Transcript: The Future of Tokenized Real Estate Assets

Hello and happy Friday everyone. I am Brittany Campbell Turner, CEO and founder of Constructor. What is a constructor? Who is a constructor? People ask me that all the time and people think that a constructor is somebody that builds buildings.

And of course, yes, that's true. But when you talk about a construct double R, it's not limited to a builder. It's not limited to real estate, design, construction, or workplace or facilities management. You should join the constructor community if you care about doing the right thing, if you serve people with the built environment, if you create and maintain an impact through quality spaces for people. And we do this by building strong relationships.

We lead in data utilization and systematizing a way where we interact with physical spaces. So join our community by going to constructor, ConstructorRR.com. Follow me on all social media. And you know what, our guest, Mohsen, he is now a new member of the Constructor community and you're gonna be learning a little bit more about him in a couple seconds here. But I do wanna just shout out to the people who are watching on Periscope, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitch, Facebook.

If you want to participate in the discussion, I will have some time towards the end. If you wanna actually ask a question to our guests, you can join us on Clubhouse. I'll be putting the link in the chat so you'll have access to actually join the room and it's gonna be a little bit like a call-in radio show. So that being said, I'll be notifying you guys a little bit later when might be the right time for you to start thinking about your questions and jump up in Clubhouse.

But with that being said, I'll introduce our guests right now and then have a little word from our sponsor. So Mohsen, he is the CEO and founder of Accru, a real estate investment platform working towards democratizing commercial real estate investments. He's an expert in real estate development and tokenomics, specifically utilizing dual and three token blockchain architecture for the tokenization of real world assets. Mohsen has over a decade of experience in real estate investments, development, and having run a successful investment company. He has studied at York University, Harvard Business School, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and most recently at Saeed Business School at University of Oxford with a focus in finance, real estate development, urban design, and blockchain.

So now a quick word from our sponsor. Yes, your exceptional space. For landlords looking for higher margins in your office spaces, you should strongly consider partnering with Yes, your exceptional space to use the Yes Playbook, an all-in-one tool for building a successful, flexible workplace brand. This Playbook focuses on giving you the tools to not just create a physical space or environment where it's just talking about the space itself, but the experience that you're getting from the space. So you can learn more at helloatyes-spaces.com.

And with that, we're gonna pull our guest onto the stage. Welcome Mohsen. And I was on mute. Hello, hello, how are you doing? I'm doing well.

So good to have you on the show. Welcome to Constructor. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited for this conversation today. Been looking forward to it.

Yeah, same here. So, well, first of all, we wanna know about you. Like who the heck are you? We wanna learn a little bit about your background. Yes, I did an intro, but like what got you into real estate investing in the first place?

Yeah, just another guy who stumbled onto real estate is essentially, no, I'm kidding. So my background in real estate started off when my dad put me in a property management job for one of his real estate companies right after my eighth grade summer vacation. I went out trying to collect rent, manage properties, and that was my first exposure to commercial real estate. From there on, I went to school for finance and real estate, did my undergrad at York University up in Toronto. They graduated, moved back to the Middle East where I was heading our family's investments across UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar.

I did that for a couple of years, expanded the family, started to work with a larger group where we had investments across Asia, Europe, and Africa, and I expanded into the North American market. Expanding into the North American market Toronto up on the East Coast, and then LA and Scottsdale, the Phoenix area, and then Reno up in Nevada is where we started investing. Once I started investing in the US, very quickly, we started to develop our portfolio across the coast, but then I was introduced to the market in the Midwest, and I separated from the family fund, and I set up my own shop where I started to syndicate deals in the multifamily space purely in Southwest Ohio.

So the Cincinnati, Dayton, Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky corridor is what we focused on. So that's where my real estate experience comes in. I had about 50 million of assets under management last when I left the fund, which was back in 2019. Now I work full time with the crew, and the crew is a platform for fractionalized real estate investment. So we're looking to make the exclusive inclusive and truly democratized commercial real estate.

All right, so we're gonna dig into a crew a little bit later, but thank you for giving a good intro on what it is. So your dad just threw you in, huh? Yeah, so I come from a family of real estate, and I was literally thrown in the deep end of the pool when it comes to commercial real estate. It was good. It was good exposure from there on.

Every time I had some time off from school, I'd be working with my dad's company, and I'd be either involved on the property management side or on the development side, and it was good. It was a great learning experience for me. Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's really cool. I got thrown into the deep end about music, interestingly enough, because it has nothing to do with the built environment, which is what I'm involved in every single day.

