Middle East Business
Qatar's cabinet approves a bill letting property be owned in digital units
By Staff Writer | 31 August 2026
The bill would convert rights in real estate into tokens registered and traded on a distributed ledger, tied back to the state property register.
Qatar's Council of Ministers has approved a draft law, and its executive regulations, to govern real estate tokenisation and the trading of real estate tokens. The Ministry of Justice prepared it with the Ministry of Municipality, Qatar Central Bank, the Qatar Financial Markets Authority and the Real Estate Regulatory Authority.
The ministry defines tokenisation as the conversion of ownership of, or rights to, real estate into programmable digital tokens that can be created, registered and traded through an electronic registry based on distributed ledger technology. The system is designed to run in step with the real estate registration system held at the ministry.
What it does to an ownership interest
The practical change is fractional ownership. Instead of buying a whole asset, an investor buys units representing a defined share of it, and those units can be traded without the underlying property changing hands in the ordinary way.
For example, a property worth QR1 million could be divided into a number of digital tokens, allowing investors to acquire a share according to the applicable regulations.
Abdulrahman Al Najjar, chief executive of Kate Real Estate
Practitioners in Doha put the arithmetic in the same terms. One worked example given publicly divides a property valued at QR10m into 10,000 units of QR1,000 each, with the units offered through nine companies approved by the real estate registry. An investor holding QR100,000 could on that model take a position in a building that would otherwise be out of reach, alongside holders contributing far larger sums.
This is co-ownership rewritten. The old route needed several parties to buy a whole building together and then to agree how to run it. The proposed route divides the interest itself into defined units and puts a managing company between the holders and the asset.
The registry link is the whole safeguard
Al Najjar was clear that protection depends on the token being tied to the official record rather than floating free of it. The title deed remains the basis of ownership, and the value of the framework lies in ensuring that a digital interest points at a registered property rather than at an informal arrangement between parties.
This gives investors greater flexibility in buying, selling and trading their interests.
Abdulrahman Al Najjar, chief executive of Kate Real Estate
That flexibility is the second claim made for the model, and it is a claim about liquidity. A conventional transaction ties up capital and takes time to complete. A regulated market in units, if the final legislation delivers one, shortens both the entry and the exit.
What a contractor or a developer should watch
Three questions are not yet answered on the public record, and each of them changes the commercial picture.
The first is who may hold. Whether participation is open to citizens only, or extends to residents, decides how much new demand the framework actually creates, and where. The second is what a token holder can insist on: the rights and obligations attaching to units, their relationship to the underlying property, and the procedures for issuance, trading and settlement. The third is enforcement. A fractional holder with a complaint about the condition or management of a building is a different creature from a single registered owner, and the route by which that complaint is heard has to be spelled out somewhere.
For anyone selling completed stock in Qatar, the change worth planning for is on the buy side. If units in a finished building can be sold in QR1,000 slices to a wider pool, the exit on a development stops depending on finding one buyer with the whole price. That is a financing question before it is a legal one, and it belongs in the appraisal now rather than after the law is passed.
The draft has cleared the cabinet. It has not yet been enacted, and the detail that matters to a practitioner sits in the executive regulations rather than in the headline.