Blockchain’s Grand Promise for the Real Estate Sector: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In recent years, blockchain technology has received increasing attention in the real estate literature. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that blockchains could provide some added benefits for the real estate sector even in the current hybrid settings, where blockchain is usually just an add-on to existing systems. This research provides an up-to-date and systematic understanding of blockchain’s theoretical potential, pros, and cons for the real estate sector. The research aims to understand why and where to apply blockchain in real estate by conducting a systematic review that identified 296 relevant documents and performed a thematic content analysis. The identified blockchain adoption proposals were classified using standardized real estate vocabulary. Most of the literature focused on blockchain possibilities within land administration, followed by property transactions, real estate investment, leasing and renting, and real estate administration. However, real estate development and real estate maintenance did not appear as attractive real estate subsectors for blockchain. This paper provides a detailed analysis of blockchain technology’s possibilities for each real estate subsector, i.e., blockchain merits, and discusses the pros and cons. Last, this review provides suggestions for future research directions.