Keeping up with its reputation of adopting technology at an early stage, Dubai is starting to adopt the blockchain technology as well. Recently, the land registrar of Dubai disclosed that they were developing a system which would work on the blockchain technology and would provide verification for the local real estate contracts.
Dubai also plans to use the blockchain technology in order to verify as well as secure the government documents by 2020. Dubai Land Department is responsible for looking into the real estate land transactions and approving them.
The Land Department further stated that the early adoption of the blockchain technology would inspire confidence among real estate investors to invest in Dubai. Also, it would make the process of verifying the contracts much more easier as the tenant contracts would also be verified using the technology.
According to the director of the Dubai Land Department, Sultan Butti bin Mejren, they intend to unify all the departments related to real estate using the blockchain technology by 2020.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”This initiative is still in a stage of infancy. In the near future, we will see many partners joining [the] Blockchain to improve their client services, including banking, mortgages, and utilities and maintenance operations…Our aim is to unite all real estate and department services on a single platform.” – Sultan Butti bin Mejren[/perfectpullquote]
The press release also stated that all the transactions would be verified by a timestamp as well which would ensure that the accuracy of data is verified while the land transactions are conducted as well. This would make the real estate market in Dubai much more transparent.
The aim of the blockchain platform is to ensure that in the rental real estate market, tenants are not just in sync with landlords but the vendor also provides utility services like water and electricity.
This would enable the tenants to make payments electronically to the vendors without having to do anything on paper.
The Asset Management group has partnered with Dubai Land Department as well as Emirates NBD along with IKEA and the Emirates Identity Authority in order to create a platform which is based on the blockchain.
If indeed, the Dubai Land Department is able to create such a blockchain based platform, real estate transactions in the city could potentially be completely seamless. Moreover, the transfer nature of the real estate transactions and the quick processing of the real estate transactions would ensure that more and more investors start investing in the city as it becomes easier for them to conduct real estate transactions and to synchronize their real estate portfolio. This could give a boost to the economy of Dubai.
Mahesh Sashital is cofounder of Smartereum.
He was previously Vice President at J.P. Morgan. He has over 15 years of experience in software engineering at various Fortune 20 companies. He has a Bachelor's in Engineering from the University of Mumbai and an MBA from the University of Texas-Austin.
