I’ll peak around more on their site, but on first glance it looks meh to me.
“Fractional” is a buzzword that’s used frequently in timeshare or “vacation ownership”, and it generally means that you’re over-paying for your fraction.
Combine that with it being overlayed on a tokenized block-chain, and it ends up looking like a REIT, wrapped in block-chain, inside a crypto-coin, with a sprinkle of timeshare. That’s a toxic combination. Even if I’m wrong on an individual aspect, all of the ingredients look undesirable…at least to me.
I was listening to an American economist who does work with the Chinese, and he said that a part of the reason behind these large urban residential developments is part of the Chinese governments attempts to move citizens from their agricultural land and into the cities. I’m paraphrasing here but after the Revolution farmers were given “rights” to agricultural land. Now, 60+ years later, technological developments mean that a tiny fraction of people need to actually be doing that kind of work. So, as an incentive, the government built all of these homes, and then make a deal like–move off your land and you get 2 or 3 condos in the city for your family. It makes more sense when viewed as a rational action by the government rather than how I’d initially seen it reported which was more along the lines of “lol CCP”.
But, I had understood that a lot of it was fueled by private speculation because there were such limited investment opportunities in China and condos were basically beanie babies.
Maybe the ‘innovation’ is that they can effectively run REITs without actually doing so for tax / regulatory purposes, because they’re actually ‘facilitating’ the investors to own the properties themselves?
(I don’t know close to enough to be sure about that.)
Whatever the legal relationships are, I think the physical/practial/real relationship between housecryptocoin owner and the property is the same as the REIT investor and the property.
I think the innovation is coming up with a way for less informed, poor people to eventually partake in real estate speculation so that their information disadvantage can be exploited.
I do some work with a local land trust - I think it’s a really promising idea that has some potential for typical nonprofit fuckery in the hands of bad actors. I’d definitely like to see pilot programs like this all over the country.
I’m not an expert on them or anything. The basic idea is that there is a community run organization that purchases an inventory of properties. The properties are sold to low-mid income residents at affordable prices, and sometimes the CLT will coordinate with a lender to offer favorable mortgages with low down payments. I think generally they require the purchasers to live in the property. Whenever the homeowner decides to sell, they sell it back to the CLT. The CLT will take some portion of the increase in value, and the homeowner will get some portion. Some CLTs take 100% of the increase in value, I think. They use it for HOA type stuff like maintaining public spaces, and also to acquire new properties.
I think it’s an interesting idea to provide affordable housing in a community that is invested in its own well being, and prevent that community from immediately becoming unaffordable if it begins to thrive.