Real Estate Transactions, better on chain?

Intro

Completing a real estate transaction in the modern era remains glacially slow and notoriously expensive. The process necessitates coordination amongst a wide range of participants including buyers and sellers and their agents, listing services and portals, registrars and notaries, third-party financiers, title companies, escrow services, insurance providers and more. Antiquated record keeping - where land registries and associated property titles may go back hundreds of years - combines with complex legal requirements to make each step of the process doubly painstaking.

While the march of technology is breaking down barriers in the real estate transaction process, there has yet to emerge a solution offering the order-of-magnitude-level improvement needed.

Could a blockchain supported, decentralized platform provide a solution?

This article, in seeking to answer that question, outlines the challenges in the status quo, discusses the viability of such a solution, and explores some of its current and potential applications.

Part I: Challenges in the status quo

Listing information is siloed

Property listings via real estate brokers are the starting point for most real estate transactions. The status quo in this regard is a collection of fragmented data silos that are structured in the best interests of their owners rather than the buyers and sellers of property and their agents. The immediate consequence of this fragmentation is high listing costs, inaccurate listing information, and the time required for buyers to identify suitable properties in their desired location. In the long term, by giving up ownership of property data to agents (centralised entities), stakeholders empower such agents to take a greater share of the margin in real estate transactions.

Buyers and sellers, through their agents and brokers, typically use a combination of aggregators and independent real estate portals to list and access property-level data such as location, features, and price. Aggregation websites. Real estate portals, meanwhile, provide inputs to these aggregators.

Multi Listing Services (MLS) available in some regions

To provide a more comprehensive overview of properties, multi-listing services have risen in some countries. These add a level of improvement for the buyer and conversely the seller as the buyer has access to a greater coverage of properties in their desired location and sellers are able to expose their property to buyers of multiple brokers. These sites are most common in the US whereas in RoW, a more common approach is to rely on aggregation portals.

Aggregation Portals

As a primary source of property listing information but with (relatively) fewer standards in place, the property information contained in an aggregation website is generally less accurate than real estate portals (and MLS where these are used) aggregating the data but doing little to maintain it. The accuracy of data on these aggregation sites is therefore inconsistent due to a lack of standardised processes and definitions at the independent real estate broker level.

From the perspective of buyers and sellers and their agents, the key drawbacks of reliance on aggregation websites are the inconvenience of variable data quality pertaining to specific properties.

Each broker site though, contains a relatively small set of entries as it typically covers only the limited sellers working with said broker in their local area and the broker typically owns and manages their site independently. This makes it next to impossible to conduct an up to date and accurate search of property listings in a specific region or city.

In recent years, some aggregation sites have struck syndication agreements with real estate broker portals in order to provide their customers (real estate agents) with national listing exposure. Basic listing and accessing of properties on is done typically at or near zero cost, with the portal earning revenue primarily from a combination of advertising and paywalls for advanced functionality.

By aggregating broker listing data and making it available to the public at a large scale, real estate aggregation portals have carved out a rapidly growing presence in the real estate industry.

From the perspective of buyers and sellers and their agents, the key drawbacks of the status quo real estate aggregation portals are, in the short term, lack of reliability of data and, in the long term, wider problems associated with surrendering data ownership to a centralised entity.

The lack of reliability of property listing data on real estate aggregation portals stems from the lack of user incentive to input accurate data and the inability of real estate portals to sufficiently vet the information given its overwhelming volume. As an example of misaligned incentives, agents have been known to intentionally leave sold listings online in order to attract new leads and funnel them to other listings[1]. Even where listings are updated in earnest, inconsistencies across portals inevitably emerge due to lack of communication across these portals. For instance, when a small change such as price is made to a listing on one portal, that change won’t immediately be updated on other portals (and may never be updated). A search through competing real estate portals thus often reveals the same property listed under different names and with different features and prices.

