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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I own some NFTs. They represent a partial interest in an LLC that owns real property (single family homes) in the United States. The properties earn rental income, which flows to a management company, which takes their cut and sends the rest to the LLC, which then puts the rent into crypto which flows to me via smart contract daily. I can take my rent money out any time I want or I can sell my NFT any time I want based on the current value of the house (which I think is just pulled from Zillow or Redfin?).

It's an experiment for sure, but the nice thing is that the tokens are only $50 each initially (they base the total number of tokens on the purchase price of the house so that they come out to $50 each) so it's low risk.

You can get the tokens too at https://lofty.ai (I have no relation to them other than being a customer, but they are a YC company).

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Sounds like a convoluted way of gambling on property values? I don't know why you would need NFT or crypto currency for that (other than making the whole scheme sound more complex and important to investors).

It's the easiest way for 3,000 people to own a single building. Managing an LLC with that many owners is an accounting nightmare. It wouldn't make sense to only charge $50 to invest and to pay rent each day if you had to manage it "the old way". The old way being REITs, which I used to invest in, but you lose a lot of money on management fees that way.

can't the justification for the management fee (employee doing the accounting etc) be just replaced by centralized software though? What does a blockchain bring?

> What does a blockchain bring? Investors.

Jokes aside, it could be that for some people the public and decentralized history of token ownership is more robust and transparent.

What happens if an owner loses his private key, or it gets stolen? Does he legally lose his property?

Presumably. But since it's ownership in an LLC, in theory the manager of the LLC could rectify it by issuing a new replacement token or something similar.

So what's the point of the blockchain here, if you have a single trusted source?

Any Gas fees whatsoever that would eat up profits?

The company that manages the NFTs reimburses them for right now.

Thus negating

> but you lose a lot of money on management fees that way.

(It's just not you paying the fees at this point in time.)

I'm not sure how that follows? Lofty.ai is using their investor money to pay the fees. I think they are counting on the fees being negligible at scale.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but don't the fees scale (basically linearly) with the number of transactions? It seems like you are suggesting that this NFT based approach is superior at least in part because money can be invested/withdrawn more frequently/flexibly.

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