300,000 New Homes: Tokenization Could Open the Door to 5 million Prospecting Investors

Dubai residential prices have risen by approximately 60% since 2022, and yet, Dubai’s real estate market is entering a historic expansion phase.

With over 73,000 new residential units expected in 2025, and projections of 120,000+ in 2026, the city is on track to deliver more than 300,000 new homes by 2028. It’s the largest supply pipeline in the Emirates history, a clear sign of its ever-increasing confidence and ambition. With any large expansion, there are challenges that need to be overcome: those of us with long memories will recall what happens when the cycle goes into reverse, and a very nasty phenomenon called ‘negative equity’ still sends a shiver down the spine.

So how can a rapidly growing market remain buoyant, inclusive, and liquid?

A large part of the answer is tokenization, which plays a crucial role in answering each of those questions.
By issuing ownership as blockchain-based tokens, Dubai is opening its real estate market to a broader, global investor base, enabling retail participation, cross-border access, and seamless trading. Ownership becomes programmable. Transactions become frictionless, and large, illiquid assets are transformed into flexible financial instruments.

In conjunction with this, the Dubai Land Department (DLD) expects to tokenize $16 billion in real estate by 2033, with early pilots already showing promise. In the recent DLD real estate tokenization pilot the average investment was just $3,000, a fraction of what traditional property investment requires. At that level, full deployment would allow over 5.3 million investors to access real estate that was once out of reach.

Dubai’s regulatory support through the DLD and VARA, alongside smart city planning and blockchain infrastructure, means the building blocks are already being laid. Tokenized real estate is moving from being a great idea in theory with little practical application to being the new way we think about real estate ownership.

With 300,000 new homes coming online, $16B in targeted tokenization, and property values soaring, the future of real estate ownership will be fractional, digital, and global.

This is the first installment in a a series of pieces I'll be sharing over the coming weeks, tackling the elements needed to make tokenized real estate truly thrive. From legal structuring, smart contract deployment, issuance and primary trading, custodianship to KYC, investor protection, and secondary market trading and liquidity.

What’s coming isn’t just a shift in technology. It’s a shift in how the world will own, trade, and experience property.

The future of real estate is fractional, digital, and global. And it's happening now.

‍