About
What is DeadMole?
We are a Norwich-based innovative property development startup,
the first blockchain property company in the United Kingdom, established in September 2024.
We aim to improve the qualilty of life for as many people as we can by creating sustainable and affordable smart homes,
beautiful high-quality living spaces.
We are motivated by the pleasure of breathing new life into tired, unloved homes.
The UK domestic housing stock is full of homes that desparately need to be modernised,
thousands come onto the market each year.
We upgrade the carbon footprint of each home we renovate, and improve its EPC rating.
We choose design over speed and profit, and our homes are fitted for the 21st century with smart devices and our own
clever box of tricks - Brainbox, a pioneering new home server device which releases you from big data prying.
Not content with this level of invention our founder Russelle wanted to make homes more affordable to Gen Z,
who have been priced out of the market for too long.
We use ground-breaking blockchain technology to allow young people to part-own a property they couldn't otherwise afford,
with dependable routes for them to move to full ownership.
The company is inclusive and we support diversity, not with words but with actions.
We believe that companies succeed in the long term by serving their staff, contractors, suppliers, partners, and customers
as well as their shareholders and creditors.
By behaving ethically to those people we serve society as a whole. We set out to build reciprocal relationships
that mirror our take on the world. We measure the success of our business by non-traditional methods which city fat
cats would hiss at.
The Idea
The starting idea is simple.
- Improve the local housing stock by developing unloved properties for immediate resale. We will focus on:
- Creating light and space
- Creating sustainable homes
- Installing smart devices and controls
- Using blockchain tokenisation to allow fractional ownership
- Engage with the local community to offer experience and employment to disadvantaged people.
- Invest surplus funds in Bitcoin.
On its own, this is already an innovative approach. There are no other UK companies yet; this is the first.
Despite this innovative strategy, there are still many ways in which this can be improved on,
and there is scope to build a really exciting new company.
The founder
Russelle Newton is our founder. Her formative interest in property began with spending school summer holidays in the office of a
builder’s yard on the Norfolk coast where her mother was office manager.
Whilst working in London, she built up a portfolio of residential properties in Clerkenwell.
The properties were high-end flats rented to City professionals and corporates.
She foresaw the area’s potential 10 years before it became fashionable, and invested accordingly.
The area grew fast, and the investments were a great success.
She set up Squaremile Residential as a lettings website in 2004 for similar flats, teaching herself to code as she went.
After leaving the City in 2003, she started a renovation venture with a friend, bringing their first project in on budget
and on time.
She is a creative, playful, thoughtful, and hyper-intelligent transgender woman. Over the years, she has toyed with various
business ideas. She developed a dating website idea called Glass Slipper in 1997 before dating websites were a thing,
which focused on the female experience.
Her interest in sustainability and repurposing led to an EV conversion business idea in 2014, not new but in its infancy.
Her interest in finance and sustainability led to a solar equity release idea at the same time. None became businesses.
In 2017, she came back to her interest in coding, households, and women’s experiences, and created Brainbox,
a home server concept, which is still ongoing.
Her ideas tend to be innovative and therefore ahead of their time.
She was unable to find backers and partners who shared the vision in Norfolk or London, and she says she didn’t back herself.
She is passionate about equality, fairness, and diversity. The business she is growing reflects that commitment.
She has a sister with learning difficulties who has been given regular employment by a major supermarket for many years now.
She have seen first-hand how beneficial that has been to her sister, and this is part of the inspiration for doing the same with Deadmole.
She has always had a deep respect and awe for the natural world, and a related aversion to waste.
As a child, she was often at a car scrapyard with her father, as he restored old cars.
As a result, the business I am growing will have genuine values about low-impact sustainability.
As a creative, intuitive, and playful person, she says there is a frustrated architect, interior designer, and engineer in her.
This gave her a long-held view that the UK residential housing stock is badly designed and out of date.
This drives part of the company ambition.
The trigger for starting DeadMole was the need for a new start after a traumatic marriage breakdown in 2020,
the loss of her children, and the death of her father in 2024.
She needed a new focus for her energies after those losses.
During the last 20 years she has noticed an alarming acceleration of expansion in the money supply,
a policy of financial repression which she loathes, and which DeadMole is partly a personal answer.
Russelle realised that leverage is a good strategy in this monetary environment.
The UK residential housing market is inflation-resistant in the medium and long term, and can be collateralized.
So far so good, but is that enough? Sound money alternatives are also a solution, but until 2009 there weren't any.
That changed in when Bitcoin went online, and it is currently the only sound money available anywhere in the world.
The obvious answer was to be in property and in Bitcoin.
For personal reasons, Russelle has been afraid to take the plunge in business, and back herself.
This has changed, and now she says she has found the courage and conviction to believe in herself.
She can draw on extensive personal experience in financial services in London.
After qualifying in 1993 as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG in the banking department, she spent 10 years in corporate advisory,
both experiences giving her a deep understanding of businesses and their finances.
Russelle is proud of her collateral ancestor Isaac Newton, and some chance encounters in 2005 led her to completing a
doctoral dissertation in Early Modern English history at Durham University in 2017, for which her first degree in music from
London University in 1989 was no preparation. With DeadMole, she is now building on a long-term interest in residential property,
sustainability, and social responsibility; marrying that to strong personal motivation, and related skills and experience.
Going forward
We plan to begin renovations in the Norwich and Norfolk area alone. Expansion will be into other East Anglian counties.
The smart home server Brainbox will be developed into a more sophisicated thing with a Home Edition and a Enterprise Edition.
There are more clever things to do with financing. We will introduce a whacky new finance package using a property-Bitcoin mix
which will increase the affordability of home for first-time buyers and other young home owners. Tokenisation will be expanded
to include home information packages which will speed up title transfer and reduce conveyancing costs, disrupting the legal industry.
We will explore tokenising the whole company on a suitable blockchain, creating one of the world's first property development DAO. A DAO is a distributed autonomous organisation, built around a collection of smart contracts on a distributed network like Ethereum or Solana.