Connecting property data across organisations
Sector: Quaternary sector · Industry: High tech and innovation · Organisation: ZHAW · Maturity level: Pilot
ZHAW researched a digital property dossier that connects data and process events across a building's lifecycle and across independent organisations. Smart contracts and distributed-ledger technology were intended to support exchange without creating one central master database.
Documentation status
- Project status: Unknown (as of 30 April 2020) — The underlying Innosuisse research project ran from October 2018 to April 2020. The study documents the concept and prototype; subsequent regular operation is not publicly evidenced.
- Evidence: Evidence high
- Editorial review: SapientBlock Redaktion, 17 September 2026
Description
Building data is created during planning, financing, construction, operation, renovation and sale in many separate systems. The digital property dossier is intended to make relevant events and evidence findable and verifiable across organisational boundaries, while the specialist data remains with the responsible partners.
The ZHAW project on the digital property dossier investigated a customer-oriented platform for real estate transactions and the lifecycle of buildings. The starting point is distributed data holdings among actors such as owners, planners, banks, insurers, administrations and authorities. Instead of collecting all information in a central database, a distributed ledger architecture was intended to coordinate confirmed events and access rules between partners. Smart contracts map process steps and permissions. The ZHAW study and the official project page demonstrate the research and prototype character. They provide no evidence of a current widespread production operation. The use case therefore primarily shows an architecture and governance pattern for shared real estate data.
Benefits
General
- Verifiable data provenance
- Cross-organisational traceability
B2B — organisations
- Fewer data copies
- Coordinated processes
- Data sovereignty with partners
B2C — consumers
- Better transparency of object information
Employees
- Less search and coordination effort
Technology foundation
Authorized distributed ledger architecture and smart contracts; specialist data mostly remains in the core systems of the participating organisations.
Implementation examples
ZHAW / Innosuisse-Projekt
Shared digital dossier for property purchase and building lifecycle
Not quantified in the primary sources
Distributed, redundant and difficult to verify real estate data