The reliance on real estate aggregation portals also has important data ownership implications. By listing on a real estate aggregation portal, homeowners and agents alike agree to terms and conditions in which they surrender their ownership of the data. As these portals grow larger and potentially consolidate, their ability to dictate the terms of usage also increases. At the extreme, leveraging their ownership of the data, the real estate aggregation portals could extract excessive margin from the property transaction process, including real estate commissions.

Transaction difficulties

The process of closing a property sale, which can take months, typically consumes two to five percent of the purchase price of the home, although in some regions, it can rise as high as 10%[2]. A survey from the National Association of Realtors found that nearly a third of all real estate transactions encounter some type of delay to closing[3]. In many cases, a closing can break down entirely, resulting in a failed sale. The time and cost required to successfully close a sale is due to the difficulty of coordinating at various stages in the process amongst disparate intermediaries, which may include brokers, land and property registrars, title companies, escrow companies, banks, insurers, attorneys, inspectors, appraisers, and notaries.

Title management

Central to a real estate transaction is the transferring of title from seller to buyer. The need to verify the authenticity and accuracy of title documents is complicated by the presence of liens, easements, and other information attached to the title. The status quo in most regions still consists of paper-based property titles but, even where a digital database exists, titles must be updated with information that comes from disparate sources.

Critically, there is rarely a consistent method for validating the filed paperwork across the involved entities. The result is a high incidence of title defects. The Title Insurance Industry in the US for instance, claims that “title companies find and fix problems with the title in 25 percent of transactions.”[4] Since any defect on the title makes property transfer illegal, owners may incur high legal and notarial fees to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of their property titles and the transfers of these titles.

The lack of clarity on property titles has given rise to the title insurance industry which, generates annual revenue estimated at $16 billion[5]. Buyers and sellers alike routinely purchase title insurance to cover the cost of litigation in the event there is a dispute on the title.

Escrow

The wide-ranging intermediaries and the lack of a secure platform for conducting transactions not only increases costs and potentially delays closing, it also increases the risk of fraud in the transaction process itself. The closing process for a real estate transaction typically includes the opening of an escrow account managed by an independent third-party.

In the final stage of closing, closing costs are wired to the escrow company then distributed to stakeholders who may include brokers, agents, and solicitors, in addition to the buyer and seller. In some countries, hackers exploit weakness in this process by getting between one or more of the transaction participants. The most common technique, which is known as phishing, is to impersonate, for example, the escrow officer, then trick the buyer into transferring closing funds to the hacker’s account. The FBI reports losses of nearly $150 million to such “real estate scams” in the US in 2018, a more than ten-fold increase since 2015[6]. Countries where documented cases are not available either simply not aware of occurrences or are likely unwitting future targets for these hackers. One analyst claims that, with the inclusion of unreported cases, real estate fraud in the US alone amounts to annual losses of $10 billion.[7] These groups will quickly shift to countries where protection against malicious attacks is weak or absent and these countries would be well advised to put sufficient controls in place to avoid becoming future victims.

Due diligence

Once an offer is accepted, the transaction goes into a “due diligence” period. This period allows the buyer to do a home inspection, get an appraisal and research the title. Title defects and the growing potential for fraud means stakeholders in the process must conduct repetitive, costly and time-consuming due diligence up front. In addition to verifying the authenticity of the title, a buyer’s agent may need to conduct checks on aspects of the property such as how the property is connected to utilities and environmental hazards like flood risks and soil contamination. These checks, many of which entail inquires with local authorities, can take three to six weeks to complete and cost several thousand euro.

Finally, where the buyer is financing the purchase of the property with a mortgage or other third-party financing service, due diligence steps and documentation must potentially be repeated by both the buyer and the lender, contributing to potential delays in closing. This leads to the status quo in which mortgage approval for residential properties takes on average around 30-60 days to complete.[8] In the US and up to 120 days in some European countries.

Part II: A decentralised solution

Why decentralisation?

As outlined in Part I, most of the challenges in the status quo in the transfer of property ownership and real estate transactions revolve around the difficulty stakeholders encounter in:

1. Sharing the (up to date) information critical to the process;
2. Verifying the authenticity of the documents critical to the process;
3. Verifying the identity of participants critical to the process.