It'll be good if I pick up my saxophone every once in a while, maybe once a year or so. Maybe I can put that into the rotation with you guys. No, so the good thing is I absolutely love real estate, and I continue to do what I love, and that's absolutely important if you wanna succeed. Well, not just succeed, but if you wanna enjoy your work. Yeah, totally makes sense, yeah.

And we love the built environment, but we're gonna talk about tokenomics, because that's something you're also very passionate about and have expertise in. How did you come upon tokenomics as something that you were super interested in? I mean, I find a lot of people who kind of have an interest in tokens, maybe had a gaming background or that, but perhaps it was just blockchain. Is it just blockchain that kind of brought you to the whole idea of tokenomics itself? Yeah, pretty much.

So I didn't know anything about tokenomics, blockchain, distributed ledgers. I'm not a technology person. I can't afford to save my life as of today. But back in 2018, I was in Toronto for a few investor meetings, and a friend of mine sat me down, and he explained to me what blockchain was. That kind of got me interested, and I was like, oh wow, this could really resolve some problems for me, and that's what led to me building a crew.

And it was truly an aha moment of, hey, blockchain could resolve these issues. Given my finance background, I knew that what we were developing was going to be considered as securities. The little bit of knowledge that I had, it would pass the highly test. So the question was, how do we remain a US-based platform that is 100% compliant, and can actually enable democratization of commercial real estate? And that kind of led me to, how do we keep the security tokens compliant, and how do we have to set up those structures, and what is it going to take?

And that's where I went to side-by-side school, and I studied blockchain strategy and tokenomics, and that's how I started to learn more and more about how to architecture these systems, and how to ensure that our platform remains compliant at any given point in time, and the use cases of blockchain, not just as a publicly distributed ledger, but also in a centralized environment. And that's how we essentially end up utilizing it on the platform, and that's where the tokenomics bit came in. Okay, that's really good. So for those of you who are listening and are not fully, fully inundated with what tokenomics is, you may be familiar with blockchain, perhaps on the crypto side, and we talk about blockchain a lot on Constructor from many different perspectives, particularly from an enterprise or private perspective as it relates to the built environment.

But Mohsin, I wanted to specifically ask you, what is tokenomics? Can you just break that down for the audience? Yeah, so tokenomics in today's world, post-cryptocurrencies is understanding the supply and demand characteristics of blockchain tokens, be it utility tokens, be it security tokens. So it's used for cryptocurrencies, it's used for NFTs in the gamification world. It's to monitor the different aspects of the supply of each underlying asset, right?

So be it a currency, be it the asset, be it the piece of art or the game, the avatar or whatever it may be. Yeah, so whatever that token is attached to, it's a digital representation of something, right? It's in its simplest, simplest terms, and it can be attached to so many different things. NFTs is so, so popular right now, and lots of people are wrapping their heads around how it might attach to a piece of artwork. So yeah, that really, really helps.

Okay, so you mentioned NFTs, what are your thoughts about? Yeah, so before we get into the NFTs, to your last comment, there's a few key differences between security tokens, utility tokens, fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, identification tokens and so on. So there's multiple kinds of tokens, and people need to understand what each one's aspects is. So what you talked about relates where there's an underlying asset, relates specifically to a security token. A utility token on the other hand is a cryptocurrency, a store of value.

So imagine a Starbucks gift card is essentially a utility token, which says it has $50 on it, and you can go and spend it at Starbucks at some given point in time. Now, if that was a gift card for, I don't know, a series or something, which went bankrupt, and that gift card disappeared, there's no more underlying value to it. It's not a store of value for anything essentially, but there's no underlying asset that supports it, right? The gift card is worthless. On the flip side for a security token, you have an underlying asset, be it art, be it real estate, be it cars, be it anything out there.

But there is an underlying asset that's supporting that token in itself. Similarly for fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens, so fungible tokens are those where each token is interchangeable for the next one within the same series of tokens essentially. And that's what we utilize for real estate tokenization as we do it today on our platform. Non-fungible tokens are unique tokens which are not transferable or tradable with another token even within the same series. So an NFT would represent a very unique perspective or a very unique piece and has a very unique underlying asset, and that's all that it will represent at any given point in time, whether it is your music rights, whether it is your distribution rights to something or it is artwork or digital art or it's being utilized in the gamification world.

