Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the course. In the last lecture, we discussed the use cases related to the media and entertainment industry. And we saw how blockchain could be employed for problems like royalty payments and piracy. In this lecture, we are going to discuss some of the use cases related to the real estate business sector and see how blockchain can be employed with real estate. One of the problems related to the real estate sector is about the rental system.

There are multiple listing services which provide an incomplete list of the rental houses. Moreover, realising apartment ownership or documents are not adequately defined and maintained. To tackle this real estate problem, we can create a public blockchain for listing and storing the rental documents and servicing payments. This solution will have all the records available at In one place, all transactions and listings can be independently verified and automatically reconciled for the users participating in the network. This solution will be implemented with the help of a smart contract between the tenant and the landlord. There won't be any need for a real estate agent or a third party provider between the tenant and landlord.

The benefits of using such a solution are that it reduces the risk of double spending, fraud, abuse and manipulation of the transactions. Moreover, it will overcome the barriers involved in the complex data sharing agreement between both the parties, the landlord and the tenant. The rental agreements can also be directly stored over the blockchain, which will be the permanent storage of the conditions mentioned, between the tenants and the owners. It will also reduce the overheads related to the legal agreements, which we signed between the lenders and the owners. Now let's visualize the use case with the help of a diagram. As you can see in the diagram, we are trying to remove the men in the middle, and the third party services entirely from the rental system.

We are employing immutable smart contracts for the interaction between tenants and owners. The tenant deposits the money in the smart contract. The smart contract immutably stores the funds deposited by the tenant. Moreover, the smart contract can also create autonomous interactions between tenants and brokers or lawyers, who will verify the details stored over this smart contract. The money deposited by the tenant is held inside the smart contract and it waits for the complete process to finish before dispatching the money to the owner. Owner, the owner of the property is notified that the money has been deposited inside the contract.

The owner deposits the digital keys for an apartment inside the smart contract, which are again stored over the blockchain. Once both the parties have deposited the money and the digital keys, the smart contract releases the payment to the owner and the digital key of the apartment to the tenant. In this solution, the smart contract will hold the assets for both the parties. Suppose the landlord is not able to deposit the digital key on time, then the smart contract can automatically trigger the transaction to return the money to the tenant. In the same way, if the tenant is not able to provide the correct identification, or KYC details, then the smart contract can automatically trigger the closure of the contract between the parties.