We all know the blockchain space is well-hyped, and many companies use that hype to their advantage.

Our mission at Disruptor Daily is to drive the adoption of blockchain technology, and to do that, we’re highlighting those companies that are truly leveraging the blockchain for all its potential.

To help recognize the companies out there developing practical use cases for the real estate industry, we are excited to announce our first annual Blockchain In Real Estate Use Case Award!

Here’s how the awards will work:

Our readers have nominated the companies below and until October 11th, you will now have the chance to vote for your favorite use case!

This is your opportunity to vote for the companies you feel have the most practical blockchain use case for the real estate industry.

In order to be an eligible voter, please follow the steps below:

Step 1: Carefully review the use cases below and vote for the one you feel could have the biggest impact.

Step 2: Cast your vote.

Step 3: Share this page and encourage others to vote!

*To maintain the integrity of the awards series, ALL votes must be linked to a LinkedIn page. We will manually review each vote and ensure there is a legitimate LinkedIn profile associated with the name. All votes that do not pass this test will be discarded*

AREX is a SaaS that works as a dealmaking platform and that aims to solve the problems of low liquidity and global accessibility in the Real Estate markets. In order to solve these problems, we have created a platform that allows both corporates and investors to list and transact their assets globally. In this structure, Blockchain & AI are used as an enabler to certify, analyze and store, in an immutable shared database, documents and digital IDs that will later serve to create the basis for an international Real Estate market as liquid and efficient as the stock markets are nowadays. At AREX we firmly believe that the first step in order to create this market is to build strong foundations, and that starts by digitalizing traditional transactional systems.

Beenest allows business travelers to book a home or rental property in a way that seamlessly uses blockchain technology.

Blocksquare offers a compliant, turn-key, white-label solution that enables companies world-wide to convert any real estate property into a 100,000 digital shares that represent tokenized debt in a property.

Last year we worked on a case study for a client, a real estate fund in South Africa, who was interested in exploring alternative exit strategies for one of their trophy assets – a single retail property they valued at 200M.

Our product would allow the client to place 10% of the title on an SPV, issue 100,000 digital shares (tokens) then sold to investors through multiple auctions organized in partnership with a prominent SA auction house. With tokenization, our client would avoid single buyer negotiations by adressing a larger pool of investors. Any premium captured through the auction, would reflect on the asset’s total valuation, while investors would be now able to expose themselves to a safer asset.

You wouldn’t mail a letter when you can send an email. A similar principle applies to the real estate fund industry. Real estate developers and fund managers seek a solution for the digital age but remain limited by paper-based processes. The restrictions of an outdated system make it difficult to build a large international, diversified investor pool.

Geographical restrictions: Banking infrastructure, language barriers, and local laws obstruct cross-border investments.

Complicated and slow: Notaries, escrows, and banks are just some of the intermediaries slowing down transactions. AML/KYC is still done on paper.

Expensive: Creating global certificates via traditional financial institutions is cost-intensive. Trading shares incurs massive bureaucratic overhead.

Illiquidity: Real estate fund shares are among the most illiquid asset classes worldwide.

Brickblock provides the technological infrastructure to fully digitise the investment process of real estate fund managers and advisors. We offer tools to streamline every step of the fund lifecycle: AML/KYC verification, contract signatures, share issuance and registry, payouts and secondary market tradability. All online, anytime. Our turnkey solution, under the brand ScalingFunds, provides a better experience to the investors, while allowing fund managers to focus on what they do best.

Faster and cheaper fundraising process: Our digital solution replaces paper-based processes to reduce distribution costs, allow lower minimum ticket sizes, and more efficiently raise funds.

Transparency: Fund managers gain detailed insights on prime leads and committed investors thanks to a fully transparent, secure, and exportable dashboard.

New markets access: Quick and effortless onboarding of private and institutional investors globally, 24/7, with our whitelabeled digital platform.