There's a lot of good use cases for NFTs. And recently we started to see NFT use cases within real estate popping up in the US as well where Proppy did the first NFT sale for a real estate asset. So we on the other hand use NFTs for real estate in a different mechanism. We use NFTs as an alternate for land registries. So a lot of developing countries, and we're working on two projects right now, one in Africa and one in Asia where these developing countries don't have very reliable land registries or if there's a private development happening, the developers have to maintain their own land registries.

So we're using NFTs in that case where owning an NFT represents the ownership in a specific either piece of land or a specific piece of a building. So if it's a shopping mall, that's one of the projects. It's slightly over a thousand shops in that shopping mall and they're selling all of them. So how do they manage the land registry for it? So we've got NFTs and each NFT represents each specific shop in that shopping mall.

So and it's backed with coordinates on X, Y, and Z axis with plans of the building, which it's linked to. So there's no confusion on which NFT represents which piece of the asset in itself. So back to your second question, what are my thoughts on NFTs? I think NFTs have some great use cases. NFTs have some undeniable benefits and use cases that can be utilized for.

But I think the way NFTs took off over the last 12 months it's great for adoption, it's great that people are doing it, but the amount of money that's being spent on digital art or on other aspects of it where people are utilizing it as an investment, you don't want NFT based art to get classified as a security and that would lead to other issues. So earlier in March, we were on a panel with Hester Price, Crypto Mom, one of the ICC commissioners. And that's where her comment was as well.

NFTs are gonna be, the ICC is considering security is law or NFTs and it's really close and it's walking a very thin line to a point where they start getting classified as security. So you've got to be very careful of how it's being utilized and where it's being utilized and if it's the right application for it. Unfortunately, what we saw as NFTs became kind of a fad where, and that's my opinion only, where anything and everything is now going to be an NFT and that's how everyone wants to represent it just because the name NFT is there or the term NFT is there next to it.

That's not the right thing for it. That's not the right use case for it. That's the same thing that happened in 2017, 2018 with the ICO debacle where, there are some really good projects that raised money through ICOs and you're seeing them flourish now, but then there were some really bad ones that got out there and that destroyed the entire concept and that's how ICOs got destroyed completely. So, you've got to utilize NFTs in the right way. That's my two cents on it, a very long two cents.

But you know what, I think it's great. So, I'm gonna get into the next question here in a second but I just wanted to acknowledge, we do have a good crowd kind of populating here on Clubhouse. So I just wanted to welcome Nick and Ali Ahmed to the room. Just wanted to let you guys know we are also streaming on Periscope YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and LinkedIn. Feel free to capture this conversation there but if you want to ask any questions, I'm actually going to ask Marcus in the background if he can go ahead and make sure that you put the, we put the Clubhouse link in the chat if anybody wants to join and be part of the conversation and have the opportunity to ask Mohsin any questions.

So, thank you for Sherry Wilson, your perspective on NFTs. And it's really interesting as to how you're using them already for a land registry to just identify specific locations in a strip mall. I think that's a really viable solution, understanding how NFTs work. That's really, really to me, a really great use case particularly for real estate. And yeah, there's a lot of, to your point, there's a lot of perspective that it's a fad but lots of people are gaining from it too and it's a matter of like figuring out what that angle is that you want to approach it with so that it's providing a lot of value with that unique asset, if you will.

So, yeah, really cool. Yeah, for sure. NFTs have some really good use cases. Royalties, for instance. Every time a song plays in a bar, the money automatically distributes to the artist, the record label, the radio show or whatever, wherever it's playing or whatever the split on those is, that can really be perfected through NFTs, right?

Similarly in gamification use cases and use of NFTs for, I don't know, whether it's Fortnite or Call of Duty or any other game out there, there's some massive use cases for it out there as well. Similarly on the real estate side, but yeah, we're gonna be launching some NFT-based products on our site as well, but that's completely different use case. So we're still tokenizing those buildings. We're still saying that, but then we're saying, hey, you can buy this NFT, which represents this 200 square foot space in a retail space of building on 1000 Main Street in, I don't know, downtown Cincinnati, for instance, and then you would only have the rights to the income for that 200 square feet when it's rented out or when it's not leased out.

And so you can buy very specific portions of those buildings as well, but that's at a later stage where we will be doing that. Got it, okay. So it would be focused on owning like a portion of that facility and being able to manage that asset that way. Okay. Right, yeah.

