Blockchain for real estate provenance: an infrastructural step toward secure transactions in real estate E-Business

Abstract In the rapidly evolving digital era, the growing trend of conducting real estate e-business transactions through online platforms has led to escalated challenges in ensuring transactional security and trust. These challenges underscore the importance of balancing transparency with data privacy and enhancing accountability in this field. As an extension of our previously published work (Abualhamayl AJ, Almalki MA, Al-Doghman F, Alyoubi AA, Hussain FK (2023) Towards fractional NFTs for joint ownership and provenance in real estate. In: 2023 IEEE international conference on e-business engineering (ICEBE), p. 143–8. 10.1109/ICEBE59045.2023.00022.), this paper introduces the Global Real Estate Platform (GREP), a novel hybrid blockchain system that utilizes real estate provenance to establish a secure and trustworthy environment for real estate e-business, specifically focusing on two key challenges: ensuring data authenticity and effectively managing access rights. Integral to GREP's design is the involvement of government entities, which is essential for maintaining the required balance between transparency, privacy, and high levels of accountability. This proposed framework is explained conceptually and demonstrated practically, offering an innovative perspective on the integration of hybrid blockchain technology in the real estate system. Furthermore, our research encompasses a detailed implementation, using various tools, and an in-depth examination of three use cases. This combined analysis effectively demonstrates GREP's efficacy in addressing the targeted challenges in the field. While acknowledging the system's limitations, including challenges in user adoption and performance variability under different network conditions, our findings open new avenues for further exploration, such as landlords' payment histories and utility bills, and using blockchain as a secondary user identifier. These features collectively highlight the transformative potential of blockchain technology in real estate e-business.