Value Proposition

Real estate is one of the biggest markets in the world by market cap. In just the U.S. alone, the total value of homes sold as investments in 2021 was $435B. If expanded to include all residential real estate in the US, the value balloons to $2.9T.

While most Americans know the benefits of investing in real estate, many are barred from ownership due to home prices being too expensive, not knowing how to get started or the high activation energy required to work with multiple 3rd parties over a 2-3 month period.

By tokenizing rent-generating residential real estate, retail investors can invest in individual properties, gain a source of passive income and benefit from appreciating asset prices at an affordable entry price.

Ease of Use

Homebase aims to curate a seamless user experience for people who want to invest and own real estate. Investors on our platform don’t need to worry about anything. Homebase will source and list suitable investment properties on the platform, setup and deal with all property management, and collect and distribute rent to all owners each month.

To invest in real estate via traditional methods, investors need a sizable amount of capital (median US home price is $430k), to work with multiple 3rd parties (appraisers, banks, etc) and have to deal with the headaches of property management. By transacting on Homebase, investors don’t need to worry about any of the pain points associated with traditional real estate investing. We’re making real estate investing a truly passive experience.

Proof of Ownership

Instead of having to go to your local county office to see who owns the title of a property, blockchain enables trustless verification of ownership. Utilizing smart contract transactions on a blockchain, investors will get paid their proportional amount of rent whenever Homebase gets paid by the tenant (each month). Smart contracts are digital programs stored on a blockchain that are automatically executed when predetermined conditions are met. For example, when executing a smart contract to buy an avatar on Opensea, the user initiates interaction with a smart contract, approves the transaction via a digital signature, and, if enough currency is present to proceed with the transaction, the avatar (or token) is sent in exchange.

Having ownership in a real estate asset represented via token also means that it can be stored in your personal Solana wallet, giving more ownership to users. Over time, we will partner with third-party lenders to allow token holders to stake their property NFTs for additional leverage if they choose to do so.

Compliance and Legal Protections

Homebase proudly receives counsel from Hunton Andrews Kurth, a Top 100 U.S. Law Firm per the Vault Law 100 Rankings, on our approach to tokenization of real estate. We’ve gone through lengthy measures to ensure that our tokens are best-in-class in legal compliance so that end users are protected from any regulatory changes down the line.

Per the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Howey Test, as long as we are providing an instrument with return, we are issuing a "security", and need to comply with local regulations regarding security offerings. Given that we are offering on-chain tokens, that will mean we fall under the "security token" offering umbrella. As of now, security token offerings (STO) are one of the few legal processes to bring interest-bearing real world assets on-chain in the US. In the section Legal Compliance, we will discuss how the Homebase process of tokenization works and the regulation exemptions that we follow.