_____________________________
_____________________________
Introduction:
I'd like to announce SmartRE, a real estate platform using the Ethereum blockchain, whereby US homeowners liquidate a percentage of their homes and investors worldwide buy in at as little as a dollar. Investors are protected by customized insurance from Lloyd's of London.
Legal
Legally, how is this possible? Will the system be classified as playing with security? We have consulted and collaborated with a specialized real estate law firm in San Francisco to help craft the contracts that are between the buyers and the homeowners. It is a rather complicated agreement but suffice it to say, it is not written in the form of a security and we have a good understanding under which category it would be classified.
Each property will have its own smart contract and ERC20 tokens and we use the contracts for escrow, transaction, and clearing-house purposes without any vested third-parties. SmartRE tracks and records the transactions in its databases for insurance beneficiary purposes, along with the other usual functions. We shield the technical details from the average users via our app but we also do not have access to their secret key, which will be used, with the user's permission, when there is dispute as to transaction provenance. We want to make it as easy to invest as Robin Hood does for stock investment.
Why?
Why do this? There is tremendous amount of capital locked up in US homeowners' properties. And given that the average US household has over USD 100,000 in debt, according to the US Federal Reserve of New York, no other solution out there exists that can alleviate the situation. There are home equity loans and reverse mortgages, but they are, in a sense, accumulation of more debt. Targeting the San Francisco Bay Area first, which includes Silicon Valley, where the founders live, we understand the needs of this market. While there are a lot of wealthy people there, a huge majority are still trying to make ends meet due to high housing costs and cost of living. We can help with that. The average home in the SF Bay Area (which consists of the core six counties) is valued at around USD 825,000. That's average. For the Peninsula and San Francisco, it's almost impossible to find anything under USD 1 million unless you are seeking a one-bedroom.
That's the sell side. On the demand side, there is tremendous amount of money coming into US residential real estate from across the globe. According to the National Association of Realtors, more than USD 153 billion was invested in the twelve months up to March 2017. The key issue has been the price point. A lot more people have wanted to invest in the biggest and safest single-market real estate sector but cannot afford the cost. What SmartRE is doing is allowing everyone to invest for pocket change. If you have a USD, then you can invest. This allows for hedging against currency fluctuations and a good steady growth instrument.
State of the Software
We are currently in private beta and will have an invitation-only public beta in late September, with full public release in late October/early November. Presently, we have over 1700 buyers who are ready to put down thousands of USDs each. This is without much marketing, but just presenting at small meetups and conferences. We anticipate that with a full marketing and grass-roots campaign after the token sale, we can ramp up faster to hit our goal of 500 houses with sizable equity liquidation on the platform by the end of 12 months, with the associated buyers. Second year is 2,500 houses and by year five, we anticipate 180,000 houses. We anticipate that we can be profitable by year two unless we expand into other geographies faster than forecasted. This is only the projection for the San Francisco Bay Area. We will go into Southern California (Los Angeles, San Diego, Beverly Hills, etc.) by the ninth month and New York by the second or third year. We take a fee for using the platform by the homeowners and another fee corrolated to the Gas Price of the Ethereum blockchain.
Team
The team is made up of startup veterans, with the CEO helping his last startup list on the New York Stock Exchange at more than USD 8 billion in market capitalization and his sales account for that startup, SMIC, grow to over USD 150 million in less than two years. He has a paper with over 275 citations in ACM MobiCom. The CTO has a PhD in computer science and has over 40 peer-reviewed IEEE/ACM papers and over 20 US patents filed (with nine issued to date), and worked at top Silicon Valley companies. The profiles can be seen here:
www.smartre.io/teamTokensale
The token sale is scheduled to start at midnight (00:00 CEST) August 14, 2017 and run for a month or until the sale allocated tokens are all purchased. There is a total supply of 100 million SmartRE Coins (SREs). Note that these are WAVES-based and different from the ERC20 tokens used for each property. We will sell up to 54% of the total supply at USD 0.30 each with a cap at USD 12.5 million. The SREs can be used two ways: 1)as a 75% discount voucher to the fees on the platform on the buy side, or 2)when it appreciates in value, as the payment for the network. We are doing the token sale as we would like to encourage people to use the platform as we truly believe it can benefit a lot of people on so many levels. Of course, the homeowners and buyers benefit, but also the general economy as more capital is deployed instead of being locked up in an asset that, for most people, does not generate capital until it is 100% sold.
