Applications of Blockchain Technology in Land Administration Systems

This project’s objective is to investigate a blockchain-based reorganisation of urban land systems and housing markets. This is important because a growing number of governments engage with blockchain-opportunities to upgrade their national land administration systems (LAS). One example that builds on reorganised LAS are new regimes of property rights, i.e. fractionalised property rights, as they may create entirely new possibilities for the real estate industry – but also create new risks. Hence, blockchain-based transitioning bears the potential for systemic changes such as the way cities are build and properties are owned, traded and financed. Crucially, home ownership forms the asset base for individuals, cities and, increasingly, entire jurisdictions. By implication, policymakers, real estate investors and developers, and (future) home owners would need to adapt to this new reality. Adaptation requires new stylised facts, which this PhD project seeks to develop when entering this largely “uncharted territory” of research. This project employs an innovative, comparative, in-depth research design based on a quantitative-qualitative method triangulation to analyse new blockchain trends in Luxembourg, Sweden and the UK. Each of these jurisdictions subscribes to a different deeds and titles system to register land. This project seeks to identify what causes a specific system’s ‘proneness’ to blockchain implementation, and what are directions and degree of a country’s resulting reorganisation of land and real estate markets.
Grosvenor and other real estate developers and investment firms, but also policy makers in different jurisdictions, will greatly benefit from this research. Its outcomes aim at preparing technical systems, investment systems, legal systems and planning systems for the challenges this transition may well bring. This project is embedded in a unique team architecture of LISER, Grosvenor, Deloitte and UL SnT, which combines the necessary practitioners’ and academic knowledge on real estate, architecture, computer science, and new “market making” in novel ways.