Fractional real estate investing startup RealT is young, to be sure, but the enterprise has already proven to be one of the early hits in Ethereum’s “tokenized assets” sector.
RealT entered the new year on strong footing after the RealToken tied to the company’s ”flagship” property — 9943 Marlowe Street in Detroit, Michigan — became the first security token to be listed on Uniswap, Ethereum’s most popular decentralized exchange and a breakout success story in its own right, in November 2019.
The project’s notably kept the hot streak up in 2020 on the heels of two significant milestones.
On the Up and Up
Last month, the project set the record for the largest property sold on Ethereum to date upon selling its 16200 Fullerton property, a 15-unit apartment complex, for $615,000 USD.
Of course, if Ethereum continues to become more popular in the years ahead and gobbles up bigger swathes of the real estate market, then there will surely be larger sales to come. Still, the fact RealT notched that milestone first speaks to the project’s established first-mover advantage, which can become increasingly valuable in time.
Moreover, just last week the RealT team announced that it has now crossed the $1 million milestone in tokenized real estate sales powered by Ethereum.
These feats are testaments to the fact that RealT arrived early, so to speak, and even more importantly they did so with a superior product. Investors whose Ethereum addresses are whitelisted can invest in real estate on a fractional basis and earn daily dividends that are paid out in the Dai stablecoin.
Right now, RealT is paying out some $10,000 a month to its “landlords of the future,” which breaks down to daily payouts of more than 300 Dai presently. The company’s Fullerton property is the king of the hill at the moment, as it’s paying out around 205 of that +300 every day.
Of course, these numbers are quite small compared to the wider global real estate market, which reached $280 trillion in size in 2017. But still, taking RealT for what it is in context — a young promising project that has a lot of upside in a DeFi sector that has a lot of upside — its builders have every reason to be optimistic going forward.
Why RealT Is Good for Ethereum
The beauty of the Ethereum ecosystem is how open it is, which is to say that creators can build freely among the platform’s infrastructure and a growing range of decentralized “money lego” applications.
This reality has powerful implications that only serve to boost Ethereum and its currency ETH, argued RealT chief operating officer David Hoffman in his latest feature in the Bankless newsletter earlier this month, “Ethereum Is an Emergent Structure”:
“Ethereum is a platform for markets. All significant DeFi applications: Maker, Compound, Uniswap, Augur, dYdX, are all market-applications. These market-generating applications all need a money to function. Ether, as the native currency of Ethereum is the most obvious choice. It’s holders want applications that use it as money, so that the holders … can use it as money. This creates a perpetual energy out of the ongoing incentive to use Ether as money.”
Ethereum is greater than the sum of its parts, then, as it were. So as projects like RealT continue to succeed, they contribute not only to their own progress but also to the advancement of the utility of Ethereum and ETH in general.
In the future, there will undoubtedly be more real estate projects built on Ethereum that will follow in RealT’s stead. Some of those will presumably enjoy their own big successes. But RealT is an early winner in the arena, and as such the firm is well positioned to keep their hot hand hot.