Topic: Thinking through how the blockchain and related tech might impact real estate. (Read 237 times)

Well, we have seen how in some countries governments and corrupt government officials have changed property deeds or even destroyed it. They also have centralized storage of that data and the risk of losing that data is huge. (It is a prime target)

We know the Blockchain data are immutable and the data is decentralized, so it is an ideal option for the storage of property deeds or the proof of ownership of real estate to reduce the risks mentioned above. 

I think NFT's are a fad.... and they will be gone in a few years.... The Bitcoin Blockchain has been with us for years now. 

Despite the doubters, there are some that are giving it a try.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/real-estate/2022/02/04/this-tampa-bay-home-is-being-sold-as-an-nft/

It is not easy, but it is quite possible. Remember the real estate world works within the wealthy very well, but the poor do not really have a say in it. If you have no home or just one home where you live, that is not really a real estate deal, you do not really worry about it too much or if you do then it is a small amount that you shouldn't.

The real trouble begins when the super wealthy end up buying houses left and right in a small town, and eventually start to increase the value, when everyone sees these, they think their houses worth a lot as well, so they buy houses from 300k each, as high as 350k each eventually, and then put it up for sale at 400k each, you do this for 10 houses and you get yourself a cool 1 million dollars. Now imagine huge real estate companies doing it with 100+ houses at all times, not just in one place but in multiple places all at once.

Blockchain technology can be applied to the general accounting of the real estate market, so that this database can cover real estate offered for sale or rent from all countries. But it is unlikely that it will be effective to create your own NFT tokens for each individual property. This could make sense if such properties were frequently sold or had significant historical or cultural significance. To rent real estate, in principle, you can create NFTs, but I don’t see a particular need for this either. With the same success, you can view the database of real estate that is offered for rent.

I mean is it impossible to do? It is not. You could own a house and NFT would be the proof of that. However let's be honest with each other, we are talking about a place where we will not really have that much comfort, NFT is not really good enough ownership when we are talking about something physical like a whole house.

I believe arts and music and tweets and all that could work great for NFT because they are digital stuff, keep NFT as digital and paper ownership proof as the real deal for houses. I know it is not going to be impossible to handle it right away, and NFT could eventually get in there and make a difference but I am not sure if I want it to.

It's not a coincidence that ICO craze and NFT craze look so similar, this is because crypto and blockchain are fundamentally weak innovations that don't have a lot of use in real world. I fully agree that blockchain is a "solution in search of problem". People are giving it the benefit of doubt too easily, new technologies need to show at least some early prototypes and models, but with NFT and crypto it's always just a whitepaper and a github repo with broken code.

The trend i see is lot of people wish to earn passive income throught owning a virtual token easily accessible in one click. As the get rich by buying a coin is fading out, the attempt at making it like a stock market with dao or such didnt really took either, they are going into the next biggest market for passive income which is real estate. Or nft like collectible. Or anything that can feed the bubble of earning passive income out of the ownership of virtual tokens.

As the economy become all about capital mannagement, especially in big tech, there is an attractiveness in the idea of owning something related to technology vaguely associated with a stock, or real estate or something that bring passive income.

But blockchain technologies in themselves are still limited and the amount of passive income you can expect to make out of just owning token is limited, even if there is of course a huge demand for it.

Im not sure if this is really a good idea to make the economy so virtualized about abstract value of a title of property in a digital system that produce globally nothing.

And i dont think the tokenisation is really that much of a great idea either. Or it easily give a false sense of security while blockchain doesnt bring that much value in most markets other than the bubble / hype aspect.

This, to be honest, reminds me of the times of the boom of altcoins in 2017, and how there were ICOs for everything. Lots of use cases in any area one can think of, including the usage of blockchain for non-financial purposes (storing medical records, validating real products of a brand, and I even remember something as bizarre as using blockchain to help track infected bees and recognize their infections). But in the end, all this stuff didn't really happen. There were experiments here and there, but no area was truly disrupted by blockchain. Maybe this still lays in the future, of course, but for now, trying to find ways of using NFTs for real estate sounds like an attempt to stay relevant and catch the trend, but not as something that truly makes sense enough to be widely implemented.

