How Blockchain Can Change Real Estate
After a quick primer on blockchain, this article from Douglas Elliman Real Estate shares the expertise of Roni Rose, the host of Blockchain Bea and an agent with Douglas Elliman, on how blockchain solutions can be beneficial in real estate. From reducing risk and increasing transparency while maintaining privacy and security to fostering streamlined, global transactions and making parts of buying and selling a property more efficient, blockchain has the potential to complement, protect, and strengthen the real estate process. Click through to read the entire article, including the central role that real estate agents will always play, regardless of technology.
“Pretend you’re in a theater, and you have an audience of 5,000 people,” said Douglas Elliman’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Hummel. “You and I are going to do a transaction—I hand you the keys to my car, and you hand me your purse. And we say, ‘You now own my car, and I now own the contents of your purse.’ And 5,000 people confirmed it. That’s basically blockchain.”
Blockchain is a digital, decentralized ledger of transactions. The record of a transaction is distributed across a network to provide validity and transparency. Though it’s often used for digital currency like Bitcoin, blockchain can be used to record any type of transaction.
When utilizing blockchain to facilitate a transaction, thousands of millions of records of that transaction are created, that then exist all across the internet and all around the world.
Roni Rose, a Douglas Elliman agent and host of blockchain podcast, Blockchain Bea, explained why blockchain is useful. “By distributing the power to confirm transactions across a decentralized network, you minimize the risk of fraud or hacking. The network has to reach consensus before a transaction is approved, so you can trust it more,” she said.
This advancement in technology has a few major advantages. “Things can move across borders with ease,” Rose said. Now, instead of sending money through multiple banks or paying large fees, blockchain can record and validate a monetary transaction between two parties, anywhere in the world.
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