Using the blockchain technology to disrupt the real estate market, Alt.Estate has a strong potential to become an industry standard for the blockchain-based real estate transactions. A strong technology stack, a go-to-market strategy with 10X leverage, a working prototype with three tokenized apartments in key geographies, strong community support, and a solid pipeline of enterprise deals all position Alt.Estate as a win-win solution for real estate developers and investors.
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Estimated at $217 trillion, the real estate market is worth nearly 2.7 times the global GDP. While it offers the investors the opportunities for big gains, investing in real estate is generally more complicated if compared to stock or bonds. The issues like the high entry barriers, lack of liquidity, slow ownership transfer and high transaction costs prevent a wider array of investors from entering the field. Blockchain-based real estate tokenization is addressing those issues to become the next step in the evolution of real estate deals.
Alt.Estate Group, a financial technology company offering the protocol and the platform for real estate tokenization, pushes the real estate market to become truly decentralized and aims to become an industry standard for the blockchain-based real estate transactions.
“ERC-20” for Real Estate
Developed two years ago, ERC-20 has quickly become a significant industry standard for all the tokens on Ethereum. Inspired by the approach of ERC-20 developers, Alt.Estate’s Protocol aims to become an industry standard for the tokenized real estate.
Alt.Estate Protocol includes the smart contract technology, corporate structure and legal compliance aspects of property tokenization. It gives all large existing players – real estate developers, brokers, marketplaces and crowdfunding platforms – a turnkey solution for property tokenization with no infrastructure costs. Alt.Estate’s team has already created 20+ smart contracts and a smart contract builder which allows to develop hundreds and thousands of them in a quick and simple manner and to ensure the legal property rights with tokens.
Powered by the Protocol, Alt.Estate Platform is the marketplace for primary sales and secondary trading of tokenized assets. Together with the Protocol, the Platform allows users to trade real estate in fractions with higher liquidity and lower costs.
It opens the market for the mid-size investors: for example, if the investor’s wealth is not enough to purchase a property or, as often is the case, there are some local law restrictions for non-accredited investors, they can purchase multiple properties’ tokens from the secondary market and create their own diversified portfolio, e.g. own shares in 50 Manhattan apartments instead of owning just 1 expensive one.
Real estate tokens open new opportunities for the existing members of crypto community. For instance, crypto Investors can protect their assets from volatile exchange rate by investing it in real estate, crypto traders can build global real estate portfolio in 1 click and trade its tokens, while crypto whales can purchase properties for personal use.
A “win-win” approach makes Alt.Estate well-positioned to become an industry standard. Real estate companies can use a built-in ready-to-use widget to boost their sales. The customers – for the first time ever – get a chance to buy property with as low as $100 and get affordable real estate fractional ownership deals. While Alt.Estate gets commission and builds strong sales and marketing via existing large players, leveraging their huge budgets.
Strong Demand from Institutional Investors
Institutional investors are already participating in real estate crowdfunding deals, as 50% of the current $6 billion market is estimated to come from private equity funds and family offices. Blockchain offers even better risk/return perspective, higher liquidity, lower costs and less complicated cross-border transactions. The private equity funds and other institutional investors are expected to buy tokens in huge amounts (multi million deals are standard for them) to leverage the opportunities of the platform.
The Platform trade turnover is expected to reach $4 billion in the first 3 years. All deals, transactions and fees on Alt.Estate platform will be powered by ALT tokens. The demand for ALT tokens is forecasted to be 10 times higher than the initial token supply.
10X Leverage in Marketing and Demand from B2C
While the demand for ALT tokens will be primarily driven by the B2B segment (similar to Ripple business model), thousands of real estate companies will use built-in widgets to increase sales of property to the end customers on their own websites.
This widget allows Alt.Estate to have a massive leverage in marketing: for each raised dollar the company can spend 3-10 dollars of real estate developers’ marketing budgets instead of 30 cents (30% standard rate). Using 10X leverage in marketing budgets, Alt.Estate protocol has a potential to scale faster, become a standard in the real estate industry quicker and at a lower cost for the company.
Working Prototype in Three Largest Markets
A working prototype, launched before the start of the crowd sale, positions Alt.Estate ahead of most of the competitors. The project’s team has chosen three key geographies – Japan, USA and EU – to tokenize the initial properties and to provide the investors with a chance to trial the platform.
According to EY, 85% of investment properties in USA belong to trusts, this ownership model is widely accepted and allows for multiple beneficiaries of the property. Alt.Estate enhanced the trusts’ mechanism with the blockchain technology which allows to decrease transaction costs from 30% to 2%, bring down transaction time from 1 month to 1 click, and lower an entry ticket from $200,000 to $100. All data is already uploaded on IPFS to ensure the transparency of rights ALT tokens provide, store purchase/sale agreements, property’s operating procedures, etc.
Crypto Community Support
Community and strong network growth incentives are a critical component for any blockchain project to succeed. Alt.Estate rewards community in multiple ways: up to 25% of all commission is paid as block rewards on internal blockchain, analysts can earn tokens for selecting the properties and appraisal services, promoters – for marketing etc.
Alt.Estate has already received an approval from the crypto experts – for example, the project is advised by early Ethereum investor Evan Huddlesone. The project was warmly welcomed by the wider crypto community with the number of followers across social media platforms exceeding 14K.
Team and Advisors with $4B in Real Estate Deals
Alt.Estate’s team and advisors have a combined experience of $4 billion in real estate deals. The core team includes professionals with a background in IT, real estate (last year alone the team sold $400 million worth of real estate), investments, marketing and operations. Alt.Estate CEO Vladimir Shmidt has 10+ years of experience in digital business. Prior to Alt.Estate, he co-founded a premium dating service teamo.ru, which was valued at $100M when sold to mamba.ru.
To enhance Alt.Estate expertise and accelerate the development in different countries, strong professionals have joined the advisory board. Company’s advisors work for the leading real estate companies with more than 2000 offices in 150 countries: top-notch software engineer Matthew Falk, early Ether investor and sales executive Evan Huddleson, PwC director Sayan Tsyrenov, legal expert Brian Meegan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield and Head of CEE Research Denis Sokolov, Savills partner Alexander Shatalov and Knight Frank partner Stas Tikhonov.
To sum up, Alt.Estate brings significant advantages to a number of market players, from private equity funds and other institutional investors to real estate developers and crypto owners. Thanks to the constantly high interest to the real estate market, a solid product and advisors’ expertise, Alt.Estate has a great potential to shift the industry to the more affordable, diversified, and reliable transactions.
Alt.Estate’s ALT pre-sale starts on March 30, 2018 and will last until April 10, 2018. Public token sale will run from May 1 to May 31, 2018.
