Financialization of Real Estate Markets as a Macroeconomic Trend of the Digital Economy

Abstract—: The changes in the world economy since the early 1990s, such as the globalization of financial and commodity markets, deregulation of the financial sector, and its growing role in the economy, have led to significant changes in the real estate market, traditionally one of the most conservative markets. The process of financial institutions’ entering the top players in the real estate market is most commonly referred to in various researches as financialization. In the last decade, this trend has been supplemented by processes associated with disruptive technologies that have emerged within the rapidly developing fintech industry and offer a number of mechanisms that make investing in real estate (crowdfunding), using real estate (sharing), and turnover of digital choses in action secured by real estate assets (tokenization) significantly more democratic. As a result, the excess of the total capitalization of the financial component of the market (including the growing digital share) over the total value of real estate assets can exceed reasonable limits and become an independent cause of another crisis similar to the 2006–2008 crisis in the United States. © 2021, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.