Real Estate Crowdfunding for Public Housing on the Blockchain

Abstract

The rise of frontier digital technologies for financial services, like peer-to-peer (P2P) crowdfunding, indicates new ways to access alternative financing over traditional financing. This research contributes to the nascent literature on digital finance in real estate crowdfunding, and its potential of being applied to public housing. The idea of such a platform on the blockchain is this paper’s second conceptual innovation. The rationale is to illustrate the significance of crowdfunding to alternative financing, and how blockchain technology might improve the weaknesses of crowdfunding. The real estate industry needs to embrace new solutions, capable of dealing with its traditional problems and to increase efficiency, sustainability, accountability and prevent market failures within the economy. In this new market environment, we review real estate crowdfunding acceptance in the US, Europe and Asia as well as conceptualize tech-enhanced platform that adopts the blockchain to improve the crowdfunding process for real estate public housing. This can be achieved by exploring new peer-to-peer (P2P) opportunities with better management of information and reduction in origination costs.