Increased liquidity: Investors benefit from shorter hold periods thanks to our built-in secondary market, where they can seamlessly and securely transfer their digital shares to other eligible investors.

BrikkApp is building the world's first property investment aggregator & marketplace that enables direct buying and selling from just few hundred EUR.

BrikkApp‘s vision is to allow our users to access verified & trustworthy information about online property investment platforms all across the world, select the best deals and buy and sell investments all in one dashboard. We create a shared decentralised database of verified transactions, users, and platforms.

We bring an alternative to traditional property investing through local real estate funds or private investments. Imagine that you invest worldwide and create an international investment property investment portfolio, while you have invested as little as few hundred or thousands of dollars. You can hold onto your investment until the end of its maturity cycle or you can securely re-sell using our blockchain-based secondary market. Our users always keep full power and you know your investments are securely recorded into our blockchain. They need not to worry about the liquidity of your assets as these are traded to a wide pool of international audience.

BrikkApp links fintech, real estate, investments, crowdfunding, and blockchain and brings the benefits of these intersections to our users all around the world.

Harbor is a digital platform for alternative asset investment and management. Investors, issuers, and placement managers can handle everything from onboarding to client management using the Harbor platform.

HouseCoin Australia is tokenizing Australian residential real estate and lowering the barrier of entry for everyone to be able to invest in real estate.

Real estate transactions are slow, insecure and complex. The closing process involves 8+ intermediaries and can take +45 days to close on a home or commercial property. The process starts with listing the property on several uncommunicative applications and ends through the exchange of sensitive information in the form of email. The lack of transparency, security, and communication has caused wire fraud to increase 1,000% since 2015 in addition to costing the real estate industry billions in lost time, stolen funds and redundant data verification.

Imbrex provides a secure, end-to-end solution to manage real estate transactions from initial listing to close. Deal participants have full control of their listings, transaction documents, and the closing process. Blockchain backs our mission to reduce the fragmentation of property data and inefficiencies, while also eliminating the risk of wire fraud through the use of smart contracts. By using blockchain and other web3 technologies, imbrex flips the current paradigm where the application providers are in control of the transaction to the deal participants themselves. This results in faster, more transparent and secure real estate transactions for everyone.

Commercial Real Estate is inaccessible to the public and REITs do not solve the problem because they provide low returns due to leverage regulation limitations. Jointer improves on a REIT and doubles its returns by utilizing blockchain leverage technology. Jointer's unique approach issues tokens pegged to a REIT Index with 2X leverage providing investors diversification and liquidity while allowing property owners to receive faster funding with one check, from one source. Now, as tokenization continues to take off in the market, Jointer presents a tangible use case solution to the Commercial Real Estate equity acquisition market, which is valued at $14 trillion as of 2018. With Jointer, property owners no longer have to spend costly resources to syndicate deals and investors no longer have to worry about expensive due diligence and time-consuming diversification. Jointer is a commercial real estate blockchain startup based in Silicon Valley, CA and Tel Aviv, Israel. Jointer won a $1,000,000 “Best Startup in the World” prize in 2018 during EDGE196’s worldwide competition between 4,000 startups and 196 countries and winner of the Disruptive Startup Award at Stanford University in 2019 by a panel of Google, SoftBank, Bain Capital, Thomson Reuters, Stanford Angels, BMW, Andreessen, NEA, and other top VC Funds. Jointer’s prestigious advisory group includes Nobel Prize Winners, the previous Chairman of the SEC, the previous Vice Chairman of the NASDAQ, founder of Visa, the previous Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of State, the CFO of Yahoo, the co-creator of Bitcoin’s prototype and other luminaries.