Yes, I don’t really see how blockchain and real-estate can correlate with each other yet. Because for example, some gambling houses are claiming that they are blockchain based just by accepting cryptocurrencies but their actual gambling business got nothing to do with blockchain technology.

As for a long time now, a lot of people have been saying that the blockchain might start playing a role in the real estate industry, but both might not be able to work together, because they are quite different.

Blockchain can’t really be applied in every section, or businesses. It is usually best when it has to deal with transaction, things that are similar or has to do with data like someone has pointed out. And in the case of real estate, with how things works there, I can’t really see the possibility of it working out pretty well in that area. But anyways, it’s all about innovation and if someone can really come up with a way that it would work perfectly, then that wouldn’t be a problem.

Just a fresh portion of useless blockchain hype. We have seen how DAO has replaced traditional companies, how ICO replaced stocks and IPO, how DeFi replaced all of traditional finance, now NFT is going to replace real estate registration (/s obviously).


There's really no big difference between NFT and traditional database owned by a company, both solutions are centralized. NFT database is public, but it doesn't mean it's a good thing, especially from the privacy point of view. So all this noise can be summarized as "lets have a private company managing property rights, instead of the government". But it's being misleadingly presented as if it's all decentralized because of blockchain magic.

Even so the root of trust is still the country and real estate reccord

If you trust a regular website you can even skip any cryptography a just use regular web site.

Signatures can eliminate the trust in the web service modulo middle man attacks on the identity associated with the keys used to produce the signature.

With a cypto currency you dont have to care about this because you dont care about the identity, and all you need to know about the coin ( emission , history, current conditions of transfer) is defined by the blockchain protocol.

But unless everyone can physically check the whole history of the home building, the contracts, the reselling, fixes etc blockchain are not going to bring anything, you still need a trusted third party, either its the state, a real estate agency, or directly an indivual seller that you can identify with their public key.

Having same thoughts while reading the OP. I was calculating the odds on how this tech can really fit in the real world because it does not really connected with it physically? How can one have footprint of the same. I mean even the fossil can be identified for its composition and original date of its survival by means of Carbon Radiology!

But the real estates and blockchain and NFT's? Gosh, so much linking is still pending here and can not be done at proper stance.

The real estate is complex process considering the documentation and who owns it. In my country if they are going to sell the land then they will need to check the acquisition history of last 30 years so that no one can interfere with the purchase or next land owner.

With your calculation our country will need to upload the 30 years of data over blockchain. Possible but not feasible yet.

A signature can be reccorded as well on a centralized serveur no need to copy it on thousands nodes if nobody can verify the validity of the informations.

I can perfectly concieve the possibility to buy real estate via internet, its just blockchain doesnt bring any level of security beyond storing a signature to an unverifiable fact 10 000 times instead of one.

If you transfer a coin mined according to the protocol then it works. If you transfer the property of physical things that nobody can check its useless. You still need to trust the person making the signature even if its replicated on 10000 nodes.

Someone could just sign an act for a fake house with a fake history of fixes and transfer, and store it on 10000 nodes on the blockchain, it doesnt proove the house and the fixes are real.

And i can see the same flawed reasoning around many defi thingies.

So thanks for your assumptions on what my belief are rooted on, did you see this information on a blockchain as well ?

A block chain can record abstract data and signatures. With only that, an entry in the block chain can indicate a transfer of title from one entity to another. That could be useful if it removes the requirement of a trusted third-party to record the transfer. Whether or not the information about the title and its relationship to the physical world can be verified by the network is not relevant to this specific utility.

Your statements are rooted in a fallacy called an argument from incredulity. They state that something is not possible or not useful because I cannot personally conceive of the possibility or the utility.

On the other hand, there are strong arguments that support the claim that a block chain whose value is derived from something beyond its internal value is fragile. That is why many people believe that Defi block chains and even Ethereum are doomed to failure.