The status quo for solving these challenges is to rely on centralised authorities - such as land title registries, government ministries, and real estate listing aggregation sites - to issue documents, verify the truth, and authenticate participants. Unfortunately, centralised authorities cannot always be relied upon to get it right. The reasons include human error given the large number of inputs involved, lack of incentives to the get the information right, and explicit fraud or corruption at or near the source. Further, where important real estate transaction documents move through intermediaries, the level of certainty of the veracity of the information contained in them is additionally diminished. Finally, and particularly relevant in the digital world, the challenges associated with verifying the identity of all participants slows down the transaction process and potentially exposes it to fraud.

Decentralisation offers an alternative model for solving the above challenges. At a first principles level, decentralisation in the context of real estate seeks to improve the credibility and authenticity of information and identity by making it transparently verifiable across a larger number of participants. To achieve this, rather than having a single trusted authority issue and verify the source of truth regarding a document or a participant’s identity, a decentralized approach engages a larger number of parties in reaching consensus of transactional integrity, thereby establishing trust in the transaction.

In theory, a sufficiently decentralised (and technologically enabled) real estate ecosystem – where everything from land registries, to property listings and transfer of ownership are transparent, verifiable, and easily shared and updated – could vastly improve the ability of participants to safely interact with one another, thereby diminishing the cost and latency of real estate transactions.

How could decentralisation be achieved?

Achieving a higher level of decentralisation in real estate transactions is directly linked to the ability to provide efficient coordination and messaging mechanisms across a large number of participants such that all participants have the information they need and that all participants can agree on the veracity of this information. For the real estate industry (and title transfer by corollary), a key imperative is to ensure that only permissioned participants can access and/or modify information. Further, in order to make an improvement over the status quo in terms of transaction efficiency, it is critical that agreed upon information and corresponding updates to documents are broadcast across the network in a timely manner.

How might this look in practice?

Verifiable digital identities

At a practical level, to enjoy the benefits of decentralisation in the world of property ownership, we need verifiable digital identities for both the documents in question and the parties who interact with them and the objects they are transacting. As a thought experiment outlining the perfect solution in this regard, imagine a single digital object/twin that represents a property. At a basic level, this “perfect” object contains all the information needed to complete a transfer of the property it represents. For example, this object contains:

• Basic details of the property such as location, dimensions, and structures contained within;
• Up to date title details such as the presence of liens, easements, and mortgages;
• Construction and renovation history;
• Inspection and environmental certificates relevant to the property;
• Appraisal findings by independent 3rd parties;
• Inspection reports.

Now, imagine this object has the following properties:

• It is viewable in more than one place at the same time;
• Of those that have access to the system, only those permissioned to view it can actually view it;
• Of those permissioned to view it, it can be fully controlled which information about the object they are able to view it;
• A person with the correct permissions can make changes to specific parts of the object that they have permission to change;
• All (permissioned) changes to the object are instantly visible to everyone with permission to see them;
• The object contains a complete history of the changes made to it, including who made the changes and when they were made;
• Anyone viewing the object can easily verify its authenticity beyond doubt;
• The object can be divided into multiple parts, each containing a fractional ownership record.

Such an object, when combined with the ability to verify the identity of and permissions for people accessing it, and combined with the ability to provide said permissions to individual peers, could form the core of a vastly superior real estate transaction process.

Self-executing “smart” contracts

To finalise a property transaction, there is typically a need for the notarised offer and its acceptance, the down payment for the property, and a contract outlining disbursement of commissions to brokers and other intermediaries. In the status quo, this is where escrow service providers are implanted in the transaction process but, as we’ve seen, not only is there a risk of fraud due to the potential for phishing, but this additional step – which introduces yet another intermediary - further complicates and potentially lengthens the transaction process. Continuing the thought experiment that outlines our perfect solution, imagine a contract that is appended to the above mentioned “perfect” property object. This contract has similar properties to the object, namely it:

·      Offers instantly verifiable authenticity;

·      Controls read and write permissions for each person viewing it;

·      Autonomously updates instantly and transparently to all parties permissioned to view it.

