An introduction to real estate tokenization on AWS

Tokenization is the process of creating a digital asset on a blockchain that can represent various assets, including physical assets, digital assets, or even rights of ownership. In this post, we explore the advantages of tokenizing real estate assets using blockchain technology in order to streamline property ownership transfers. We discuss the benefits of tokenization and how it can modernize existing real estate processes, which could potentially extend to other industries and asset classes.

According to a recent study by the Consumer Federation of America, the costs associated with intermediaries involved in a traditional home sale, such as real estate agents, lenders, title companies, and escrow services, can account for 5-6% of the home’s value. This can significantly increase the overall expense and costs associated with the settlement and transfer of ownership for property buyers. By converting property rights into digital tokens, processes related to the purchase, sale, and transfer of ownership of a property can be automated.

Digital tokens can represent ownership in real-world assets (RWA’s), such as parking lots, office buildings, or self-storage facilities. According to a Citibank forecast from March 2023, the total addressable market (TAM) for tokenized real-estate is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030. These programmable tokens can take the form of full ownership or fractionalized ownership.

While tokenization cannot directly modify the legal concept of property ownership, it can serve as a reliable record-keeping system for ownership transfers. Smart contracts, programs that run on the blockchain, can be integrated with existing legal processes which govern property ownership. For example, a token could be created that represents the ownership of a legal entity (Special Purpose Vehicle, trust, etc.). This entity would own a property’s title deed. Ownership transfers are then facilitated by the sale of the tokenized assets. Smart contracts can automate and record these transfers and ownership changes, while the underlying legal processes for property ownership remain in place.

Advantages of real estate tokenization

Digital assets can serve as a medium of exchange, a representation of a digital item, or even a registry of a physical property. With these assets stored on a tamper-evident public ledger, property transactions and transfer of ownership can be made in a transparent manner. Other advantages of tokenizing physical property include faster processing times, as blockchain transactions can be validated and recorded almost instantly without the need for lengthy manual processes. Transaction costs are also reduced by removing dependency on intermediaries and automating many steps. The ability to conduct autonomous transactions programmed into the tokens themselves further limits the reliance on third-party facilitators. Additionally, tokenization increases liquidity in the real estate market by fractionizing property ownership into tradable tokens, opening the doors to a wider pool of participants to participate in property ownership.

One key innovation enabled by tokenizing real estate is the ability to generate recurring revenue through settlement fees on an otherwise illiquid asset class. When a tokenized property is sold or transferred, a small percentage-based settlement fee can be automatically charged and remitted to the token creator or platform it is listed on. This opens up a new revenue model, allowing real estate owners to earn from subsequent trades of a property token, similar to how payment processors earn on credit card transactions.

One of the key benefits of tokenizing real estate assets is that it allows for new extensions and innovations to traditional real estate processes and transactions, thanks to the programmable nature of blockchain technology. For example, tokenization enables fractional ownership, dividing properties into proportional digital tokens that can be traded more frequently among a wider pool of investors. While individual transaction fees may be lower than traditional real estate deals, the potential for high volumes of fractional “property transfers” can generate a stream of recurring revenue. These settlement fees can be embedded into the token’s smart contracts, ensuring they are automatically applied and remitted with each trade.

Full ownership

One application of tokenization is representing the full, legal ownership of an asset like real estate. Traditional methods like title deeds already serve this purpose of establishing ownership. However, tokenization on blockchain can provide some additional benefits:

1. Facilitating buying and selling through open, digital marketplaces with greater accessibility and liquidity.
2. Maintaining a comprehensive, immutable historical record of ownership transfers and property details on the blockchain.
3. Enabling secure cryptographic verification of ownership through digital signatures using the owner’s private key, simplifying proof of ownership.

While the core concept of full ownership already exists, tokenization can streamline and enhance certain aspects of the process. The concept of full ownership of real estate is currently in practice in the industry, but it is still in its early stages of adoption.

Fractional ownership

The tokenization of real estate isn’t limited to traditional buying and selling practices, which involve full ownership of a given property. A property can be fractionalized and sold by utilizing various token standards. Fractionalization refers to the process of dividing the ownership of an asset into small fractions, allowing for increased accessibility and investment opportunities. For example, a property can be broken down into tokens that symbolize a certain percentage of ownership rights of a given property. By fractionalizing ownership rights, the traditional barriers associated with high-value investments will be lowered by a significant factor. This gives individuals around the world the ability to engage in global real estate markets, allowing for further portfolio diversification and the ability for one to benefit from the cash flow of a specific property. This also provides enterprises opportunities to crowdsource real estate investments, while still maintaining over 50% ownership.

