## Reimagining Real Estate: Why the Industry Needs a New Operating System
Imagine buying and selling real estate as easily as trading stocks—fractional ownership, instant transactions, and fully transparent pricing. For centuries, this has been impossible. How we transact real estate today is largely unchanged from 500 years ago. The biggest innovations—marketplaces like Booking.com and Airbnb—haven’t transformed how real estate functions. They’ve only changed how we find and book spaces.

Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, yet it remains stuck in the past. The global real estate market is valued at [$380 trillion](https://www.scnsoft.com/finance/tokenization-to-redefine-investing-in-real-estate), but remains highly illiquid, with an estimated[ 99% of its value locked in fixed assets](https://www.scnsoft.com/finance/tokenization-to-redefine-investing-in-real-estate). Property transactions take months—on average, [58 days in the U.S.](https://www.homelight.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-sell-a-house/) and up to [107 days in Dubai](https://www.phoree.ae/resources/blog/how-long-will-it-take-to-sell-my-property-in-dubai). Pricing is opaque, with an estimated [5.32% in total commissions](https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/realtor-fees/) extracted from each transaction. Liquidity remains elusive, with real estate investments traditionally requiring large capital commitments and lengthy holding periods.

Layers of brokers, banks, and legal intermediaries extract fees at every stage, turning the system into a slow, expensive, and inefficient process. In 2024, the typical cost to sell a house was $54,616, with agent commissions making up nearly [39% of this cost](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/27/how-much-it-costs-to-sell-a-home.html). Institutions struggle to scale portfolios, developers face persistent funding bottlenecks, and governments lack the data necessary to manage housing policies effectively.

If real estate is so valuable, why has it remained trapped in inefficiency?

## Why Has Real Estate Remained Unchanged
Unlike financial markets, real estate operates under a system designed around supply and demand bottlenecks. A transaction only occurs if a seller has access to an asset and a buyer is found at the same time. This fundamental constraint forces markets to remain highly localized—buyers and sellers must be connected through networks of intermediaries.

These inefficiencies have led to a system of entrenched middlemen—brokers, lenders, lawyers, and title companies—all fighting to control access to real estate transactions and capture a portion of the value. Each transaction generates valuable data, but because there’s no shared infrastructure, that data is lost once the deal is completed. There is no global pricing standard, no shared history of ownership, and no transparent market data.

Regulatory friction makes this even worse. Every country—and often every city—has different rules for how property is owned, transferred, and financed. These layers of bureaucracy slow down transactions and make cross-border real estate investment difficult. Until now, there has never been a legal and technical way to truly digitally control real estate assets.

## Every Attempt at Change Has Failed—Until Now
For years, attempts to modernize real estate have focused on digitizing the process rather than fixing the core infrastructure. Marketplaces like Zillow and Opendoor made real estate more accessible but didn’t change how ownership is recorded, transferred, or financed. Tokenization projects tried to bring real estate on-chain, but most simply tokenized SPVs —financial wrappers that still rely on the same slow, fragmented systems. These efforts failed because once again they tried to bootstrap supply and demand while all competing against each other. They didn’t address the core problem: real estate lacks a shared operating system that all these players can interact with.

## The Real Estate Operating System: A New Foundation
The fundamental shift isn’t tokenization—it’s creating an infrastructure layer where real estate functions as a digital-first, programmable asset class - *an infrastructure where the asset is at the center of everything*.
![](https://lightshift-website.s3.amazonaws.com/1741880849079_Comparison%20Table%20Arda.png)
With this infrastructure real estate can finally function like a modern asset class.

## Why Now – The Market is Shifting
Real estate is reaching a tipping point. [The conditions for transformation](https://primior.com/5-reasons-real-estate-tokenization-could-dominate-the-market-by-2025/) have aligned:
* Technology has matured. Blockchains now have the scalability, security, and decentralization to support trillions of dollars in real-world assets globally, enabling real estate to function as a fully digital, liquid asset class.
* Institutional players are moving. BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs are actively leading the shift toward tokenized real estate. JPMorgan alone has processed nearly [$700 billion](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/04/27/tokenization-is-the-killer-app-for-tradfi-jpmorgan) in tokenized short-term loans, demonstrating real demand for blockchain-powered financial infrastructure.
* Regulation is shifting. Jurisdictions like the UAE, the US, and Europe are establishing clear legal frameworks for digital property ownership, paving the way for mainstream adoption.
* Market growth is accelerating. Real estate tokenization is already nearing $4 billion and is expected to scale into the hundreds of billions over the next decade as adoption reaches institutional and retail markets.
This shift is no longer hypothetical—it’s already happening. The question is no longer if real estate will be digitized, but who will define the infrastructure that powers it. That’s where Arda comes in.
## Why Arda – The Right Solution, The Right Team
Arda isn’t just building another platform—it’s creating the standard for how real estate operates in the digital economy under the same legal and technical open standard.

The team leading this transformation is unmatched. [Oli Harris](https://x.com/olijharris) (ex-Head of Digital Assets at JPMorgan, and Managing Director for Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs) has built institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure before—leading projects like JPM Coin, JPMorgan’s Quorum—the world’s first enterprise Ethereum platform, and Goldman’s tokenization platform; bringing together the largest financial institutions in the world. Having already tokenized real estate in more than 3 different projects before, he is now bringing his whole experience building institutional grade blockchains to reimagine the largest asset class in the world.

## A Generational Opportunity
The digitization of real estate isn’t just an upgrade—it’s an overhaul of how the world’s most valuable asset class functions.

Imagine a world where anyone can buy a fraction of a property, where real estate can be traded like equities, and where ownership data is instantly accessible across the globe, where all the participants can innovate, program and collaborate from Booking to Airbnb or Sotheby's and JPMorgan. This isn’t decades away—it’s happening now. And Arda is leading the way.

At Lightshift, we invest in foundational technology that reshapes trillion-dollar markets. That’s why [we’re backing Arda](https://www.lightshift.xyz/blog/investing-in-arda-the-operating-system-for-real-estate)—the team building the infrastructure for real estate’s digital future.

The shift has begun. The future of real estate is being built now.