So owning specific parts of buildings, right? So maybe someone doesn't wanna own anything from floor two till floor 79, but the 80th floor is the top floor. So that's gonna maximize your rents or you're owning something that's south-facing in a ocean city or in a city like Miami or it's east-facing in New York or it's west-facing in LA where you've got ocean views or something on those lines. Yep. Then you're able to maximize on your investment and your returns, one.

And two, you're able to make other parts of the building more affordable as opposed to having a single, a straight line price for all the tokens that gets sold for that building. Yeah, that makes sense. Where I'm employed, we were designing a community space that also would have floors associated with just office space to support our organization. And that community space would provide so much value to the local, local community where different startup organizations or organizations that support the community with longevity right now, they would have the ability to use that space temporarily.

We would put them on some sort of lease or that kind of thing for a period of time in order for them to impact that block with huge impact. And then we were also planning for a rooftop deck. So, as you're talking, I'm thinking like, oh yeah, okay, I can see how this would work. There's definitely more value in particular spaces versus others that people will either flock to as far as their interest in utilizing it. So that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, we're also working with a few government entities to support public interest projects through NFT sales. So letting the community invest within their own neighborhoods. So whether it's a park or a parking garage or another community facility that needs work or a community center for that matter, or that needs to be built or needs an upgrade, let the community invest in it. Let each one of them buy an NFT or it could be a soccer stadium or a baseball stadium or a football stadium where let the fans own the stadium.

Why just the team or let them own part of it or something. So we're working on a few very exciting initiatives from that front where not only can you uplift your own favorite teams, but also your own neighborhoods and watch out for some of those announcements. And that's all NFT based products too. Very cool, very, very, very cool. Okay, so with that, I know there are already people here in Clubhouse that are interested in those kinds of things.

So when you post, we would love to hear from you, and I'm sure you're most in for sure. Of course. Yeah, so you talked about tokenization and some of what tokenomics, if you will, are in your business itself. Could you just break that down in the simplest terms for us? Because you have quite a few tokens used within a crew.

Right, so a crew uses a multi-token architecture. We've got your security tokens, which represent the asset. We've got utility tokens, which represent your US dollar deposit on your online account. We've got your identity tokens and your governance tokens, which keeps the entire platform compliant. So at any given point in time, we know who owns what in order to remain compliant, in order to let the SEC know, in order to let the IRS know, and in order to make sure that we're not breaking any laws on our end either.

And at the same time, it enables all the investors to be able to have a say in what happens with each building. So for every asset, since it's an independently investable asset, an independently owned asset, each of the investors get a voting right on certain matters, on certain key matters. And when that vote comes up, that's where those ID and governance tokens come into play. If it's about where your investment is going and how it's happening, that's done utilizing the security tokens. You're buying the security tokens for each specific asset.

You're not just investing in a fund. Or when you're transferring, when you're selling those tokens, or even in the initial purchase, how does that happen instantaneously? That happens utilizing those utility tokens, representing the amount of money that you have deposited on the online account. And those utility tokens then guide how that money moves from your account into whoever you're purchasing the token from, be it the initial issuer or be it on the secondary market. So it helps the money move the way it should without causing any legal issues.

So no money transmitter issues or no custody issues. And it ensures that you get to self-custody your assets. And it helps us eliminate all of the intermediaries required, or a large number of them. So be it custodians, be it transfer agents, be it escrow companies. That's where the blockchain aspect, the smart contract aspect works really well.

And that's where you need the multi-token architecture to make sure that you are able to conduct the transaction appropriately. And that's why our security tokens are extremely complex smart contracts. They're not simple ERC-20 tokens as some of the basic coins that exist out there. And that's a big confusion that people have is, hey, why don't we just create a new ERC-20 token? And because it's the most commonly used term out there, and we can do our own SDO offering or our own security token offering, in order to do a compliant SDO offering or even a technically decent security token offering, you've got to make sure that your tokens can perform certain functions, be it checking if someone is in a career investor or not, be it checking if you know their ID or not, or if they're on a whitelist or not, if that wallet owns more than, I don't know,

if you want to set a limit that no one can own more than 20% in a building, that's, you know, you can set those kinds of limits. So how your tokens function becomes extremely, extremely important as well. So it's in the best interest of the investors or the buyers of these tokens that all that compliance is met with. You know, we forget a lot of times in the hate for the regulators that the regulators are there to protect the common man or to protect the most vulnerable of the investors out there who are the ones who have the most to lose.