When buying a property, the information required to make an informed decision is often difficult to acquire, and largely provided by estate agents who are motivated to “close the deal”. The property’s repairs history, running costs, encumbrances, as well as local information such as distance to schools, shopping, public transport are simply not 100% transparent. When purchasing a property, the transaction speed can also be very slow. Getting the title deed to a property can take months, in some countries even years. The entry level for purchasing property is extremely high and takes years of saving for most people, and the costs associated with property transactions such as estate agent fees, surveys, legal fees, notaries etc. can be very high. Similarly, selling a property can be slow, arduous and subject to even more fees. Finally, the property investment world specifically is difficult to get into, as it is subject to high entry levels, low liquidity, poor transparency (even for the tax man), and on top of that most “good” deals never reach the market, as insiders get to cherry pick. Regulatory differences create further barriers in the case of cross-border transactions.

On the Max Crowdfund platform, all documentation is standardised and administration is automated (investor onboarding, investment process, interest payments, monthly, quarterly and yearly reports, etc.), allowing us to lower the entry level to as little as €1,000 (and potentially €100 in the future), making property investing affordable and accessible to all. Blockchain technology allows for all property related activities to be irreversibly recorded and publicly available, so there can be no doubt about: past problems, dates of renovations made, previous sales prices, recent rental yields etc. The transaction speed and cost are also greatly improved by the platform, as purchase and rental agreements are standardised, and in line with local regulations, and are registered on the blockchain within minutes. Using the Max Crowdfund platform, property projects can raise funds by issuing Security Tokens, which are registered on the blockchain and are instantly tradable (regulatory restrictions apply) for a minimal cost, allowing users to liquidate their investments as inexpensively and easily as acquiring them in the first place. Max Crowdfund will obtain licenses from financial authorities in their countries of operation and passport this license throughout Europe. Peer-to-peer trading will be allowed under the new European Legislation, and additional licenses will be obtained when required. This, alongside the platform being available in many languages, allows for cross- border transactions and opens up investment opportunities to a global audience that was previously limited.

Propy is a real estate transaction management platform that revamps the purchase process by leveraging the latest in groupware and blockchain technology. Groupware, or software that facilitates teamwork, ensures transparency and safe experience for agents and clients alike. Blockchain technology boosts security by encrypting client information and guaranteeing its integrity in perpetuity. Data stored on the blockchain is essentially hack-proof.

Loss, Theft, Disaster and Hack-Proof

All signed documents are encrypted and stored on the blockchain, a boon for deed registration. Rather than wait for an agent to physically deliver the deed to a county office, a seller can send a copy straight through the Propy platform. The buyer will be able to verify its receipt instantly, and the data will be insulated from loss, theft, and natural disaster – all while retaining the regular hack-proof guarantee.

Borderless by Design

Blockchain technology may be of greatest benefit to the nearly 40% of foreign buyers of U.S. residential real estate who live outside the country. Thanks to the tech, the overseas crowd can finally enjoy real-time access to transactions without having to compromise on security.

Propy is friendly to foreigners in several ways. Smart contracts can be programmed from anywhere, providing overseas actors with control on par with their stateside counterparts. In addition, the platform accepts foreign currency and cryptocurrency, which skips the hassle of timing deals around exchange rates.

RealBlocks is a technology-enhanced platform for illiquid alternative fund managers that allows for:

Simplified subscription process for alternative investment funds.

Enhanced liquidity through a secure, dark-pool, peer-to-peer trading platform.

International distribution leveraging an offshore feeder fund structure.

Investing in U.S. real estate can be a lucrative endeavor and an exciting path toward passive income. However, this investment vehicle has traditionally been only accessible to wealthy individuals with large amounts of capital required to make real estate investing truly feasible. Add in the typical headaches of high transaction costs, margin-intensive middlemen, restrictive governments, and laborious documentation processes, and it’s easy to see why many international investors shy away from U.S. real estate.

Enter RealT, a company built to remove these traditional hassles and create a global marketplace promising real estate investment opportunities to anyone, anywhere. Using DLT technology, RealT has developed a fully-compliant, trusted, and user-friendly platform that leverages the most significant benefits of public blockchains — permissionless global access, asset fractionalization, instant settlement, and peer-to-peer transactions — to deliver improved levels of liquidity.

