HDFC Capital: Mapping Real Estate Tokenization Through Expert Interviews

Vaanya joined HDFC Capital as the only trainee working on the fractional real estate (tokenisation) research workstream. The concept, which involves converting real estate into smaller tradeable tokens to enable fractional ownership, was new territory for the team and for her.

She helped contact relevant founders, assisted with the interviews, and in producing the final output. She spoke with fifteen to twenty professionals in the space, including founders building tokenization platforms, others working in adjacent areas of fractional real estate like the more orthodox timeshare, industry experts from conferences she attended etc.

The interviews surfaced a range of approaches to the problem. Different players were structuring tokenization platforms differently, and their assessments of the risks, legality and the opportunity varied considerably, in light of the new government guidelines that had come up. Vaanya's job was to find the signal in that variation: which approaches were genuinely differentiated, which risks were structural versus idiosyncratic, and what the opportunity actually looked like across the field.

She synthesized the findings into a a short document for the senior team to act on, and a more detailed account detailing the opportunity, the risks- legal and otherwise, similar startups outside of India, the different Indian players and their approaches, and the players using technology to build something differentiated.

The document shaped the team's next steps. It helped them narrow the field to a focused group of founders worth pursuing further, specifically those combining fractional with a differentiated technology approach.

Outside of this, she also regularly spoke to founders in the proptech and related sustainability space, understood the markets and the gaps these startups were targeting, and took meeting notes to convey these findings to seniors.