Head’s up, real estate agents, Aperture’s Property Coin is coming soon to real estate financing.
Aperture, the Los Angeles based house-flipping real estate tech company launched in 2016, just announced its asset-backed crypto-currency called Property Coin. Property Coin goes on sale February 26.
Property Coin will issue $50.00 tokens with a minimum token contribution of $1,000 for US investors. Higher than other crypto-currency investments but lower than most real estate investments, Aperture hopes to generate $50M worth of tokens.
Aperture co-CEO Andrew Jewell said, “We really see the opportunity for Property Coin to come in and be truly the first crypto-denominated securitization or structured finance vehicle backed by real world assets, real estate assets.”
Property Coin tokens are to be used to finance real estate acquisitions, based upon Aperture’s algorithms and staff expertise, that Aperture will then flip for a profit. 50% of Property Coin’s profits will also be reinvested in other real estate investments and loans nation-wide that are aimed to create appreciation for its crypto investors.
Matt Miles, Aperture’s other co-CEO, believes that Property Coin fits in perfectly with Aperture’s main business of flipping homes as an iBuyer and loan underwriter to smaller real estate investors. “Our experience as investment bankers (with the Royal Bank of Scotland) who finance mortgage and real estate transactions is a well-defined path of how to do (such financing) in the right way, in a way acceptable to institutional investors and lenders. (After launching Aperture) we learned about the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) market and saw that no one was doing those things with ICOs. We’re adapting what we already know about financing assets to create a model to finance real estate assets in the ICO space.”
Actually, there is a company doing similar real estate financing and flipping in the ICO market and that company is called Tether. Tether provides tokenized traditional government-backed currencies on the Bitcoin and Ethereum block chain. The difference, however, in these two crypto businesses is that Tether operates on the block chain and Property Coin does not. Property Coin is its own, distinct entity and, therefore, finances its real estate transactions with its own, separate tokens. Property Coin’s “back-up” financing is discrete within Aperture’s larger world of house flipping and real estate asset financing.
Whatever the similarities and differences in crypto financing, it’s definitely time for real estate agents to jump on the crypto learning curve. Volatile as crypto-currencies may or may not be right now and into the near future, it certainly appears that real estate crypto financing is here to stay in some form or another. Aperture’s Property Coin is just the latest iteration.
