A $36.5 Million Dollar Condo Is Being Tokenized in New York

This news dropped about 48 hours ago but it went completely under the radar to me until now.

The YouTube Bloomberg video doesn't even have many views yet, so for some reason, this news doesn't appear to have taken hold of many eyeballs.

If you aren't yet aware, I'll explain a little bit about what happened in this video (linked at the end, if you want to watch it).

The video is talking about a $36.5 million condo that has been newly developed in Manhattan (New York). It was actually featured on Ryan Serhant's YouTube channel recently which is one of the reasons why this video caught my eye.

If you aren't aware of Ryan Serhant: He's a real estate agent/broker and he is the star of the show "Million Dollar Listing"... He also started a YouTube channel vlog that is sort of modeled after Gary Vaynerchuk's "DailyVee".

Ryan Serhant is a big name in the real estate game. The fact that he's involved in this project makes it 10x more valuable and relevant in my opinion.

Anyways, what they are doing with this condo is tokenizing the debt. Meaning, they're creating private securities backed by the debt of the condo.

For example, let's say the Condo's token is offered at a total valuation of $35 million. 35 people step up and each decides to buy $1m worth of the tokens.

Now you have 35 people who each own 1/35th of the condo. Normally, owning a condo investment like this would result in a loss of significant liquidity.

It's not easy to sell a $35 million condo and it could take years and years to actually recoup your money.

By tokenizing it, you're creating essentially a liquid market for the Condo that has never before been available to the real estate market.

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Why is this so interesting?

Well, if you know me at all then you know that I have my hands in some real estate of my own. Real estate is a fun business for a lot of reasons. It's also a really "unfun" business for a lot of other reasons.

Bank loans, lawyers, title deed companies... All the red tape that goes into buying and then renovating or building on a property and then selling the property is a MASSIVE hassle.

From the moment that I began researching crypto a few years back, one of my first thoughts was the relationship that it could have with real estate.

I imagined that if someone can create a digital gold (Bitcoin), then someone must be able to create something that represented micro-shares of an investment property (what I'm involved in).

I love that we're seeing it happen in one of the biggest real estate markets in the world (New York). It's the beginning of something special.

There are a lot of hurdles to getting this into the hands of the average investor though. As the video points out, these shares of the condo are only available to accredited investors (individuals with a net worth of $1m+ or a high yearly income).

Thus, it's only available to the top 5% of Americans. It's a start though.

The tokenization of assets, communities, etc. is a key pillar in the fundamental idea of the Steem blockchain. The Steem blockchain is uniquely positioned (in my opinion) to offer these types of tokenized assets to Steemians and to the masses.

When the SMT protocol is launched, I can already imagine the scenario of having easily tokenizable assets. The only barrier in that scenario is the laws of the U.S. government which are currently harsh on the offering of these tokens because they are considered to be private securities.

Hopefully, we will find some loopholes or some better regulatory structures!

Regardless, this is exciting news for me and I think for many others. The future is in tokenization. It's not even a question to me but rather, a foregone conclusion!