So these regulations are there for a reason, and they're there to ensure the safety of these investors. And if someone remains compliant with them, not only do you come up with a good product or a safe product for investing, but you ensure that everyone's investment is as safe as it can be. Every investment has some kind of risk, but it's as safe as it can be. It's providing you the safest returns compared to non-compliant products out there. Yeah, well, and I think when we spoke first, Wilson, I was telling you how much I appreciated that you made sure you were in compliance with the way you were building a crew in the first place in order to make sure that there is that safety in mind, not just building and then checking afterwards to see if it was in compliance.

So I think that there are a lot of solutions out there, but where you've taken safety in mind and making sure to be in compliance with each jurisdiction where a crew is able to be used, I think it's really helpful. And I mean, you're international, so it's really important to make sure you're supported in every single jurisdiction. Yep, so when we started building a crew, we started off by dealing with the regulators. We did not develop the tech stack or the product in itself until we didn't know that we could create a compliant platform.

There was a pathway. There was an agreement by the regulators that, yes, we can do this. And once we had that, that wasn't for at least a year and a half after we started off on this. So we started on our journey on a crew in April of 2018. I had that dinner that we talked about earlier in January of 2018.

So it took us till August of 2019 till we hired our first technology-backed person or head of technology now to join our team and to start working on the product in itself and to develop the architecture along with me and start implementing the idea that we had. The reason for that was we didn't want to do any of that till the SEC and FINRA and CFTC were not OK with us moving forward with this. Yep, it seems like just the smart way to go about it, which is great.

Yeah, there's no point in creating something and then be like, oh, how do we avoid regulation or how do we skip around it or how do we make it compliant now? How do we make all these changes? Say, if you want to do it, do it right from day one. And that usually leads to the best possible product out there, in my opinion. Very cool.

So essentially, you're making it easier to put real estate assets into an investable asset format that's on a platform and to your point, taking out some of the intermediaries and hopefully shortening the timeline for transactions, things like that. So talk about how that happens. How does someone put their asset onto a crew? And then also, how does someone invest? Yeah, so a crew is there for a two-sided marketplace.

It's there for both the investors and the asset owner side of things, be they individual, be they institutional investors or asset owners. And we're trying to create a marketplace or we've created the marketplace where everyone has the same opportunity to buy into real estate and at the same time has the same opportunity to sell their real estate as well. A lot of times what happens with commercial real estate is, as the assets start to grow larger and larger, the buyer pool becomes smaller and smaller. So institutional investors are usually selling to institutional...

Institutional owners are selling to other institutional investors and so on. So what we wanted to do and the journey that we embarked on was, an institutional investor should have a much larger buying pool or selling pool of sorts and every common investor should have the equal opportunity to buy into those institutional class commercial real estate assets. So when someone wants to list an asset on our platform, we also have to make sure that the asset meets certain requirements. So we have to do the entire due diligence on the asset or the underwriting on the asset.

So imagine an IPO for a new company that's going on NASDAQ, that has to go through a full due diligence and underwriting process with one of the investment bankers, be it J.K. Morgan, be it Goldman Sachs, the whole line yards. So we perform those activities on every asset that goes on the platform. So when someone wants to list an asset on our platform, it starts off with a simple form that they've got to fill out on our website, where they give us their information, a little bit of information about their website, sorry, about their asset, and they just submit that.

So the basic, you know, what kind of an asset is it? What's the address of the asset? And that's where our team gets in touch with them, personally gets more information. We understand what the seller's goals are on it or what the goals behind fractionalization are, if they understand what how tokenization would work and if it is the most appropriate fit for them as well. Once we have an agreement on it, then we get into a more deeper dive due diligence.

There's a small fee for it. We set up the legal docs and we set up the asset on our platform and we market it. And all the investors within our platform and beyond can sign up and can start investing in the deal. The beauty of this is what are the key benefits for asset owners is as someone who developed real estate myself, so having a permanent capital structure is is absolutely phenomenal. Never having to worry about redemption or never having to worry about how am I going to do these capital calls or know these guys be able to put in the right amount of money.