Additionally (and critically), this contract has the ability to make changes to the property object once the conditions defined in the contract have been met. For example, once the buyer has made the correct deposit and all required parties have signed, ownership on the property object is updated and funds are released according to the pre-defined instructions in the contract.

How it works technically

In the digital world, the above described “perfect” object for property can be achieved through a consensus protocol and a combination of supporting technologies that have collectively come to be known as “blockchain.” At a high level, this can be thought of as a dynamically updating database where permissioned participants follow agreed-upon rules for viewing and updating it. As information is broadcast across a network of authenticators (called nodes), consensus on the truth or current state is arrived at through underlying protocol itself. Imagine the internet itself enabling verifiable and transparent peer to peer transactions.

At specific time intervals, which are built in the architecture of the protocol, updates are added to the database. Each update adds another “block” to the list of amendments, forming a chain that goes back all the way to the original state of the database. Since the only way to update the database is to add a new block, the data contained in the previous blocks going all the way back to genesis, provides a practically immutable record of all changes ever made to the database.

Application and benefits

All stages of property ownership and related transactions could be streamlined and improved by decentralized systems that, as described above, leverage blockchain and other technologies to achieve verifiable authenticity among participants.

Goldman Sachs posits that a blockchain-based real estate ecosystem “could make paper-based property records obsolete, as all present and past real estate transactions would be meticulously stored on an immutable and decentralized ledger.”[9] The global investment bank goes on to estimate that, in the title insurance industry alone, $2 - $4 billion annually could be saved as a result of the removing the need for reconciling records, reducing both back office headcount and actuarial risk, equating to a 30% reduction in premiums for consumers[10].

Efficiencies can be achieved across a wide range of activities in the real estate sector. A report from Moody’s Investor Service, for instance, estimates that the mortgage loan industry could save up 20% in expenses.[11]

In the final stages of a real estate transaction, where in the status quo escrow companies take their place as an intermediary between the parties interacting in the transaction, a permissioned blockchain could drastically accelerate the throughput time of the process by making each event visible to all participants in real time and utilising smart contracts to automate based on these real time updates.

In the longer-term, where smart contracts are empowered to interact with blockchain-based property records, peer-to-peer asset transfers could be enabled. As outlined in a 2018 report for the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, this has the potential to reduce transaction times “from months or weeks to minutes”, and transaction costs from “thousands of dollars per sale to a modest service fee.”[12]

The benefits provided by the increased level of trust enabled by blockchain-supported decentralisation extend beyond improvements in efficiency and reductions in transaction times.  Particularly where trust in authorities is low, the creation of a decentralized blockchain land registry, for instance, could empower a much greater portion of the population to participate in real-estate markets and the economy in general. Just as countries which lacked landline infrastructure leapfrogged to mobile, in places where land registration infrastructure is currently low (or absent) and a large portion of the population lack the documentation needed to prove land ownership, there is an opportunity to leapfrog the developed world’s “old-fashioned” databases to a more secure, distributed system.

The increased participation could, writes International Growth Center economist Sebastian Kriticos, “instigate productive redevelopment of land by reducing expropriation risks, facilitating market transactions, and unlocking access to finance”[13] Further, the geographic decentralisation of records stored in a blockchain-based ledger makes them more resilient to natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake that destroyed “an untold number of title deeds and land registry records” centrally stored in Haiti[14].

A solution to the age old “dead capital” conundrum could be potentially alleviated by deploying such a solution broadly and correctly in these developing nations.

