How much potential is there in blockchain? Consider the story of the Long Island Ice Tea Company who changed their name to the Long Island Blockchain Corp – and their stock jumped 200% on the news! Now it’s the real estate industry’s turn.
Using blockchain technology to record property ownership may revolutionize real estate as we know it today. The best part of this blockchain application is that the entire industry can now be tokenized, allowing real estate – or fractions of a piece of real estate – to be easily bought and sold in a liquid marketplace via security token offerings in a process known as “tokenization”. And with tokenization comes democratization.
Democratization is basically the action of making something accessible to everyone. What that means is tokenizing real estate from platforms such as the World Token Market makes real estate crowdfunding available to all.
Corigin Ventures wrote an interesting white paper entitled “Waking Up from the Dream of Real Estate Tokenization” which is a must-read to understand the potential and power that tokenization possesses. The article goes over why an investor would allocate funds to a tokenized real estate asset, why a sponsor would want to tokenize an asset, and some tokenization startup business models. With three major aspects of tokenization including democratization, investment liquidity and blockchain efficiencies, you can make the argument that distributed ledger technology such as blockchain is changing and will change the entire lifecycle of a real estate transaction. In fact, companies have already successful tokenized commercial properties already.
Blockchain’s promise is the goal of democratizing asset classes – and that will certainly take time. Sharing trusted immutable information is the key to the technology. There are many reasons to tokenize real estate, but being able to reach a large pool of investors is a major impact that makes democratization a goal worth striving for. But unlike the problems plaguing many cryptocurrencies, now there’s a way to make tokenized real estate offerings a liquid investment with a secondary market. This point makes Security Token Offerings extremely attractive to both issuers and investors as these tokens can be bought and sold with the entire process being seamlessly integrated with transfer agent custody. So now, not only can real estate be democratized (available to anyone), but also liquid (bought and sold at will). Wow! How many times have you heard investors lament about having to “hold” illiquid real estate? Enter blockchain. Enter the World Token Market!
The potential of blockchain is certainly undeniable – and, as we are seeing significant examples of its success already, the democratization aspect of real estate tokenziation is certainly undeniable as well. And while many may still be skeptical of the power of tokenization (and the ability to create a secondary market for those security token assets), we invite you to contact us to view a live demo on how the entire process works!