In A First, BXP Sells Digital Property Rights

BXP’s December sale of a 409K SF, low-rise office campus in a Boston suburb seemed standard on the surface, but in one way, it was the most unique commercial real estate deal of the year.

When the REIT sold the 140 Kendrick St. campus in Needham, Massachusetts, to Lincoln Property Co. and Cross Ocean Partners, the sale included the formal, recorded transfer of digital rights of the property.

Digital property rights allow the owner to permit or prohibit digital or virtual content that uses the property as a canvas, typically through augmented reality. 

“There is commerce being conducted within this metaverse on our assets, and we should be aware of what's going on, and we believe we should be participating in what's going on,” BXP Executive Vice President Bryan Koop said.

“This isn't a tomorrow thing. It's today, and it’s here.” 

The transaction was recorded through a blockchain transaction on the Digital Rights Network, and both BXP and DRN assert it is the first formal recording of a transfer of digital property rights.

The property sold for $132M, but BXP wouldn’t specify how much, if any, of that figure represented remuneration for the digital rights.

Digital Rights Network founder Neil Mandt said this transaction opens the door to an entirely new way of thinking about physical property assets in an increasingly digital world.

“We've had only three property rights in history: air rights, mineral rights and land rights. And now there's a fourth right,” he said.  

Securing digital rights opens up new possibilities for revenue and helps minimize liability risk for property owners. 

Mandt, a filmmaker by trade, founded the Digital Rights Network in 2022 as a platform for building owners, developers and advertisers to register and manage digital rights to properties. The network advertises that it has more than $400B and more than 11B SF of assets registered. 

This recording, while not yet legally binding in settled law, acts like a “no trespassing” sign posted on a fencepost, putting others on notice about how a building or site can be used within the space of augmented reality and virtual reality, Mandt said.

Digital rights mostly center around augmented reality, which overlays digital content on a view of the physical world using a smartphone or smart glasses. Pokémon Go uses AR. There were 1.4 billion to 1.7 billion active users of some form of AR in 2025, according to various market estimates.

A 2019 advertising campaign for the HBO show Game of Thrones was an early example of an AR ad campaign that used commercial real estate as its backdrop. For the campaign, Snap Inc. used AR to superimpose a computer-generated image of a dragon landing on the Flatiron Building in New York City.

Now that strategy has become commonplace. Nearly 1,900 campaigns were uploaded to Fooh, a site that catalogues such ad campaigns, in 2025. It is unclear how many of those campaigns had the property owners’ permission. 

Koop said he realized the need for managing the REIT’s digital property rights after security guards warned him there were people walking through the Prudential Center with high-end scanning equipment. He tried to learn their identities but reached a dead end. 

Company officials decided they needed to get out ahead of the rise of AR, and contacts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Real Estate arranged an introduction with Mandt.

Now, all of BXP’s properties are registered on the network, Koop said.

Companies are using digital overlays of properties for their own enrichment, whether property owners want it to happen or not, said Steve Weikal, industry chair of the Real Estate Transformation Lab at the MIT Center for Real Estate. But he said commercial real estate organizations should monitor and regulate who is using their properties in the digital world, just as they would in the physical world.

“If somebody were to put a hot dog cart in the lobby of your building, you might have a problem with that,” Weikal said. “This is basically a hot dog cart in the lobby of your building.” 

The assertion of digital property rights may also help with potential liability issues. In 2019, Niantic settled a class-action lawsuit brought by property owners who claimed Pokémon Go players were creating a nuisance as they wandered onto private property, GameSpot reported. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to a new set of rules designed to protect property owners.

But property owners are still exposed to legal action if someone gets hurt while using AR in their space. That leaves them with all of the risk of such ventures with none of the reward, Weikal said. 

“Pokémon makes a bunch of money off that, and if the kid falls and breaks his leg, who gets sued? Not Pokémon. Boston Properties gets sued,” Weikal said. 

Having a digital trail to show that an AR activity wasn’t permitted may help head off personal injury liability.

Asserting and managing digital property rights can also create new possibilities for monetization, Mandt said. Revenue from the AR-VR industry exceeded $743M globally in 2025 and is projected to skyrocket to $200.9B by 2030, according to P&S Market Research.

AR advertisement can be individualized to target various demographics of visitors to a mixed-use space. The same space can be sold over and over again for a fraction of the cost and regulatory hurdles of erecting a traditional billboard.

Such a new stream of revenue may make even nondescript assets near highways more financially advantageous, Koop said. He has urged friends he knows who own warehouses near Interstate 95 in Boston to look into registering their digital property rights.

Koop is considering taking it even further.

“I want to register my house,” he said.