Lofty

Invest in U.S. rental properties for just $50 in 5 minutes

4.3•16 reviews•

670 followers

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Diversify your portfolio, earn rental income daily, and watch your stake appreciate until you want to sell. Lofty is the future of real estate investing — we’re making real estate easier and more flexible for investors globally.
This is the 2nd launch from Lofty. View more
Lofty

Lofty

Real Estate Investing With Instant Liquidity – Lend & Earn
Lofty was ranked #5 of the day for August 28th, 2024
Lofty offers instant liquidity in real estate investments, allowing you to buy and sell ownership in properties easily. Lend money for others to trade and earn attractive yields. Enjoy daily rental income, easy management, and a path to financial freedom.
Lofty gallery image
Lofty gallery image
Lofty gallery image
Lofty gallery image
Lofty gallery image
Lofty gallery image
Free
Launch tags:
Investing•Blockchain•Personal Finance
Launch Team / Built With

What do you think? …

Jerry Chu
Maker
📌
Hey Product Hunt! I'm Jerry, one of the founders at Lofty. We started Lofty because we got frustrated during our own experience trying to invest in real estate. We believe the entire process, from buying to selling, as well as the ownership period, including management, should be much easier given the technology that's available. So, we set out to build Lofty, which we hope will one day become the NASDAQ for real estate. We first launched on Product Hunt in 2022. At the time, all you could do was buy, manage, and sell partial ownership in a limited number of properties. Since then, we've greatly improved the product and have built many exciting new features, specifically the ability to buy AND SELL legal ownership of real estate properties with instant liquidity, and the ability to lend money for market-making on the platform in exchange for a cut of trading fees. So, here is a comprehensive overview of Lofty and what we offer today. What is Lofty? Lofty is a real estate marketplace, where people can buy and sell fractional ownership in real estate properties in seconds. Anyone can come to list a property on Lofty for sale. We convert the equity of the property into tradable tokens on the blockchain through a process called "tokenization". They can then list as much or as little of it as they want for sale on the marketplace. There are thousands of investors from around the world using Lofty to invest and build their own real estate portfolios. Many of them have also listed and sold partial ownership in properties they already owned (including their primary residences). We’re one of the only platforms that lets you buy AND sell fractional ownership with no restrictions or lock-up periods. Now, we’re launching a new feature that allows you to instantly buy and sell ownership in properties without the requirement of a traditional counterparty. For the first time in the world, you can now buy and sell equity in a house (grants you legal ownership + management control) with the same experience as trading a share of AAPL on Robinhood. How does ownership work? Every property’s deed is legally held by a unique WY DAO LLC. Unlike a traditional LLC that has a centralized managing member/partner, these LLCs are algorithmically managed through smart-contracts on the blockchain without a human manager. Every member has equal power and voting rights based on how much of the LLC they own. So, by owning 10% of a DAO, you legally own 10% of the underlying property. The tokens/shares are legal representations of ownership in the LLC; whoever owns tokens also owns the LLC, which means they also own the property. Co-ownership of properties is very common in the US and is no different than if you co-owned a house with family members or close friends. But instead of informally discussing how to manage things over the phone or in meetings, the management process is formalized through the “governance program”, where members vote on all management decisions. One token equals one vote and a super majority of 60% is required for any decisions to pass. We don’t manage your properties nor do we sell properties to you. Instead, you’re directly buying from and selling to other people on the platform. Your funds never touch our accounts and you settle directly with each other using the blockchain through smart contracts. We don’t take a cut of your earnings or charge you management fees. Instead, we make a 6% transaction fee for every transaction on the platform. It’s split, so the seller pays 3% and the buyer pays 3%. Now anyone can invest and actually legally own real estate without worrying about breaking the bank. Anyone from around the world can participate; you don’t have to be an accredited investor. Our smallest users have invested $50 while our largest user has invested over $2,000,000. No crypto understanding or experience needed, you can pay with credit cards or ACH transfers. But, you can also directly pay with crypto currencies if you'd prefer. We currently accept ALGOs as well as USDC on Algorand. Within the next two weeks, we'll also be accepting USDC on Base, Polygon, and Solana. To sign up, just create an account on Lofty - https://www.lofty.ai/ Instant liquidity + lending! Check it out here - https://liquiditypool.lofty.ai/ We’re proud to introduce our newest feature, the automated-market-maker and liquidity pools! You can read more in-depth about how this all works in our learning center. We took some concepts from decentralized exchanges (dexes) in the web3 world and adapted them to better fit a real world asset like a house. The algorithm borrows liquidity from people on the internet. It uses this borrowed liquidity to trade with Lofty users, which allows you to buy and sell ownership instantly without needing a traditional counterparty. The result is for the first time in the world, you can now directly buy and sell legal ownership in a specific property with the same speed and user experience as buying AAPL or TSLA on Robinhood. On the other side, you can also now lend out your real estate ownership and/or money for yield. This is especially beneficial for lending out your real estate ownership, because you can continue to collect rental income from the property and vote on governance decisions, while also getting yield from lending. You can view our lending platform here and if you don’t have USDC (a stable coin) to lend out, no worries. We have our own on-ramps at Lofty and honor 1:1 exchange rates between USD and USDC. You can also directly convert USD to USDC on Coinbase, then send it to your Lofty account. This feature is completely opt-in. Some of our users only invest in real estate, some only lend out funds, while others interact with both. Referral Credit If you refer a seller to our marketplace and they end up listing a property for sale, you'll receive a $1,000 cash referral bonus. Additionally, if you refer anyone who spends $250 within the first month on the platform, you’ll both receive a $50 gift certificate to use on any property on the marketplace. If you have any questions, please ask them below. We're really excited to share this new update with the Product Hunt ecosystem!