That is an absolutely key benefit that comes in. Another one is when valuing commercial real estate, the biggest factor for the reduction in its true value is this thing called discount or marketability. By fractionalizing the asset and putting it on our platform where we have a secondary market, we're reducing that discount on marketability or what we like to call is we're adding a liquidity premium on the value of that asset. So asset owners are able to unlock the true value of that asset and they're able to recapitalize on their asset by selling a small piece of it.

If I need a million dollars and I own a 10 million dollar asset, I have to sell the entire 10 million dollar asset. I can't just sell a million dollar portion of it. So when you're fractionalizing it and you're tokenizing it and selling it on our platform, you can say, hey, I want to retain 90 percent of the tokens and in turn retain 90 percent of the ownership in it. I just want to sell 10 percent of it. So on a 10 million dollar asset, you have 10,000 tokens.

You're only selling 1000 tokens in the market initially to start off or on our marketplace. So all of these benefits add in. Now, we're introducing some really fun features over the next couple of months by the end of the summer, which include leverage against your security tokens or margin trading like you would in your traditional capital markets or on the stock market. So investors will be able to borrow directly against their security tokens that they own and qualified assets. What that enables it to do is asset owners can actually remove the debt completely from the asset side and pass on the debt opportunity to each investor individually.

So if same building with 10,000 tokens, there is no debt on the building on itself. I have 90 percent of the tokens. I can still borrow against those 90 percent of the tokens that I can still increase or decrease my return based on my risk, appetite and see how much risk I want to take. And it would be the same opportunity for everyone else. But it makes the asset so much more stable in terms of more than 95 percent of capital calls are caused by debt servicing.

When there is no debt on an asset, no matter how good or bad the market is or no matter how poorly or an asset is performing, you're not going to have the need for that that capital call that that would need to come in. There would be very occasional capital calls if they would ever be needed. And that, too, could very easily be handled with a nicely placed reserve on that asset. And lastly, one of the biggest advantages for institutional asset owners or larger asset owners for specifically is that anytime you have a larger asset, on your balance sheet, you have to maintain a decent size reserve.

And those are usually insurance company requirements. When you're fractionalizing the asset, you're providing a steady stream of data, which is verifiable data by third party, which is verified data by third party. When you have verified data, which is supporting your asset, insurance companies actually reduce the classification and you're in turn able to reduce your reserve requirements. Which is a big, big, big relief. If you want a hundred million dollar asset and your reserve is supposed to be, I don't know, 10 percent or 10 million dollars, and you're able to reduce that to two million or three million dollars, that's a massive relief from that perspective.

So that's another big benefit from that. Now, how can investors invest in these deals? So right now we're in a platform that's for accrued investors only. And there's a lot of democratization that needs to be done with an accrued investors as well. Right.

So anyone who makes 200, 250 thousand dollars, 250 thousand dollars as an individual or has a net worth of a million dollars is considered as an accrued investor. Or you have some of your SEC licensing in place. But that does not mean everyone is an ultra high net worth individual or everyone has the ability to purchase real estate. So a senior manager at GE or P&G or Unilever or any of the larger brands or Walmart is someone who would just barely qualify to be an accrued investor.

Their exposure to real estate would be I can go buy a single family home or duplex or something or a quad and rent that out. And then I'll have to deal with all the hassle for the tenants and the maintenance and management. And 90 percent of the times from our research, people venture into that and they very quickly get rid of those assets because it's just not worth their time. And they expected a very different kind of investment or what they're used to in the capital markets.

So we enable and we provide an opportunity for that large group of people to invest into commercial real estate, as well as the ultra high net worth individuals who already have the opportunity, but they still want to diversify. So what do we do is we reduce the minimum investment down to a thousand dollars. So crowdfunded platforms would do what? Fifty thousand, twenty five thousand. Very few or if any would do down to a thousand dollars.

We have our platform is super secure. The immutable ledger of blockchain is what really makes it super secure. We have instantaneous transactions so you don't have to keep money with an escrow company. You don't have to wait for 90 days for a project to close. You have a buyer, you have a seller.

The transaction closes right away. You know, there's no waiting periods involved. There's no title searches that you have to do and all that fun stuff. And at the same time, you know, you can borrow up or borrow down the same leverage aspect comes on the side as well. As you deem fit, you don't have to invest in an asset that is very highly levered because that's how the asset stands.

You get to decide how much leverage you want or you get to decide your risk tolerance on each asset that you're investing in. And now you can diversify in assets of your choice. It's single direct investing. You could go on fund rise and put in 500 bucks, but then you're just part of a very, very large portfolio of assets where you don't know what what all those assets are. Whether you like all of those assets or not, whether you like the locations or not, you know, you're you're still kind of stuff.