How it works: since real estate cannot be directly tokenized in the United States, each property on the RealT platform has a digital deed. Ownership of this deed is divided across a number of “RealTokens,” digital tokens on Ethereum, each of which represents a membership share interest. Based on token share, owners collect daily rent revenue, and vote on property decisions such as maintenance and leasing. Each property has a dedicated property management team. Collecting daily rent, sourcing tenants, and managing repairs has never been easier and with investment amounts starting at as little as $60 per token, people from all income brackets can participate in investing in an asset class previously accessible only to the wealthy.

Welcome to the future of real estate, where a new generation of investors will be able to purchase, trade, and transfer real estate frictionlessly. Learn more at: www.realt.co.

Reasi automates property settlements so you can transact real estate using only your phone. More importantly, we modernize and fix a broken process.

If you've wondered why home-buying sucks, it's because of lousy escrow. Escrow stitches together all the loose ends in a transaction – commission agreements, mortgage, buyer down payment – and pulls everything into the final closing day. It's expensive because the job is paper-based and manual, and overall it's so shoddy that buyers are getting their down payments stolen by the billions thru wire fraud.

We've created Reasi to bring convenience and efficiency to this broken real estate closing process. We leverage blockchain smart contracts to act as our autonomous escrow agent who ensures all requirements are met. Reasi streamlines all legal documents and money deposits in a workspace shared by all parties. With Reasi, customers finally gain the real-time transparency, efficiency, and convenience that is demanded today.

Rentberry streamlines the rental tasks from A to Z and uses the ERC-20 BERRY token to power the co-signer network feature.

The co-signer network allows tenants to raise funds and finance their security deposit, while the Rentberry platform community members can back tenants and get the 5-10% interest in return. It allows to unfreeze the money held in long-term rental deposits making the regular bank loans outdated.

Rentberry uses smart-contracts to power this feature. Smart-contracts make sure that all parties (landlords, tenants, co-signers) will have fast, secure, and fraud-free transactions.

In 2018, Rentberry also became the largest PropTech ICO raising $30 to support the blockchain use case in the long-term renting niche, released the mobile apps, and launched in 50+ countries.

The onerous steps involved in a real estate transaction rely on cumbersome paperwork, long wait times and lack of trust between parties. In 2017, ShelterZoom launched the world’s first blockchain-based platform that eliminates the paperwork, speeds up the process and increases the trust and transparency throughout the entire negotiations, all at a lower cost of overhead for the agents, consumers and brokerages.

Winners of the 2018 SIIA CODiE Best Emerging Technology Award, which recognizes “high-impact products”, ShelterZoom’s blockchain-powered tools provide a 1-Button™ solution that solves the most intractable problems with real estate transactions. With Offer Now (or Rent Now in the case of leaseholds), anyone can make an offer on any type of property from anywhere in the world online—even through mobile. Everything is secure and transparent due to the automated implementation of a “smart contract.” This means no paperwork, no worries that your offer hasn't been presented, no signing of documents over and over again and an electronic trail of each stage of the negotiations. A personal dashboard keeps track of everything.

To eliminate manual work completely, ShelterZoom’s patent-pending technology creates interconnectivity and interoperability for data, documents, processes and people across the real estate value chain. ShelterZoom is the first company in the world to digitize all forms and contracts and make data transferable from the beginning (such as a listing agreement) all the way to closing. It is also the first to “tokenize” the forms and contracts that make contract terms negotiable, matchable and executable, along with the ownership being divisible and transferable. By connecting data from multiple components within a transaction, ShelterZoom has brought the concept behind the Internet of Things to legally-binding agreements. Real estate transactions are setting the stage for the “Contract of Things”TM – the next phase in the evolution of the internet.