Research

Design of the Smart Contract: A Use Case for Real Estate

Year 2018
Author Ioannis Karamitsos, Maria Papadaki, Nedaa Baker Al Barghuthi
Publisher Scientific Resear
Link View Research Paper

Globally, real estate is undergoing a major evolution and transformation towards smart cities. Smart cities are being developed and a plethora of network, services, and transactions are integrated into the city planning initially and daily use. It is anticipated that the evolution of technology not only improves life for tenants or office workers, but also enhances building performance and sustainable energy.

But how can blockchain technology improve things within the real estate industry? This paper looks at a multitude of benefits, some of which are listed below.

  1. The ability for different parties can modify database
    Within the ecosystem, multiple parties such as owners, tenants, and financial management (FM) operators involve the management of real estate properties. They have access to modify a variety of information with the blockchain. This eliminates the modification between the parties.
  2. A trustless network between parties 
    It’s trustless among entities and parties: During the real estate development, different entities might not have any business relationships previously. Thus, this might increase the lack of trust.
  3. The advantage of disintermediation: With the blockchain, trusted intermediators such as notary and brokers are not required since the transactions can be independently verified and automatically validated.
  4. Transactions advantage: In real estate companies, different transactions related to different parties (such as landlords, tenants and FM services) are part of the same database. The real estate companies face difficulties to separate the number of invoices. With blockchain technology, we can separate transactions between the parties seeking to improve the efficiency of the invoicing process.