about what each side thinks the lease says, and how the legislation that sits behind it applies. We make the hard easy. Plain English, for every side.

The founder is both. Adam owns three flats in the building as a leaseholder and sits on the board as a director. He writes the service-charge cheque and signs the demand. Every dispute on this site is seen from both sides because he sits on both.

The founder story

From a 1950s council block to 16 homes. Then the real work started.

Adam Street's grandmother was one of the first council tenants at 4 to 8 Hafer Road when the post-war block opened in 1957. His parents later bought the flat under Right to Buy. Years later, Adam looked at the ageing block and came up with an idea that most people thought was insane: get all eight neighbours together, demolish the building, and rebuild it. Twice the size, 16 homes instead of 8, selling the extras to fund the whole thing.

They did it. Peter Barber Architects designed the new building. Five years of construction. The original block was 6,000 square feet. The new building: 16,350 square feet, 16 bespoke homes with roof gardens, courtyard houses, and balconies. Self-managed from day one.

Evening Standard  ·  RIBA Journal →  ·  Community Led Housing London →  ·  Peter Barber Architects →

Then came the part nobody warns you about. Running the building.

A defective roof. Five years from first leak to settlement. Three prior claims that never fixed the real problem. 2,600 hours logged. £576,022 recovered. No solicitors. A £26,000 lease dispute where we used ChatGPT to interpret the lease and got it wrong.

The lease dispute inspired LEASE-iQ. The Section 20 process and managing the consultants and contractors inspired BLOCK-iQ. Then Adam started talking to friends, other directors, other leaseholders. The same problems. The same isolation. These experiences are not unique.

That is why Building Trust exists.

Read the full case study: 5 years, £576,022, zero solicitors →

Why this proptech is different

Most proptech is built by people who have never managed a building.

This one is built by directors who still do, and still find it hard. Every feature answers a question a volunteer director actually had to answer in the middle of their week, between the day job and the school run.

Why this matters

Built by someone who's been there. Still there.

01

Both sides of every dispute. A practising SoF director who is also a 3-flat leaseholder in the same building. He writes the service-charge cheque and signs the demand — the only proptech founder we know of who genuinely sits on both sides of the table.

02

2,600 hours logged. £576,022 insurance recovery over 5 years. No solicitors. No legal fees. Every hour of real building management is built into LEASE-iQ.

03

Cross-checked, not a chatbot. Every answer is cross-checked by multiple AI models before it is shown, so ambiguity surfaces instead of getting papered over. If a clause is genuinely ambiguous, LEASE-iQ tells you.

The team

Two founders, one reviewing solicitor.

Adam Street
Founder & CEO

Lead Director at Hafer Road Freehold Ltd (16-unit SoF, Battersea SW11) and a 3-flat leaseholder in the same building — he writes the service-charge cheque AND signs the demand. Every dispute, both sides. Built BLOCK-iQ from scratch using AI-assisted development. Background in AI transformation consulting. Runs TIP (The Incremental Pathway) alongside Building Trust.

Sean Gilley
Co-founder & CTO. LEASE-iQ

Built the LEASE-iQ AI engine from the ground up. Former enterprise AI architect with deep experience in regulatory alignment and knowledge graph engineering. Every LEASE-iQ answer is cross-checked by multiple AI models before it is shown, so ambiguity surfaces instead of getting papered over. All processing runs on GCP Europe (London), fully encrypted, and your lease is contractually never used for model training.

Reviewing Solicitor · Stream 2 and Stream 3 tiers

Independent property solicitor working with Building Trust through his own consultancy, True Counsel Limited (England & Wales, company no. 10945466, registered office 124 City Road, London EC1V 2NX). Five years as Head of Corporate & Commercial Legal Services at FirstPort, the UK's largest residential property manager, plus director-level legal roles at Emeria UK, Poundland, Flying Trade Group, and earlier private practice across commercial and property law since 2001. LLB Middlesex, Erasmus Scholar at Stockholm. Bitesh personally holds a 3% minority equity stake in Building Trust; the legal-review engagement is invoiced through True Counsel Limited at arm's length on standard professional terms and disclosed to every Stream 2 and Stream 3 user.

Who we work with

RTM companies. Share of freehold directors. Resident management companies. From 4 units to 80+. If you carry personal liability for a building you manage unpaid, we built this for you.

We built this because no one else did.

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