Kenedix: Real-Estate Tokenization

Kenedix, Inc. (Kenedix) was a Japanese financial institution that managed real-estate funds. Recent turbulence in the economy and market had impacted the company adversely. In light of Kenedix’s medium- and long-term goals, its president and chief executive officer (CEO) was meeting in March 2020 with the company’s management to come up with a viable plan to address these challenges. Over the past several years, Kenedix had worked to shift its business toward an asset-light model and had introduced innovative solutions such as crowdfunding. The CEO believed that more could be done to leverage emerging technologies into the company’s core business of real-estate fund management. He and his team needed to consider whether adopting blockchain technology in finance, or real-estate tokenization, would enable the company to thrive in a saturated real-estate equity market. Could tokenization act not only as a solution to the company’s current plight but as a strategic competency for the future?