Real Estate Working Group
Purpose
The Working Group promotes the potential of blockchain applications in the Real Estate industry. Blockchain solutions can help save resources, reduce carbon emissions and make internal processes more sustainable.
Objectives for 2021
The WG has agreed on three objectives around which it will carry out its annual work:
The common goal of the objectives is to enhance understanding of blockchain solutions in the real estate sector.
- - Create in-depth Real Estate insights by focusing on identifying research-outputs and best practices about the Unique Object Identifier (UOI) in cooperation with the FIBREE UOI Working Group, EC and the sub-working group of the INATBA WG Climate Action that focusses on Real Estate (all united in the so called ‘D2I2-consortium’)
- - Expand the knowledge of tokenization as a means of Real Estate financing
- - Enhance knowledge on the digitization of Land Registries
Outputs for 2021
Among others, the WG aims to publish a report/manual on blockchain and land registry systems based on survey data, launch a research project on tokenization in real estate and build out their work on the UOI with insights from government use cases.
Work to Date
Subgroup 2 (land registries) hosted two roundtables on the role of blockchain in the land registries sector in June and October.
The UOI subgroup published a first report with FIBREE on the climate action applicability of the Unique Object Identifier in the built environment. They hosted a follow-up event on use cases, including an application for the government of the Netherlands.
Sub-Groups
The Real Estate WG-Subgroups:
The Real Estate Working group is divided in three sub-groups, each focused on a different work-stream:
- The Unique Object Identifier sub-group aims at creating a global property/object identification system to reorganize collection and analysis of property/object-related data in an efficient and more decentralized way. The subgroup has presently submitted an application as an EBSI-use case to the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) and cooperates with the Foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate (FIBREE), the Climate Chain Coalition and an international public/private consortium.
- The Tokenization sub-group focuses on promoting the use of tokenization as a novel means of financing for Real Estate.
- The Land Registry sub-group focuses on creating knowledge on how blockchain improves global land registry processes.
Why is it essential?
Real Estate is the world’s biggest asset class. A building is not a construction on its own but is rather a large long-term investment that impacts and is impacted by its surrounding. The built environment is a complex multi-stakeholder network that is heavily regulated. In a digital world built on blockchain, a lot of the present information flows between public and private parties can be reorganized more efficiently. Because the impact of this change on society will be great, preparation and interaction with all stakeholders will be crucial to canalize this change in the right direction with alignment of all relevant public bodies.
