Introduction

Real estate is traditionally considered to be illiquid, difficult to access, lacking in transparency, time-consuming and costly in its transaction and investment processes, and has large capital requirements. Nevertheless, real estate is considered one of the world's largest asset classes, valued at around $200 trillion, however, only around $19 trillion is currently accessible to investors through shares, funds, or other investment vehicles. Hereby, tokenization promises to overcome many of these common shortcomings. This book is an inductive exploratory study on the still novel topic of tokenization in real estate. Tokenization in real estate can refer to both the digital representation of a real estate asset and the digital representation of ownership of a real estate asset, often in combination with fractionalization. This research aims to understand the concept, underlying technologies, opportunities, and challenges of tokenization in real estate. Limitations stem from the novelty of the topic and with a primary focus on the Swiss market.