Blockchain technology is challenging the way real estate and equities are bought and sold

What have the Queen of England, the Catholic Church, and Bill Gates all have in common? Landownership, and lots of it! Earlier this year, the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation became the largest owners of farmland in the US, owning over 240,000 acres of land (approximately 97,000 hectares). The Catholic Church owns over 71 million hectares, which is a land mass the size of France, but the largest owner of land that is not a government is Queen Elizabeth II. According to the publication Love Money: “By far the world’s largest non-governmental landowner, Queen Elizabeth II is the head of the British Commonwealth and therefore legal owner of around 2.7 billion hectares of land, as estimated by The New Statesman. That’s as much as a sixth of the planet’s land surface. The Crown Estate includes prime chunks of London, massive tracts of agricultural land in rural Britain and more than half of the UK’s foreshore”.The real estate sector is estimated by Savills to be worth over $200 trillion globally, with approximately $185 trillion as residential property and $15trillion as commercial real estate. More up-to-date figures from Associated Press last year claimed that the value of real estate worldwide was almost $270 trillion and expected to grow to over $330 trillion by 2023. In the UK alone, the residential property sector is valued at $8.7 trillion. Therefore, it ought to come of little surprise that many organisations are looking at how technology, including Blockchain, could improve the efficiency of how real estate is bought and sold and managed on an ongoing basis. Much has been written about the tokenisation of real estate yet, to date, there have been relatively few examples — possibly because tokenised real estate creates digital security, which is subject to the same regulatory restrictions of any publicly…