Would be hard to penetrate the real-estate market via blockchain technology because this one is quite complicated. There are documentation that needs actual signature of the owner or buyer, but it depends if the system will change. Documentation is the hard part here because most owners or soon-to-be-owners, I believe, will still prefer hard document of their property. A lot are not yet into this blockchain tech market but it may start. It depends on how the blockchain projects will revolutionize the real-estate market.

In a decade? I don't think that NFT craze with be there long time and also I am not really knowledgeable related to real estate investment, I just buy rental properties wnd make passive income so I am not going to get much excited about this. Also we should not be excited too much about announcements because they are doing it to sell their products for higher price so its kind of market strategy to make more money.

I do agree with this.
Blockchain for real estate is a meaningless combination, I suspect are made up to attract investors with a buzzword.
Fir s of all, I hardly doubt you'll ever need a blockchain for any non-monetary application non Bitcoin application.
Secondly, as @IadixDev correctly stated, the oracle and his fairness represent a crucial weak point in any blockchain/physical world interaction.

When we are talking about Blockchain I do think it would be an excellent data storage space undoubtedly but then again the probelm would be the accessibility, the secure and Decentralized option might cause a probelm since more people might be able to find the information but then again the third party would not be needed here perse. Ownership will get a whole new concept and with that they would be able to cut down numerous costs at the end. They can connect people quite easily and generally with real estate you have to go through various agents as well, therefore I do think that might work, but putting up chunks of real estate and selling them as a stock perse might be an issue!! For me personally I would not invest in that, but at the same time it might be same as owning some shares in a company and the people might vote together regarding what to do with the plot of land.

I like the recent trend of blockchain and cryptocurrency powered fractional real estate. Real estate being priced outside the budget of many. Makes it well suited for a fractional ownership format where real estate is divided into many small portions which lower income earners can afford. In some cases fractional chunks of real estate can earn a small amount of passive income. That seems like a natural market trend people might embrace due to its intuitiveness.

The ratio of population to living space is one good barometer of where housing prices are currently via supply and demand. Metrics and statistics relating to housing markets could be tapped to create crypto tokens which reflect or attempt to correct market conditions.

There is very little that a decentralised system can add to real state as such that cannot be achieved already by existing means and by the usual databases and systems. However, there is something to be said about decentralised organisations and new governance systems that can actually make the managing of real state more democratic or easier. I am talking about voting, demonstrating rights, paying and providing collaterals, but all that fall more into financing.

The obvious benefit is that the involvement of third-parties can be reduced by recording transfers of titles with a block chain, as long as those third parties recognize the process as valid. An NFT can be used as a way to register ownership, so it seems like a natural fit to me. That doesn't mean it will happen any time soon, though. Governments tend to protect their economic empires at the expense of their constituents.

The problem imo is that blockchain works well when you have to deal with data that is generated according to certain condition defined by the protocol, for physical / material assets not so much, unless the information can be verified by the whole network which is very unlikely for real estate, and it ends up depending on trusted third parties so blockchain are more going to be a waste than anything.

In a recent interview long-time real estate innovator Teresa Grobecker made the bold claim that in about a decade home titles will be hosted on a blockchain as NFTs.

Setting aside that there's probably a certain amount of showmanship and hyperbole on display here, the conversation touched on a number of ways in which NFTs and the blockchain could transform real estate, including:

- Using NFTs to certify that e.g. certain repairs had been done on home appliances or fixtures (https://youtu.be/MP2xGAfUn0I?t=1007)

- Looking at how real estate might play out in the metaverse (https://youtu.be/MP2xGAfUn0I?t=820)

- The ways in which a blockchain for real estate might make appraisals more objective, reducing bias in the home ownership process and improving prosperity in under-represented communities (https://youtu.be/MP2xGAfUn0I?t=1297)

I would be interested in hearing the community's thoughts, as I'm currently in the process of trying to seriously think through the various real-world use cases for these technologies.