Part III: Criticisms and response

Garbage in, garbage out

It’s important to emphasise that a blockchain-based decentralized solution doesn’t necessarily address the accuracy of property information nor the accuracy of transactions of these assets. As the Vermont legislature, in its position paper on blockchain use, correctly points out, “blockchain technology offers no assistance in terms of the reliability or accuracy of the records contained in the blockchain; if bad data is used as an input, as long as the correct protocols are utilised, it will be accepted by the network and added to the blockchain.”[15]

This provides a hint to incumbents in the process that there remains a critical role to play in a decentralised permissioned system, specifically accountability for the accuracy of information, both the onramp and the offramp of such a system need to be strictly and adequately controlled.

Impossible and undesirable

Some argue that decentralisation is either ineffective, undesirable, or both. Notable criticism comes from a 2017 report written by a group of European surveyors and notaries for the World Bank. The group posits that, given a seismic political event like a coup, decentralized validators would prove unable to stand up to the new regime’s reorganisation of property rights, thereby negating the supposed immutable nature of the records and eliminating the proposed utility of the system. Further, the group makes the argument that a decentralized system isn’t desirable in the first place because it threatens to erode the trust put into democratically empowered public organisations, thrusting it instead into the hands of an “interest-group” coalition that is outside the bounds of democracy. The report concludes that “the well-established interplay between cadaster, land register and notaries provides more benefit to a functioning economy than blockchain.”[16]

This argument negates the efficiency gains that a well-designed system offers where these parties act as “gatekeepers” of information accuracy and in doing so, serves to entrench inefficiency, obscurity, high transaction cost and ultimately, robs citizens of a potentially better system. Essentially, throwing out the baby with the bath water to maintain the status quo. For countries that have less mature and or fragile cadastral systems subject to corruption and abuse, these arguments simply have no basis and hold no water.

Response

Acknowledging the garbage in, garbage out principle, blockchain-supported decentralisation nevertheless has potential in helping to clarify if not the accuracy, then the authenticity of information. With information more transparently shared through a decentralized protocol, it is at least possible to verify that everyone is seeing the same version of the truth. That alone has powerful applications for facilitating transactions, and it may even make it easier to correct errors when they appear as they are visible to all.

As for the effectiveness and desirability of blockchain-based decentralisation in real estate ownership and transactions, despite the criticisms, applications of the technology are moving beyond pilots, gaining momentum at both the governmental and B2B level. Graglia and Mellon, in their 2018 report for the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, referring to the use of public blockchains to record key real estate documents argue that, even at this early stage, the technology has applications and the incentives for its adoption are sound. They write, “in jurisdictions where corruption is a concern, introducing a public record of hashes can make it significantly harder to falsify records. On the other end of the spectrum, in countries where there are strong open data movements (Sweden, Estonia) or high degrees of transparency (the Netherlands), a public document registry may also be welcomed.”[17]

Part IV: Barriers to adoption

Significant barriers stand between the status quo and an alternative decentralized blockchain-based, real estate ecosystem. Issues include:

1. Getting key participants to opt in

Fragmentation in the real estate industry makes it difficult to establish industry-wide standards. Wide adoption will require a clear business case and fully depend on the willingness of key players to opt in. Goldman Sach’s report on the title insurance industry, for instance, concluded that “the lack of uniformity among various title insurance parties could impede the adoption of an industry-wide blockchain standard.”[18]

2. Regulation and legislation

Comparing the results of blockchain-based land title registry pilot projects conducted in Georgia, Sweden, The Netherlands and Dubai, independently conducted research concluded that having a friendly legislative framework in place is one of the crucial aspects for successful integration of the technology.[19] In the case of Georgia, one researcher concluded that the “success of the project was greatly determined by the flexibility of the respective regulations that didn’t hinder [authorities] from recording some citizens’ data on the blockchain, whilst in case of other countries such as Sweden or The Netherlands, for administering the technology into the public service, some regulatory changes are needed.”[20]

3. The usability of the technology

The management of public-private encryption keys is an issue that continues to plague blockchain-based decentralized networks. In the context of real estate, encryption keys would be needed to prove identity in order to access, register, or transfer a property -- but what happens if the key is lost or coercively obtained by bad actors? Graglia and Mellon identify the use of multiple signature wallets, which require more than one party to sign-off on transactions, as one of several prerequisites needed for the adoption of blockchain in real estate.[21]