In this case, you're picking and choosing every asset of your choice. You're picking and choosing areas, regions, asset class, so on and so forth. So it gives you the full control and the ability to be in control of your investment. So that's a really great breakdown. Thank you for that, Mohsen.

And for those of you who are listening, if you have your questions, please get them ready, because I'm going to just ask one more question before I invite people up to the stage. Mohsen, you seem as though you have an interest in allowing for the investment capability of people who are not typically able to invest in commercial assets. What drives that for you? Why did you want to make that available through? Yeah, so, you know, I've I've grown up in a real estate family.

I've always had the benefits of developing a very diverse portfolio, which for which real estate has been a very large part. I've seen how real estate acts as as a generation as a tool for building wealth for generations. I've seen it work in a way where it truly changes people's futures, financial futures by making the right investments. And it's just not right that it's not available to more than 80 percent of the people across the United States. It's just not fair that less than four percent of the real estate out there is owned and managed by by female owners.

Or just not fair that less than two percent of the owners are people of color when it comes to commercial real estate. You know, I'm an immigrant myself and I'm blessed to be part of those categories. But at the same time, it's key to have equal opportunity for everyone when it comes to real estate or to to determining their financial future and their financial freedom as they grow. And that's just been a passion of mine for which I've always tried to democratize commercial real estate. I was working with my family fund.

It was just our family office. It was just our family money. There was no outside money. I started up my own shop where I enabled my friends and family to invite friends and extended family members to invest in commercial real estate, which was still a very high minimum. And they couldn't invest on their own.

But not again. Similar thing. Not in commercial. They had other opportunities. But, you know, the idea was always, how do we bring this investment threshold so low that we can remain compliant and the transaction process can be so smooth and people can have the same opportunity across the world, no matter what color, creed, religion, whatever they belong to, should not be a barrier for entry into building their generational wealth and securing their financial future.

So that's that's kind of what takes into it. You know, that's what we did on the platform is we made investing super simple, like signing up. It's a six step process. We need that basic information to remain compliant to for reporting purposes. But that's all that we need.

Once you've signed up and you've gone through your ID verification and accreditation verification for now, so we don't open up to retail investors, you know, investing in a property is literally one click away. It's you browse a property, you look through it, and you like it, you can invest as much as you want. And you have $10,000 in your online account, you can buy 10 tokens in it. You have $100,000 and you want to only buy five tokens, you can buy five tokens in it. That's all in your hands.

It's it takes less than 30 seconds for that entire transaction to go through. You know, we made it as simplified and without any hassles, you don't have to go and sign off on massive PPMs and subscription agreements and, you know, all those legal docs and all of those escrow docs. And then you don't have to go wire money. You don't have to drive all the way out to your bank and wire money to some XYZ entity. You're doing it all online and all transparent.

You have all the information right there. And it's all under the immutable leisure. So gives people that trust and confidence as well. Very, very cool. And I appreciate your passion about this.

And it just it's near and dear to my heart to To continue to learn and also share about different ways for people to develop generational wealth, especially people who have not been able to historically based upon discrimination, whatever the case might be, right? There's so much. So they're historical socio economic level. So the fact that you're that's a passion of yours and you're pursuing that's really, really cool to me. So thanks for sharing that.

So, um, I do want to request if there anybody if there's anybody who is watching on live stream, if you have any questions for most, then please put them in the chat, we'll be watching the chat. And we do have two people on stage. Eric just came up to the stage. Eric, if you have a question for Mohsen, you can come off mute and ask your question. Eric.

All right, I can't hear you, Eric. So I think the club has audio is not coming through for some reason. All right, let's try that. Air market Marcus is working on finding a solution for us. So here, one second, guys.

Okay, Eric, let's try one more time. Better. Low test. Yes, I can hear you now. Eric, welcome.

Perfect. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on the stage and appreciate the information you guys are putting out. Very informative.

Very, very next level stuff. I did have a question on how you guys are leveraging the investors, but also in turn, have you considered looking at liquidity pools that come from the cryptocurrency space with tokenization? Thanks. Yeah, so Eric, to answer your question, you know, liquidity pools in the cryptocurrency space are really based on supply and demand, right? So we're working with a few different hedge funds to come in as market makers and provide liquidity on our secondary market 100%.

