Invest hundreds of thousands of won and earn rental income in Dubai and Tokyo... the game changes [Kim Yongnam's Real Estate Asset Management]

The global real estate market is undergoing a quiet revolution. This is because cryptocurrency and digital technology are going beyond simple payment methods and are changing the way real estate is traded and owned. In major markets such as Dubai, Japan, and the United States, the number of cases of trading real estate as digital assets is rapidly increasing.

Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are breaking stereotypes in the real estate market. Dubai is leading the government, Japan is building an institutional foundation, and the United States is opening a ‘tokenization’ investment market that divides real assets into digital through private innovation.

Real estate tokenization is a method of converting the ownership or profits of real estate into digital form so that anyone can invest in it by dividing it into pieces. In the past, access to premium real estate requiring hundreds of millions of won was limited, but now it is possible to invest in real estate around the world with just a few hundred thousand won. The fact that profits are automatically distributed digitally and real-time trading is possible 24 hours a day provides both liquidity and transparency to investors.

Dubai is at the center of change. By May 2025, Dubai's digital real estate transaction volume has already exceeded $18 billion (approximately KRW 25.083 trillion). Dubai Land Authority has established a system to divide real estate ownership through a blockchain-based platform and allow anyone to easily transact. Through the ‘Prypco Mint’ project promoted by Ripple and Control Alt, investors can own a portion of high-end real estate and receive rental income for just a few hundred thousand won. This is all the more noteworthy because it operates on a clear government-led regulatory framework.

Japan is also moving quickly. GATES Inc., a real estate investment company, plans to sequentially tokenize approximately $200 billion (approximately KRW 278.7 trillion) of its assets, starting with $75 million (approximately KRW 104.5 billion) of high-end assets in central Tokyo, and open them to investors around the world. The Japanese government included digital assets in the institutional system through the revision of the Financial Instruments and Transactions Act in 2020, and the current market size is approximately 140 billion yen (approximately 1.31 trillion won). Tokenization on this institutional basis is paving the way for foreign investors to more easily access the Japanese market.

The United States is also showing rapid changes in digital asset-based real estate transactions. In California, a luxury multi-family home worth $12 million (approximately 16 billion won) is planned to be sold for Bitcoin and digital dollars, and Detroit-based platform RealT is allowing investments in small and medium-sized homes starting from $50. To date, we have distributed over $24 million (approximately 33 billion won) in rental income to over 65,000 investors, recording a stable rate of return of 6-16% per year.

These global trends open up new opportunities for investors. Commercial assets in Dubai, residential real estate in Tokyo, and the short-term rental market in the United States have different profit structures, allowing for diverse portfolio composition. Additionally, with just one electronic wallet, you can participate in overseas real estate investment without complicated documents or legal advice.

There are also some things to watch out for. Each country applies different tax laws, and tax burden may vary depending on the classification of digital assets. Technical errors and security threats have not completely disappeared, so investors need to confirm sufficient information in advance.

Korea is also showing signs of change. There are increasing cases of some platforms dividing small and medium-sized buildings in Seoul and the metropolitan area into pieces and selling them to investors, and the government is also preparing to enter the market in earnest by reorganizing related systems.

Ultimately, real estate tokenization heralds a fundamental shift in the way assets are traded. Now, the important thing is ‘trust’, and the value of real estate is no longer evaluated only by area or location, but we are entering an era where it can be traded anywhere in the world according to transparent and fair standards. This appears to be a major shift in the investment paradigm.

<Korea Economic The Moneyist> Kim Yongnam, CEO and President of GlobalPMC Co., Ltd.