How large & how inaccessible is the market?

By value, nothing else comes close. Savills put the total value of global real estate at $393.3 trillion at the end of 2024, about four times the value of global GDP and larger than global equities and debt securities combined. Residential property alone accounted for $286.9 trillion of that figure (Savills, "Total global value of real estate," 2025).

Now hold that against how the asset actually trades. Listed equities settle a trade in one business day, can be bought in fractions of a single share, and cost a fraction of a percent to transact. Real estate offers none of that. The largest store of wealth in the world is also the one an ordinary investor can least easily enter, exit, or price.

That gap between how much wealth sits in property and how badly the market around it functions is the subject of this article. Each of the frictions below is an artifact of infrastructure, not a law of economics.

Why do you need to be wealthy before you can start?

The first barrier is capital. Buying a property in a major European city requires a meaningful sum before the process even begins. Typically a deposit plus transaction costs that a lender will not finance. In practice, direct ownership is reserved for people who already hold capital. The asset class that has built more intergenerational wealth than any other is largely closed to the people who would benefit from it most.

The partial solutions that exist narrow the gap without closing it. French SCPIs (retail real-estate funds) accept smaller tickets but charge subscription fees that commonly run between 8% and 12% of the amount invested, lock capital for years, and give holders no say in the underlying assets (French SCPI market data, 2025). Listed REITs are liquid but price with equity-market sentiment rather than the underlying buildings, which reintroduces the volatility investors often turned to property to avoid. Real-estate crowdfunding lowers minimums but typically packages short-term debt, not ownership. None delivers what a direct owner has: a real, income-producing interest in an identified asset with transparent performance.

Why is your capital locked once you're in?

Direct ownership is a commitment of capital for an undefined period. Property is slow to trade that illiquidity shields it from short-term panics, but it also means that when an owner needs capital back, the exit takes months, costs thousands, and may force a sale at the wrong moment.

The cost of that illiquidity is structural, not merely inconvenient. An owner cannot rebalance without triggering a full sale. There is no partial exit, it is all or nothing. There is no price discovery until the day the asset is sold. Contrast that with any listed holding, which can be trimmed in part, priced continuously, and settled within a day. The point is not that property should trade like a stock; it is that the owner is given no option between "hold everything" and "sell everything."

Why is the transaction process so slow and expensive?

Consider France, a representative developed market. Buying an existing property runs through an agency commission, a signed compromis de vente with a deposit, a statutory cooling-off period, and then weeks of notarial due diligence, title, planning, co-ownership rules, mortgages, easements before the acte authentique is signed and keys change hands. The interval between compromis and acte is routinely two to three months.

The cost is as striking as the delay. So-called frais de notaire on an existing property in France run about 7% to 8% of the purchase price, the bulk of which is transfer tax rather than the notary's own fee and that figure rose by roughly half a percentage point in most départements under the 2025 budget (notaires.fr; Service-Public.fr, 2025). Every step exists because the underlying legal and administrative infrastructure was built for a world without digital records and without any way to represent ownership other than a paper deed held in an office.

Who does the information gap favour?

Public-market investors have real-time prices, audited accounts, analyst coverage, and regulatory filings. Real-estate investors work largely in the dark. Comparable transaction data is delayed, partial, or private. A property's true net yield after costs, vacancy, and maintenance is rarely disclosed in advance. Condition is established through slow, expensive surveys. Ownership history is fragmented across registries. The result is a market where information asymmetry systematically favours professional insiders, developers, agents, institutional buyers over the individual on the other side of the table.

What about the owners? The dilemma no one structures for

The access problem does not only trap buyers; it traps owners too. Picture an asset-rich landlord in her fifties, holding several properties that produce steady net income she has no wish to give up, who nonetheless wants to free a portion of that capital to back a family project, or simply to diversify. The traditional system offers her exactly three moves, and each is blunt. She can sell, triggering a capital-gains event, a months-long process, high fees, and the permanent loss of the income stream. She can remortgage, taking on debt and interest cost to borrow against equity she already owns, subject to income tests and approval delays. Or she can do nothing, and leave the capital locked.

