Whilst this is no doubt innovative, everything that is abysmally wrong with property ownership in the UK stems from complicated ownership structures like that being proposed here. Just look at the leasehold scandal (and upcoming reform), the push for commonhold, and the things that go wrong (such as the cladding scandal following Grenfell).<p>Homes are not investment vehicles to make people wealthy - they are a fundamental human right that many people are priced out of, or subject to unscrupulous landlords and freeholders exploiting what is still essentially a feudal system.
"Safer than stocks. The stock market is volatile and risky compared to property ownership"<p>That's a bold statement. Property markets can crash too. And what happens if a crappy tenant trashes the place, or the property turns out to have subsidence, or asbestos, or covered in dangerous cladding? And insurance doesn't pay (for whatever reason, plenty of real world examples of this)
> Proptee is responsible for managing the entire investment portfolio. Operating fully in-house allows us to keep your fees to the minimum. At the moment, we charge only a small management fee of 0.85%.<p>So Proptree is going to find tenants, clear blocked drains and repair leaking roofs all for 0.85%?<p>Or are they going to hire their mates to do it out of the capital amount, who will take massive commissions?
Will be interesting to see how they build their management fee in, what realized fees look like, how units are valued and whether that price can be independently verified. Clearly the aim is to dress this up to feel like exchange trading, but there is no open market for some standardized unit of "fractional landlording", so presumably they are always on the other side of every transaction.
It must be said that in the UK property is governed by specific law and specific rules. These may vary per country (E.g. Scotland vs England), I'm only familiar with England.<p>For example a contract to sell/buy property must be done by deed, which among other things requires special wording and witnessed signatures.<p>Owners are also registered with Land Registry and there is a limit to 4 legal owners. If there are more owners a legal instruments like a trust must be setup in order to create beneficial owners.<p>Bottom line: it is not simple. Whatever this website allows to sell and buy it is unlikely to be actually shares in properties, but rather some contractual rights to receive a share of profits based on level of investment (however that might be calculated as it's not clear), like property investment funds, which this effectively likely is.<p>Values of properties do go up and down. How can they adjust on a daily basis? They cannot. Best one can do is to hire a Chartered Surveyor every 6 months or so to get an independent valuation.
Aside from morality / economics, this is hardly innovative. Tokenised property investment has been going on in the UK for years. The biggest players now are:
<a href="https://www.propertypartner.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.propertypartner.co</a> who started in 2015...<p>They even have a secondary market or exchange which is a regulated MTF (<a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/multilateral_trading_facility.asp" rel="nofollow">https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/multilateral_trading_fa...</a>) where you can trade your investment using limit and market orders.
I wonder if there's buyer-side liability. If you purchase a property which then incurs vast costs due to a technicality in the deeds (example would be a duty to maintain something), who pays?
See <a href="https://landx.id" rel="nofollow">https://landx.id</a> for the equivalent for property micro investments in Indonesia.<p>Context: We pivoted our crypto exchange startup into LandX because we (the founding team) got sick of people trading over hype. Fractional ownership of cryptocurrency is awesome because it let anyone get into the game. What if we can do the same for something solid on the ground? So LandX -- for Indonesia.
So I guess since there is no commision all taxes, fees and inevitable maintainance and renovation costs are already priced in, which is not bad but interesting.<p>It's similiar to Real Estate Development Funds we have in my country but out of tha stock exchange.
Seems like an interesting idea.<p>I happen to know the founder and he is a really smart and a hard working person, with quite a lot of experience trying out different ideas, so I wish him and the team a lot of success!
It would be neat to see them issue ERC20 or some sort of ethereum token associated with a given property. Though I am unsure if that would work with the current legal structure.
Leasehold <a href="https://leasehold.io/" rel="nofollow">https://leasehold.io/</a> is an alternative which uses a deflationary blockchain cryptocurrency to distribute profits to token holders.<p>It distributes profits via a token buyback (and burn) mechanism which maximizes the reward for long-term token holders. When the buyback comes at the end of each month, you can sell tokens back to Leasehold Holdings on one of the exchanges and cash out or you can hold your tokens and instead benefit from capital appreciation of those tokens. Capital appreciation is guaranteed (in the long run) since each buyback reduces the remaining total circulating supply of tokens (in a cryptographically verifiable way).<p>Also, Leasehold plans to become a multi-company blockchain project to benefit from network effects.<p>Our community also runs a decentralized exchange so that anyone can trade the Leasehold token against a mainstream cryptocurrency (Lisk) <a href="https://ldex.trading/" rel="nofollow">https://ldex.trading/</a> - The DEX code is fully open source so anyone can launch their own decentralized market to trade the Leasehold token against any other compatible token.