The commercial property brokerage and advisory firm Cushman & Wakefield has announced a partnership with a fintech company named Inveniam.io. Inveniam offers a technology that helps digitize and tokenize private investments, helping them perform more like publicly traded ones. Rob Skinner, the Executive Managing Director at Cushman’s U.S. valuation and advisory team explained that this partnership was driven by the request they are getting from clients, “Many major financial institutions are looking to digitize and tokenize the trading of private real estate on secondary market,” he said.
Before the pandemic there was a push to tokenize real estate in order to make it easier to buy, sell, and value. But many of the tokenization efforts did not pan out. When the crypto-currency market crashed fewer building owners were experimenting with tokenization but now we might be seeing a resurgence. The difference between what Inveniam is powering and the tokenization efforts of the past is that now the deals will look more like traditional private real estate investments. By digitizing the “middle-office” of investment firms investors can have some of the perks of tokenization without making buyers go through the unfamiliar and nerve-racking process of purchasing an actual blockchain token. There are still plenty of reasons to create digital assets including ease of transfer, distributed data, and fraud protection but the industry is finding out that investors still want some parts of the normal private investment and not to completely tokenize the entire process.