Crowd-owning — The Next Step for Real Estate Ownerships

Potential use-case of having a digitised form of real estate ownerships.

Darvin Kurniawan (Founder & CEO)

We should think about the blockchain as another class of thing like the Internet — a comprehensive information technology with tiered technical levels and multiple classes of applications for any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money; hard assets (physical property, homes, cars); and intangible assets (votes, ideas, reputation, intention, health data, information, etc.). But the blockchain concept is even more; it is a new organizing paradigm for the discovery, valuation, and transfer of all quanta (discrete units) of anything, and potentially for the coordination of all human activity at a much larger scale than has been possible before. Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy Melanie Swan

You might have heard at least once in your life that real estate is the king of investments, and that 90% of millionaires are made through real estate investments. At one point of time, you may have thought that you should diversify some of your savings/investments to buying real estate and/or real estate investment trust (REIT). You may even have convinced yourself that a particular real estate you’ve had your eye on will appreciate in value — lo and behold (or maybe not that surprising), it increased in value indeed, right under your watchful eye.

If you have succeeded and are now holding an income-producing property as an investment, good for you. But if you are like me and most other people, we have procrastinated due to one reason or another: the fact that buying real estate involves some major commitments, or we don’t have the financial capacity to invest in real estate, which requires a prodigious amount of cash as downpayment, the hassle of applying for a bank loan, among other things.

What if we tell you that you are not alone? We believe many people have missed lucrative real estate opportunities exactly because of the reasons mentioned above. And this is exactly the problem that we are looking to help you solve.

Thanks to a wealth of advancements in technology, it is now possible to create digital assets that we can use to store value, such as real estate, and trust in its transparency. Let’s throw the spotlight, temporarily, on the innovative technology at the core: Blockchain — core technology behind Bitcoin — is a distributed database that is capable of maintaining a continuously-growing list of records that is secured from tampering and unauthorised revision. As it can, and will, reside across a network of public computers, the blockchain is authenticated across this distributed network before any new transactions are verified, cleared and stored in a block that is linked to the preceding block. More secure and tamper-proof public ledger to record ownerships.

Illustration on how digitised real estate ownerships works.

REIDAO (www.reidao.io) is a Singapore-based company which is creating digital assets backed by a specific real estate. This process is called “tokenisation”. Each real estate can be broken up into many tokens with a set value, and each token can be independently traded, making it an ideal alternative real estate ownerships form.

Imagine a real estate asset with a market value of USD 1,000,000. Traditionally, you would have to cough up the downpayment to purchase the real estate (e.g. USD 200,000 if 20% downpayment), and to be able to secure the loan required for the balance amount.

With REIDAO, the same property will be broken up into many tokens — let’s say, 100,000 tokens. With a market value of USD 1,000,000, each token will be valued at USD 10. Put simply, property ownership of this real estate is broken up into 100,000 pieces with a value of USD 10 each. You choose to participate in the purchase according to your financial ability.

Leveraging on blockchain technology for authentication, these tokens are valid cryptoassets and should be treated similarly to other cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin, Ether, etc). They are held in a digital wallet where you, as the owner, hold the (private) key to access it. These tokens will maintain their value according to the underlying asset that backs them up.

Just like cryptocurrencies, these tokens can be traded independently. You will be able to list your token(s) for sale on our platform where potential buyers can view them and will buy it from you if they agree on your asking price (or let negotiations ensue). This mitigates one of the most common problems in traditional real estate where it is usually difficult to find a buyer. In this type of ownership, you are not selling the whole property; you are only selling a portion of the said property.

The tedious paperwork usually attached to the traditional way of investing in real estate is also eliminated. Proof of transactions of the tokens are recorded in a public ledger where they are secured cryptographically, making it almost impossible to be hacked and altered.

As we grow, we will be listing multiple types of real estate from multiple cities around the world, enabling you to diversify your property ownerships to many regions that you traditionally would not have access to.

In the end, we hope that what we are doing will help in level-ing the playing field of real estate opportunities, putting you and I on the same level as the “big boys”.

Stay tuned for our updates and announcements on our first property sale for the Proof of Concept! Reach out to us at connect@reidao.io to join our updates list and Slack community.

More communication channels:

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/REIDAOio

- Telegram: https://t.me/reidao

- Rocket Chat: https://chat.reidao.io

- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/REIDAO