# Blockchain's Grand Promise for the Real Estate Sector: A Systematic Review
## 3 Results
### Theoretical Blockchain Pros and Cons in Real Estate  
The main advantages the literature suggested for blockchain in the real estate sector included enhanced trust, efficiency, transparency, cost reduction, inclusion, prevention of fraud and corruption, security, time reduction, automation, and disintermediation, as Figure 5 shows. The trust is suggested to be enhanced, as blockchain provides verifiability. The data on the blockchain are traceable, up-to-date, and validated, increasing the overall confidence in the blockchain as a data storage solution. The increased trust also stems from reduced human errors and increased accountability. Blockchain's transparency and immutability are crucial in increasing confidence and are often proposed as among the leading blockchain benefits in the real estate sector. The transparency and immutability of blockchain solutions also reduce fraud and corruption in the real estate sector, which the literature regards as a remarkable benefit, as it eases one of the sector's inherent systematic issues. The literature proposes that blockchain's efficiency advantages in the real estate context originate from process-related (paperless) simplifications. Blockchains allow many configurations, and this customizability also contributes to efficiency. Moreover, blockchain solutions' customizability allows new economic opportunities to arise with blockchain solutions, most often linked with tokenization in the real estate investment context. Efficiency advantages also arise from automation, as blockchain's mainly digital processes couldallow, e.g., automatic tax notifications to officials, which then contribute to compliance efficiency. These efficiency advantages lead to time and cost reductions, which the literature highlight as significant blockchain advantages for the real estate sector. Blockchain adoption within the real estate sector is not without cons, as almost 70% of all documents discussed some. Figure 5 highlights the most often identified challenges and disadvantages. Technical challenges related to, e.g., the early stage and immaturity of blockchain technology, digital identity and signatures, unavailability of good-quality digital data, public-private keys, immutability, scalability, cyber-attacks, and threats, as well as interoperability and integration with legacy systems. Legal issues and regulatory uncertainties also included requirements to update regulations and laws, a lack of standards,  
Figure 5: Theoretical blockchain pros and cons in the real estate sector. The number represents the number of documents. legal validity, and consumer protection. Organizational knowledge, resistance, and trust issues were other challenges to blockchain adoption in the real estate sector. The real estate sector was often portrayed as a conservative sector whose established players benefit from the current information asymmetries, which creates resistance to change [27; 78; 91; 174]. Many blockchain adoption proposals would likely cause new power shifts, requiring conflicting interests to be re-aligned. The knowledge gap was yet another organizational challenge. Implementing blockchain in real estate is also very complex and time-consuming, requiring new processes to be agreed upon. Implementation also requires the real estate sector players to collaborate with many stakeholders, which is a challenge, as there are trust issues. Additionally, collaboration often requires governmental coordination in the real estate sector. Interestingly, despite how often the literature proposes blockchain to remove or at least reduce the role of intermediaries in the real estate sector, the literature very often notes that the benefit of disintermediation does not materialize. Instead, intermediaries are very often still needed. Similarly, blockchain may not remove manual phases required in the real estate processes.