Abstract
Blockchain technology is one of the key technological breakthroughs of the last decade. It has the ability to revolutionize numerous aspects of society, including financial systems, healthcare, e-government and many others. One such area that is able to reap the benefits of blockchain technology is the real estate industry. Like many other industries, real estate faces major administrative problems such as high transaction fees, a lack of transparency, fraud and the effects of a middleman including undue influence and commissions. Blockchain enables supporting technologies to overcome the obstacles inherent within the real estate investment market. These technologies include smart contracts, immutable record management and time-stamped storage. We utilize these key properties of block chain technology in our work by proposing a system that has the ability to record real estate transactions in a private blockchain, using smart contracts. The immutability of the blockchain ledger and transactions can provide a safe space for the real estate business. Blockchain technology can also assist the authentication process by hastening background checks. Personal digital keys are provided to parties that are involved in a contract, thus minimizing the risk of fraud. We also discuss the rationale behind the advantages of using a blockchain in this manner, and how we selected the consensus mechanism for our proposed system.