Why Do Property Transactions Still Take Months?

A property transaction is slow and expensive because the ownership record it moves is a paper document, and almost every step in the process exists to manage the risks that paper creates. In France, notary fees alone run 7 to 8 percent of the price of an existing property, most of it transfer tax, before agency commission or financing costs. Digitizing the layer through which investors hold and transfer an interest compresses the administrative friction; it does not remove the taxes, the local law, or the need to select a sound building.

Real estate is the largest store of wealth in the world and the last major asset class still running its ownership record primarily on paper. Equities moved from physical certificates to electronic book entry. Fixed income moved from bearer bonds to registered positions. In each case the asset did not change and the market around it did: costs fell, settlement compressed, and the investor base widened. Property has not yet had that transition, and the reason is worth examining precisely rather than rhetorically.

One clarification belongs at the top, because a great deal of confusion in this area follows from skipping it. Tokenization does not digitize the purchase of a building. It digitizes the layer through which investors access, hold, transfer, and receive economic rights from an investment in that building. The property continues to sit in a ring-fenced legal vehicle governed by local law. What changes is the investment layer above it.

Why does the process have so many steps?

It is easy to mistake the complexity of a property transaction for rigour. Notaries, registered deeds, cooling-off periods and lodged registrations feel serious because they have always been serious. But the apparatus exists for a specific reason that has nothing to do with property being unusually complicated as an asset. It exists because the ownership record was a physical document that could be forged, lost, duplicated, or disputed, and because the parties to the transaction had no shared way to verify it.

Every step follows from that starting condition. Title has to be searched because the record is not self-verifying. Documents have to be gathered from separate public offices because no single system holds them. A licensed professional has to authenticate the transfer because authentication cannot be performed by the record itself. A registration step is required because the transfer and the record update are two different events that happen at different moments.

That is a coherent design for the problem it was built to solve. It is also a design whose costs are largely a function of the medium rather than the asset.

What does the transaction actually cost?

The honest answer is that only part of the total is cleanly documented, and the rest varies enough by market and structure that any single number would be an invention.

That single line already tells the important part of the story. Before the buyer owns anything, a materially large share of the purchase price has been consumed, and the largest component of it is a tax rather than a fee for a service. Any account of this market that suggests the whole of that cost is intermediary rent is wrong, and any account that treats all of it as immovable is equally wrong.

Which of those costs is administrative, and which is real?

This is the distinction that determines what digitizing the ownership layer can and cannot achieve, and it is the one most often collapsed in commentary on the subject.

Transfer taxes fund local government and are set by fiscal policy. They do not fall because the record moved to a ledger. Financing costs reflect the price of capital. The fee for finding and assessing a sound asset reflects genuine work, and that work becomes more important rather than less when execution is quick, because execution speed removes a natural brake on poor decisions.

What does fall is the first category, and it is not trivial. The document collection, the sequencing of intermediaries, the professional re-authentication at every subsequent transfer, and the dead time between agreement and completion are all costs of the medium.

What does it mean for a transfer to settle immediately?

On a platform where investor interests are represented digitally, the record of who holds what within the contractual structure is maintained on a distributed ledger. That ledger is authoritative for the investment layer. It is not a substitute for the national land registry, which continues to record legal title to the property itself.

When a transfer is instructed, the ledger updates as a single event. There is no separate registration step for the investment interest, because the transfer and the record update are the same action rather than two actions that have to be reconciled. The gap between decision and ownership of the interest closes to the time it takes for the transaction to confirm.

That removes more than elapsed time. It removes the carrying cost of the transaction period: capital held in escrow, professional fees accruing while the file is open, and the risk that a transaction agreed in principle fails before it completes.

The income mechanics change on the same logic. Where net rent is collected by the vehicle that holds the property, distribution to holders can execute on a defined schedule as code rather than as a manual reconciliation followed by a batch of payment instructions. Distributions from funds and listed vehicles have been passive for decades, so passivity is not the novelty. The difference is that a programmable distribution runs without anyone deciding to run it, and leaves an auditable record of having done so.

What happens to the intermediaries?

Each party in a traditional transaction performs a function the paper system made necessary, and each extracts a fee for it. The useful question is not whether those functions are legitimate but which of them are prerequisites of the medium and which are prerequisites of the asset.

Authentication is the clearest case. The notary's role in constituting and authenticating the legal structure is genuine and does not disappear. But the weight of that role changes when the investment record is a ledger entry rather than a paper deed. Authentication becomes a matter of constituting the vehicle correctly once, rather than re-authenticating a document at every subsequent transfer of an interest.

Valuation shifts from transaction prerequisite to advisory service. The sourcing function does not shrink at all. Identifying well-located assets with realistic income and sound tenancy is the part of the process that determines the outcome, and it becomes the dominant variable precisely when the administrative layer stops absorbing attention.

What is the cost of the waiting period itself?

There is a cost in a months-long completion that appears in no fee table.

For the whole of that window the buyer is carrying a commitment that is neither open nor closed. A capital event is in progress but not complete. Has the survey flagged anything. Has the notary received the documents. Is the title clean. Will the lender hold its offer. That load is invisible in every timeline comparison and entirely familiar to anyone who has been through the process.

When settlement of the interest is effectively immediate, the load does not shrink. It ends. A decision was made and executed, and the record reflects it. That is a different condition from a faster process, because a faster process still has a carrying period.

What does a digital ownership layer not change?

Three things, and they are the ones that matter most.

It does not change the asset. A poorly located building with a weak tenancy is the same investment whether the interest in it is recorded on paper or on a ledger. If anything, easier entry raises the cost of weak selection, because capital reaches poor assets faster.

It does not change the legal ground. The property operates under local law. The vehicle that holds it is constituted, maintained and regulated accordingly. An investor holding a digital interest is not acquiring title to the building; they are acquiring an economic interest in a ring-fenced vehicle, with rights defined by that vehicle's documents. Those are different legal objects and the distinction is not cosmetic.

It does not yet change exit. Entry mechanics and income mechanics have moved. Secondary depth has not moved with them, and the honest framing of the current state is that these instruments remain structured principally for income while the market layer is built.

That figure is the correct corrective to any claim that this transition has already happened. It has not. What has changed is the mechanism, not yet the scale.

The bottom line

The months-long completion, the administrative friction, and the manual income reconciliation are not features of real estate as an asset. They are features of the paper that represented it, and of a verification process built to manage the specific risks that paper creates.

Some of the cost survives the transition, and it is important to say which. Transfer tax survives, because it is fiscal policy. Financing cost survives, because it is the price of capital. The value of sound sourcing survives and increases. What does not survive is the coordination overhead of a system in which the record cannot verify itself.

The asset stays. The wrapper changes. Confusing the two in either direction, treating the wrapper's flaws as the asset's, or claiming the wrapper's improvement as an improvement in the asset, is the most common error in this market.

This article is part of DeReal Perspectives on real-estate access, liquidity, and tokenization. It is analysis of the market, not investment advice or an offer of any kind.

Sources

• notaires.fr, Frais d'acquisition (2025): immobilier.notaires.fr ; Service-Public.fr

• RWA.xyz, Analytics on Tokenized Real-World Assets (2026): app.rwa.xyz