Singapore-based REIDAO is set to create the first digital assets that are backed by real estates. REIDAO is tokenising real estates on the Ethereum Blockchain. In doing this REIDAO – described itself as the Groupon for digital assets – is opening doors into the traditionally commitment-heavy and finances-dependent but lucrative real estate opportunities.
Darvin Kurniawan, CEO and co-founder of REIDAO said:
“Rising prices of real estate limits the ability of individual investors with limited funds to invest in any real estate, REIDAO aims to open up the market to everyone with an interest in investing in real estate. By using Ethereum based ERC20 tokens we can fractionalise real estate ownerships to smaller portions.”
David Chandra, COO and co-founder of added:
“Buying real estate usually involves major commitment and a certain amount of financial capacity in available cash as down payment. REIDAO offers a new way to participate, allowing anyone to own a fraction of real estate with any budget.”
Darvin explained the business in simpler terms: Imagine a real estate asset with a market value of $1,000,000. Traditionally, you would need to have enough cash for the downpayment to purchase the real estate (e.g. $200,000 with a 20% down payment), and have to be able to secure the loan required for the balance amount. With REIDAO, this same property will be broken up into many tokens – say, 1,000,000 tokens, which will then be valued at $1 each. You can choose to participate in the purchase according to your financial capability and investment appetite. e.g. If you choose to buy 1,000 tokens (0.1% ownership) then you will only need $1,000.
REIDAO will also be building up an exchange platform where buyers and sellers can meet and transact their property tokens. One of the common problems in traditional real estate transactions is the ease to find a buyer, which creates liquidity issue. With these property tokens, because you are not selling the whole property, finding buyers for your property tokens should logically be easier.
REIDAO’s decision to be based in Singapore is not without reason. Singapore is set to be one of the leaders in the Blockchain space. SGInnovate – a new Singapore government outfit for deep technology startup – is creating a Blockchain community consisting of various Blockchain based startups in the country including REIDAO.
The team is also making sure that the public will accept Blockchain as an upcoming tech.
“We need to educate the public, we need to familiarize the people that there is this new assets class – digital assets. We also went through the Lean Launchpad Program with NUS Enterprise to know exactly what people wants”, added Darvin. National University of Singapore through its entrepreneurial arm, NUS Enterprise, is running Lean Launchpad Programme which encourages startups to go out from the office and get market validation, before spending considerable amount of resources to build a product that nobody wants.
Darvin closed:
“We want to democratized real estates opportunities. Everyone can participate and not just those with deep pockets. We also want our users to be able to access a wide selections of real estates globally. Geographical boundaries for opportunities is going to be irrelevant soon enough.”