Part V: Real estate professionals leveraging blockchain-supported decentralisation today

Despite the challenges, real-world adoption of decentralized and blockchain-supported solutions in the real estate sector is already underway in a growing number of use-cases globally. Often these are addressing one or a subset of the challenges present in the status quo as opposed to going for an all-in, industry-wide solution from genesis. Businesses currently leveraging blockchain in real estate transactions and property titles emphasize that, with truly peer-to-peer transactions remaining a possibility contingent on many external factors, the focus on displacing intermediaries is premature.[22] Instead, the experience of professionals in the real estate sector so far has been that the technology, rather than replacing intermediaries, makes them more effective, empowering them to prosper in addressing specific frictions in the status quo.

Real-world adoption is, thus far, seen primarily in the following use-cases:

1. Decentralized listings portals

Imbrex, founded by a real estate agent frustrated with the status quo of property listing, is a real estate tech startup that leverages the Ethereum public blockchain in its creation of a decentralized listings portal that allows users to retain control over their listings and transaction data. Barely a year old but with more than 35,000 listings, 52 brokerage firms and thousands of users, Imbrex is proving that with correctly aligned incentives, an alternative to the centralised listing status quo, with its associated costs and fragmented structure, is possible.

2. Blockchain-supported escrow commons

Propy, like Imbrex, was founded by real estate professionals. In this case, CEO Natalia Karayaneva was frustrated with the time-consuming real estate transaction process, particularly for international transactions, and so was driven to create a blockchain-supported decentralized commons for real-estate transactions. Propy’s online transaction tool enables all parties including brokers, agents, title companies, escrow and transaction coordinators to complete the deal online. Evidence that established intermediaries find value in the system comes in the form of escrow agents and title companies opting-in to Propy’s platform[23]. Founder of Sequoia Real Estate Kelvin Kam, for instance, is featured on Propy’s website declaring the platform “allows agents to focus on their clients."

3. Smart contracts: property sub-division and transaction efficiency

SettleMint has created a set of smart contracts based on the existing Belgian cadastral system as it pertains to the process of sub-dividing a property and later selling the sub-divided property. This process is increasingly demanded and necessary as urbanisation accelerates and city boundaries are extended, often requiring not only the creation of new plots of land but also the re-zoning of the sub-divided plot from agricultural or industrial to residential. As these complex (series of) events are well defined in the Belgian cadastral system, it is possible to “codify” the underlying process and business logic and the required permissions for each step in the process in smart contracts thus removing transaction friction and automating several steps in the process.

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These early forays show that, rather than displacing existing intermediaries, the technology empowers intermediaries to provide a better experience for their clients. They achieve this by automating processes and/or eliminating the need for reconciliation which enables them to focus on providing truly value-added services to their clients rather than getting bogged down with remedial tasks.

Though still very much nascent, it is apparent that blockchain-supported decentralisation in real estate transactions presents sufficient opportunities to be further explored. For participants in the real estate transactional ecosystem, there is the potential to create (or be an early adopter) of a platform that promises significant competitive advantages. For brokers, agents, and notaries, there is the opportunity to provide better customer service by leveraging technology to reduce redundancies in the status quo. For registrars and government offices, there is the potential to increase public trust and transparency and to stimulate economic activity by empowering more citizens to efficiently leverage the value of their property.

[2] J. Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon, “Blockchain and Property 2018: At the End of the Beginning.” (2018) In Innovations, volume 12, number 1, page 93.

[3] https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2016/01/21/one-third-deals-face-closing-delays

[4] American Land Title Association. Title Insurance: A Comprehensive Overview. 2007 https://www.alta.org/press/TitleInsuranceOverview.pdf

[5] According to 2019 report from First Research: https://www.firstresearch.com/Industry-Research/Title-Insurance-Carriers.html

[6] According to data from the 2018 FBI Internet Crime Report (https://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2018_IC3Report.pdf, page 19 and 20) and a 2018 public service announcement from the FBI titled “Business E-Mail Compromise: The 12 Billion Dollar Scam” (https://www.ic3.gov/media/2018/180712.aspx).

