The real estate industry has not just talked about blockchain for years, but it has actually used it. In restricted ways, that is: some tokenization of assets for fractional ownership here and private asset trading there.
“Blockchain is slowly making its way into real estate, but let’s be honest, it’s still early days,” Mitch DiRaimondo, co-founder and lead project manager at CRE developer SteelWave Digital, told GlobeSt.com. “The tech is ready, but the industry isn’t. Most of what’s happening now is limited to test cases and niche platforms. Real momentum is building under the surface, but you have to know where to look. Blockchain is fixing real pain points — friction, settlement delays, lack of liquidity — but we’re still laying the pipes.”
Tech takes a long time, and then adopting it can be just as long, if not even more of a wait. Potential users have to understand what it can do and then eventually realize that the capabilities could fit into practical needs. Historically, this has been much harder to do than it sounds, particularly as the people who provide the tech are typically on one side of a deep gap, and the people who understand the problems it could solve are on the other.
Recommended For You
“In some ways, it’s unclear what problem [blockchain is] solving,” says Stephen Rutenberg, a partner at Polsinelli. “On the intellectual level, it’s fascinating. The idea of self-executing contracts is just fascinating for so many legal areas.” These are contracts implemented in executable software that can take actions when the conditions fit, for example, making payments at particular times.
Rutenberg added, “in some cases, it’s a philosophical question. Is a self-executing system more fair [on its own], or is it more fair with human involvement and some control?” CRE has a long history and highly established chains of processes. There are inefficiencies, but that has some benefits. Some parties can step into a process if something is going wrong, for example.
Rutenberg mentions Bitcoin as a technology that allows the transmission of an original without an intermediary or to verify a transaction. “It’s not foolproof,” he says. “Even to the extent one is, do you want that, or do you want recourse? Intermediaries allowed the world to develop to where it is.”
That might be the biggest point. With paperwork and inefficiencies, there are ways to address risk. Speed and more efficiency are not necessarily better if they can enable disaster to happen. Automating is not past that, but going through it for a robust approach takes a long time to happen.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
