Buying, selling, renting, leasing, financing, administration — you name it, practically every aspect of real estate management is utterly time-consuming and inefficient. There’s too much paperwork, too much data, and too many intermediaries involved. Blockchain is here to change that. We got to the bottom of the latest report from Deloitte to help you find out how.

Problem #1. Cumbersome and Inaccurate Property Search

Since real estate data is largely spread across fragmented, non-standardized listings, searching for any property-related information, such as location, owner, and rental rates, becomes a major headache for all parties involved in the process. Moreover, in such a non-interoperable ecosystem, data is susceptible to distortion, which often results in inaccurate, costly decisions.

Solution: introducing a blockchain-driven MLS (multiple listing service) that enables brokers to finally take control over their data, now more clean and reliable than ever.

Problem #2. Paper-driven, Ineffective Due Diligence

Conducting a real estate selling, buying or leasing transaction requires stakeholders to spend a lot of time assessing the property legally and financially, which can be massively time-consuming due to tons of documents involved. Moreover, it’s manual work by nature, so information is always at risk of being lost or distorted.

Solution: building digital identities running on the blockchain and consolidating data on properties, organizations and individuals — all in digital format. This would make pre-transaction activities easier and increase the overall accuracy of real estate data.

Problem #3. Convoluted Management of Transactions

Lease agreements often involve execution and tracking of multiple transactions on a regular basis, which might be a heavy time and financial burden for stakeholders when it comes to accounting, ensuring compliance, and managing cash flows.

Solution: moving from the traditional lease contracts to blockchain-based smart tenancy agreements to allow transparency in terms and transactions as well as automated payments to stakeholders.

Problem #4. Delayed Decision-making

As real estate data is scattered across proprietary systems and organizations, managers often have to make dubious and untimely decisions, dealing with property information that is duplicated, opaque and hard to exchange.

Solution: developing a shared database with the blockchain at its core to aggregate high-quality and real-time data that will enable players to use predictive analytics and make more mature leasing and property decisions.

Problem #5. Slow and Expensive Transactions

A due diligence process usually involves massive paperwork and several parties, which may result in as much as 3 months of waiting to get a finance approval required to conduct a transaction.

Solution: using a combination of digital identities and smart contracts to speed up financing and payments through automated documentation, real-time tracking of contracts, and minimized delays due to fewer middlemen in the loop.

It’s Getting Real

One thing is clear: the historically convoluted real estate industry won’t go so easily because most players have been profiting heavily from the imperfections of the current system. Therefore, many of them are still to be convinced of the value blockchain can bring to the table.

Luckily, blockchain platforms like genEOS are helping established businesses and startups to ease the development and launch of decentralized applications, and thus build a stronger case for a new, blockchain-powered real estate market.