This is not an edge case; it is the position of millions of European owners, and family offices know it intimately. It is the same constraint that stops them rebalancing property exposure without a taxable exit. The financial system has never built the instrument such an owner actually needs: a way to partially monetise an asset she understands, without a full sale and without new debt.

The consequences reach beyond individual balance sheets. Europe's housing shortfall is now severe: the European Investment Bank estimated the EU needed roughly 2.25 million additional homes in 2025 about 50% more than were built and the European Commission's 2025 Affordable Housing Plan puts the need at around 650,000 additional homes a year (European Commission / EIB, December 2025). When owners can only hold or fully exit, inventory stays frozen, which is one quiet contributor to why supply never reaches the market.

What does tokenization actually change and what does it not?

Tokenization is often described loosely, so be precise. When an interest in a property is tokenized, that interest held through a legal vehicle, typically a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) is represented as a digital token: Property → SPV → tokens → cash flows. The token can be transferred without re-running a notarial sale, subdivided into fractions, and programmed to distribute income automatically. The underlying asset does not change. The building, the tenants, the rent, and the legal protections remain. What changes is only the layer through which ownership is recorded, transferred, and monetised, the wrapper, not the asset.

The long-run projections are large. Deloitte's Center for Financial Services forecast in April 2025 that the value of tokenized real estate could reach roughly $4 trillion by 2035, up from under $0.3 trillion in 2024, a compound growth rate of about 27% (Deloitte, April 2025).

Sobriety is warranted about the present, though. The entire tokenized real-world-asset market, every asset class, not just property stood at only about $31–34 billion in mid-2026, up from roughly $6 billion in early 2025, and around two-thirds of it is tokenized US Treasuries; real estate is still a sliver (RWA.xyz, 2026). Tokenization does not eliminate risk: a poor property is a poor property in any wrapper. It does not guarantee liquidity, because a secondary market requires buyers that do not yet exist at scale. And it does not replace legal structure but it works only when it sits on top of properly constituted SPVs and regulated ownership rights.

The bottom line

Real estate is not broken because it is a bad investment. It is broken because the infrastructure around it, the costs, the timelines, the minimum tickets, the opacity, the binary between holding and selling is decades behind every other asset class. The yields, the demand, and the wealth-creation record are real. The wrapper is the problem. Tokenization is one credible route to a better wrapper, but only where it is built on real assets and real legal structure and, in 2026, it remains early.

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

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Is real estate really the world's largest asset class?

Yes. Savills valued global real estate at $393.3 trillion at the end of 2024, roughly four times global GDP and larger than global equities and debt securities combined, with residential property accounting for $286.9 trillion.

Why is real estate so illiquid compared with stocks?

A property sale runs through agents, deposits, cooling-off periods, and notarial due diligence, taking months rather than a day. There is no partial exit and no continuous price discovery, so an owner faces a binary choice between holding the whole asset or selling all of it.

How much does it cost to buy property in France?

On an existing property, frais de notaire run about 7% to 8% of the purchase price mostly transfer tax a figure that rose by roughly half a point in most departments under the 2025 budget, on top of any agency commission.

Does tokenization make real estate liquid overnight?

No. Tokenization can represent an ownership interest as a transferable token, but a liquid secondary market requires a depth of buyers that does not yet exist at scale. As of mid-2026 the entire tokenized real-world-asset market was only about $31–34 billion, roughly two-thirds of it US Treasuries, with real estate a small fraction.

How big could tokenized real estate become?

Deloitte's Center for Financial Services projected in April 2025 that tokenized real estate could reach about $4 trillion by 2035, up from under $0.3 trillion in 2024, a long-run forecast, not a present-day figure.