Blockchain-based Rental Documentation Management with Audit Support
João F. Santos, Miguel Correia, Tiago R. Dias
TL;DR
This paper tackles the challenge of volatile and opaque rental-document handling by introducing a blockchain-based documentation management system built on Hyperledger Fabric. It details a three-phase rental workflow—tenant document upload, landlord proposal evaluation, and auditor-accessible reporting—with on-chain metadata and off-chain document storage to ensure immutability and traceability. The authors implement a comprehensive smart-contract-based solution, including authentication, cloud storage integration, and a React frontend, and evaluate performance under concurrent loads, demonstrating improved auditability, transparency, and potential time/cost savings relative to traditional processes. The work advances practical real estate audits by providing a permissioned, GDPR-conscious architecture with Ricardian contracts and robust access controls, enabling secure, auditable collaboration among tenants, landlords, and auditors.
Abstract
Document management in the rental market is a critical process to ensure the accuracy of financial transactions and regulatory compliance in the sector. In Portugal, the challenges include the complexity of legislation, particularly GDPR non-compliance, lack of transparency, and bureaucratic process inefficiency. With this in mind, a solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain platform, is presented for the implementation of a document management system for the rental process. This system oversees the rental process, which consists of three phases: the application for a property by the prospective tenant through the upload of necessary documents, acceptance/rejection by the landlord of various received applications, and the creation of a report by the system, which only the auditor can request and view. The system smart contract records metadata associated with the documents (hash, owner) and coordinates requests for file access by landlords to prospective tenants. Thus, the system is responsible for creating immutable and traceable records of the entire process. The underlying platform serves as the foundation for conducting future audits. After the landlord verifies the files and accepts the rental proposal, any authorised auditor can request a report for a property by accessing the records through the final report, which includes all events that occurred during the process.