Rajiv Ayyangar
@pmdbt Congrats on the launch! This can't have been an easy thing to pull off. Probably a naive question, but what's the number one reason people choose to invest in real estate vs. other asset classes?
Jerry Chu
Maker
@rajiv_ayyangar Thanks Rajiv! Took us 2 years to finally enable this in a technically feasible and legal way, so it's definitely been an interesting journey. Your question isn't naive at all. I would say based on interviewing our users, many of whom own or invested in real estate outside of Lofty, there are 3 main reasons. 1. Psychological - there is something psychological about owning real estate, where you feel a true sense of ownership and have control of this asset. You can share the address and photos of the property with your friends and family and talk about the location and your plans for the investment. It's a feeling that often can't be replicated by investing in stocks or crypto. 2. Tax benefits - people often ignore post tax returns on their investments. It may seem like real estate returns are boring when stocks have double digit annual returns and even treasury yields are paying out 5%, but you have to pay taxes on the income earned on those other assets. For real estate, an owner benefits from various expenses that can offset their tax liability on paper (we handle this for our users automatically), including depreciation expense. As a result, you are more likely to keep all the income you've earned. In fact, many of our users receive great yield on their properties, but have 0 or negative tax liability on paper, which they can even use to off-set tax liability from other investments. 3. Leverage - there will always be risks when taking on leverage for any investment, but real estate is rare in that it's often standard to take on 5:1 leverage through a mortgage. This type of leverage is not really possible in a lot of other asset classes. Real estate often have low nominal returns, but when the investment is leveraged, those returns often aren't boring anymore. It's not uncommon to find real estate investors earning consistently high yields (above average stock returns or treasury yields) thanks to this. If you combine this with the second point, these investors are also keeping more of their returns. Overall, people often ignore real estate, because they seem boring and the national average return seems low compared to other asset classes, but that's because it includes properties and neighborhoods that don't have any growth or demand. If you find the right properties in the right areas, it's very common for your real estate investments to out perform other asset classes. I think this is one of the reasons why growing up, most of the families of wealthy friends and classmates I had were all involved in real estate somehow. Given all these reasons, I think real estate should definitely be a part of anyone's portfolio should they have the funds to acquire these assets, and now with what we're building at Lofty, everyone can :)
Antoni Kozelski
@pmdbt Congratulations on the release of Lofty! It is a great platform and a great idea👍
Yared Efrem Afework
Lofty, built on the Algorand blockchain, is in a class of its own in terms of tokenizing real estate. It'll be the next YC wonder company.
Lev
@yared_efrem_afework Amazing. Question on Algo -- what makes it superior for this type of thing? Genuine question as I am curious. I know a bit abt crypto, but I'm looking to learn more. Why not ETH or Cardao for this purpose, for example? Again - excuse me if my question is too basic.
Yared Efrem Afework
@shallow_investor Algorand is cheap, blazingly fast and has low hardware requirements. It has had 0 downtime since its inception. What makes Algorand unique is its consensus mechanism, Pure Proof of Stake. It is a 3 step process where node runners use VRFs to self select themselves (like a lottery). It's a decentralized sub-sampling process. In the first step, no matter how many node runners there are, roughly 20 block proposers come into being. They each propose a block, which are propagated across the network. In the second step, a committee of size 2990 is self-selected. They vote and decide on which of the 20 blocks has the "lowest hash", arriving on 1. In the third step, a committee of size 1500 is self-selected. They judge this block and see if it has any illegal activities going on, like double-spending, signature frauds, etc. Once they've judged that there isn't anything illegal, the block is added to the top of the ledger. In this way, Algorand consistently produces a new block every ~2.8 sec which is immediately final, as there are no soft forks. Compare this to Bitcoin, which has a block frequency of one every 10 mins, and in which blocks are considered final after 6 blocks (1h). It's a blockchain that gets out of your way and let's you focus on your business, e.g. tokenizing hundreds of properties like Lofty have done: https://www.lofty.ai/marketplace This video illustrates things.
Lev
@yared_efrem_afework Wow - thanks so much for the thorough and quality response. Appreciate it.
Jerry Chu
Maker
@yared_efrem_afework appreciate the complement, we'll definitely try! :)
Baron
Ok just watch Jerry’s intro video above, and tell me this isn’t like SpaceX for real estate in a way (stakes are way less of course). This is so the future. I am still astonished when I see Jerry buy and sell ownership in a property in a matter of seconds in that video. Props to Lofty. Keep up the amazing work.
Lev
@slick_ron Yes exactly. It's absolutely nuts. How is this possible, while buying a normal house is the most manual and analog thing in the world?