[7] According to Sun Title president Tom Cronkright as reported in https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyyale/2019/05/07/real-estate-wire-fraud-is-real-and-it-almost-happened-to-me/#7371767e1c47

[8] A study backed by mortgage firm EllieMae estimated average closing times of 50 days for mortgages in 2016: https://www.elliemae.com/about/news-reports/press-releases/average-time-to-close-a-loan-increased-to-50-days-according-to-latest-origination-insight-report and the National Association of Realtors often quotes 30-60 days.

[9] Goldman Sachs, “Profiles in Innovation: Blockchain: Putting Theory into Practice”, 2016, page 37 (https://pgcoin.tech/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/blockchain-paper.pdf)

[10] Goldman Sachs, “Profiles in Innovation: Blockchain: Putting Theory into Practice”, 2016, page 37 (https://pgcoin.tech/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/blockchain-paper.pdf)

[11] As reported in CB Insight’s “How Blockchain Technology Could Disrupt Real Estate” February 21, 2019 (https://www.cbinsights.com/research/blockchain-real-estate-disruption/) which references Moody’s report, “Blockchain efficiencies could streamline transactions but reduce banks' fee income.”

[12] Blockchain And Property In 2018: At The End Of The Beginning (innovations/ volume 12, number 1/2 93) J. Michael Graglia, Christopher Mellon

[13] World Bank blogs, “Keeping it clean: Can blockchain change the nature of land registry in developing countries?”Sebastian Kriticos, March 29, 2019. https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/keeping-it-clean-can-blockchain-change-nature-land-registry-developing-countries.

[14] “Unclear land rights hinder Haiti's reconstruction” Anastasia Moloney, Monday, 5 July 2010, https://news.trust.org/item/20100705105000-axvt3

[15] Blockchain Technology: Opportunities and Risks. https://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Legislative-Reports/blockchain-technology-report-final.pdf (page 19-20)

[16] “Blockchain – can this new technology really revolutionize the land registry system?” written by Maurice Barbieri, The Council of European Geodetic Surveyors and Dr. Dominik GASSEN German Federal Chamber of Civil Law Notaries. Paper prepared for presentation at the “2017 World Bank Conference on Land And Poverty” The World Bank - Washington Dc, March 20 -24, 2017. (page 12)

[17] “Blockchain And Property In 2018: At The End Of The Beginning” (innovations/ volume 12, number 1/2 99) J. Michael Graglia, Christopher Mellon

[18] Goldman Sachs, “Profiles in Innovation: Blockchain: Putting Theory into Practice”, 2016, page 41 (https://pgcoin.tech/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/blockchain-paper.pdf)

[19] For instance, see: “Digital Transformation: Blockchain and Land Titles.” GEORG EDER, Vienna International Development Network, for 2019 OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum.

[20] “Integration of The Blockchain Technology Into The Land Registration System. A Case Study Of Georgia” May 2019: Tallinn University of Technology. (page 71)

[21] “Blockchain And Property In 2018: At The End Of The Beginning” (innovations/ volume 12, number 1/2 95) J. Michael Graglia, Christopher Mellon

[22] Specifically, the summary of an interview between Ubitquity founders Nathan Wosnack and Marina Reznick of Atlantic Sotheby’s International Realty, as reported in “Blockchain And Property In 2018: At the End of the Beginning.” J. Michael Graglia, Christopher Mellon. In a paper for presentation at the “2018 World Bank Conference on Land And Poverty” The World Bank - Washington DC, March 19-23, 2018. (page 57-58).  

[23] For example, see: https://propy.com/blog/first-american-title-insurance-company-completes-its-first-transaction-on-propy/ and: https://propy.com/blog/propy-announced-partnership-with-escrow-agent-japan-co/.