Disruption in real estate markets? Blockchain land register implementation in Sweden

This Master-thesis proposal seeks to better comprehend newly emerging, Blockchain-based land registries and their potential impacts on a variety of actors involved, their practices and routines, all of which can be summarised as a new sociotechnical configuration (Rip and Kemp, 1998). While the technological advantages of Blockchain-based solutions for the real estate industry are well known and communicated, the broader societal implications of such technological disruptions are less clear. The transformation of land registries and mortgage markets is a highly topical area, and this emerging theme has so far hardly attracted scholarly research. This thesis seeks to find some first answers and to contribute to this under-researched field. Real estate markets in Western societies are confronted with severe problems reaching from housing shortages to highly speculative land policies and private withholding strategies of land parcels to which the old-fashioned models of land registries have fundamentally contributed. Luxembourg is only one among many examples. This Master-thesis would be a first step to better comprehend Blockchain-based land registries, the challenges encountered when introducing the technology and its precise workings, as well as the broader implications for the actors / ecologies, enabling and limiting factors, and the perceived threats and opportunities. Based on these first results, further studies covering a comparative case study research design and/or an investigation into much broader political and societal implications could be feasible.