Smart contracts for ownership transfers

In a traditional real estate transaction, there are several processes that involve manual actions such as inspections, negotiations post-inspection, and escrow. While the actual processes are still carried out manually, the documentation and record-keeping associated with these processes can be digitized by implementing them programmatically.

If a real estate owner wishes to transfer their property to a new owner, this would be an instance where logic is represented via a smart contract. By leveraging smart contracts, the transfer of real estate ownership can be automated, transparent, and secure. For starters, this logic can be implemented through the transferFrom and approve functions, which can be inherited from established token standards like ERC-20 or ERC-721.

However, real estate transactions often involve complex legal and regulatory requirements. Various security token offering (STO) frameworks, such as ERC-1400 and ERC-3643, have been developed to facilitate the management and compliant transfer of tokenized assets, including real estate properties. These frameworks provide additional features and mechanisms to ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations, such as know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements.

Connecting blockchains to external data sources

To ensure the tokenized real estate asset is accurately represented, the process can involve connecting the blockchain to external data sources. An oracle solution allows for bridging data from off-chain databases, such as land registries or title deed information, to the smart contracts on the blockchain. Oracles can additionally provide fair market valuations and other financial information to the smart contract, verifying that a digital token is backed by an equivalent amount of collateral and that buyers can participate in transparent, auditable transactions.

The role of AWS in real estate tokenization

AWS provides a comprehensive set of cloud services that can facilitate the tokenization of real estate assets. Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) is a fully managed service that allows you to access and query blockchain networks such as Ethereum and Polygon. By using AMB, organizations can eliminate the overhead of provisioning and managing blockchain infrastructure, allowing them to focus on building and deploying their tokenization applications.

Additionally, AWS offers a wide range of complementary services that can be integrated with blockchain solutions. For example, AWS Lambda can be used to build serverless functions that interact with smart contracts, enabling the automation of various real estate processes. Amazon API Gateway can expose these Lambda functions’ functionality through APIs, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate blockchain capabilities into their applications. These APIs can facilitate writing data to the blockchain via transactions, as well as reading data from a blockchain network, while also allowing integration with external systems and services.

Amazon DynamoDB can serve as an off-chain database for recording real estate transactions and ownership history, providing a scalable and highly available off-chain data store. AWS additionally offers robust security services that enhance the security posture of blockchain solutions. These include AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for securely managing and controlling cryptographic keys, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for granular access control and limiting access to sensitive blockchain resources, and AWS Nitro Enclaves for executing sensitive operations within a secure, isolated environment.

These AWS services can be seamlessly integrated to enable secure, scalable, and reliable tokenization solutions.

Conclusion

Leveraging tokenization to enhance the operational efficiency of the real estate industry has the potential to modernize investment strategies and transactions for buying, selling, or investing in properties. Increased research and development can propel tokenized real estate into a mainstream investment option in the near future.

This post serves as a starting point to understand how tokenization can unlock liquidity in the traditionally illiquid real estate asset class. To learn more about financial services tokenization use cases, refer to Build a digital asset tokenization framework for financial services use cases using Amazon Managed Blockchain – Part 1. If you would like to explore a blockchain workload on AWS, reach out to web3-wwso@amazon.com.

About the Authors

Simon Goldberg is a Blockchain/Web3 Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. Outside of work, he enjoys music production, reading, climbing, tennis, hiking, attending concerts, and researching Web3 technologies.

Damu Winston is the Global Head of Web3 Innovations (WWRE) at Amazon. Damu brings two decades of experience in delivering innovative solutions that leverage breakthrough technologies such as Generative AI, Blockchain, Voice-first, AR/VR, Metaverse, and Simulations. His expertise spans across multiple industries, including Financial Services, Nuclear Energy, Healthcare & Public Health, Real Estate, and Information Technology. He is dedicated to helping our clients unlock their full potential and drive next generation impact through harnessing these groundbreaking technologies.

Chance Anderson is a Product Coordinator supporting Amazon Global Realty’s Web3 Innovation team. With a diverse range of experiences spanning multiple industries and functional areas, including project and product management as well as strategy consulting, Chance has developed expertise in leveraging cutting-edge technologies to drive innovation and impact. Driven by a strong analytical mindset, he is dedicated to unlocking customers’ full potential by harnessing emerging technologies to deliver transformative solutions.