We're also looking at other opportunities for people to be able to lend so that leverage piece that I talked about. So creating some kind of, not some kind, but a kind of those liquidity pools, where if you don't want to invest directly in real estate, you could kind of create a liquidity pool from which people can borrow against on their leverage and not just through our banking partners, because, you know, borrowing from the community could just provide better terms, could provide more assets which other lenders may not be comfortable with.

So we've got two lenders on the platform right now. And as we're working on growing those, so we're running the pilot with two lenders, we want to include another community based lender on there, which is a similar concept as liquidity pools out there within cryptocurrencies. But utilizing the cryptocurrency based liquidity pools is not really something that's on the horizon for us in the short term purely because it gets very difficult to manage compliance against with some of those things. Our security tokens are quoted in a certain way or our smart contracts are quoted in a certain way that you in order for you to own one of those tokens, you've got to have an identity token in your wallet as well.

And in order for you to stake those security tokens, you know, you won't you won't be able to stake your ID token with it as well. So it becomes very complicated and it doesn't. The crypto based aspect can't can't come in 100%. But we are working to provide community provide the community at large with the opportunity to invest and to lend and have more stable returns in the form of interest payments or something on those lines on our platform as well. I hope that answered your question.

Yes, yes, thank you. Appreciate appreciate that. Thank you so much, Eric. Nostalgia, you're on stage as well. Just wanted to give you the opportunity if you had any questions.

Oh, the first thing I did was look for an app because I'm I'm always looking to diversify more of an investor in the in the crypto space. I've been delving into it. So thank you most for the broke breakdown, the tokenomics like, oh, this is cool. This makes sense. Especially when you were describing the differences between the different types of token like the security token, the utility token and then use the gift card analogy.

I'm like, that makes sense. So if you don't mind, I'm going to steal that and put that in my database when I explain it to people. His analogies are very helpful. So my question for you was that in the advent of making things simpler, i.e. for the layman investor as opposed to like, you know, more sophisticated investors, like what's your process in the education aspect?

Because as we all know, I what's called Robin Hood's under under attack and actually has to pay a $70 million fine from Finra because they were gamifying trading like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just do this. It's not that you just make it simple. But investing is a little bit more intricate than just putting your money in and hoping it goes up depending on what your investment strategy is. Right.

So it sounds like you like a crew goes through a very high, intense KYC AML type of deal. But what are the aspects of actually educating people on how to invest, why it's important to invest to create generational wealth versus just, hey, you should buy this token because it gets you into real estate. So can you explain a little bit more about that? Sure. Yeah.

So educating people on investing on technology, on what they're investing in is some of the most important things that we worry about building generational wealth and how to do it right or how you can secure your financial future are great terms to use. But they're useless if you're not educating people on those aspects for it. So the one thing that we focus on more than anything is trying to educate people on how to pick their investments, what to look for investments. And we've got some great videos and we're developing more and more.

We're developing a series of videos and Q&A's on our platform as well, which walk people through on one, what to look for in their investments, how to develop those investments, how to develop your strategies on investments. When someone's signing up on our platform at accru.co, the first two questions we ask is, hey, what's your risk appetite? How risky do you want your investment to be? To what's your investment thesis? Like, do you want more steady income?

Or are you looking for more long term growth? Or are you looking for short term growth? And obviously, each kind of investment kind provides, it has a different kind of impact. And we have a different risk profile associated with it as well. So by asking those questions, we then provide them with more and more educational material throughout their time on our platform.

And then we utilize various, or we send out various different emails at least once a month, which is purely focused on educating people on various different aspects of real estate investing, commercial real estate investing, tokenization. And then we're bringing those changes in and what it's enabling them for. And then the most important thing is every asset that people are looking at, you know, when you're looking at public markets, or when you're looking at any larger real estate private equity funds, their offering documents are super complicated.

Even with my experience, when I start reading them, my head starts to spin. It's like, what are these disclosures about? What do these terms mean? What does ABC or XYZ or what does an analyze IRR, analyze ROI mean? Or how is this IRR calculated?

Because my Excel formula just shows me a very different IRR. And then how, what are the effects of adding, you know, your annualized income and time value of money? And how do people change up those numbers? So what we've tried to do is we've tried to create a very simple one pager summary of sorts, which is the actual page which has all the investment details on it. So when you click on an asset, you get a one one one web one page site, where you can actually review all the details, which tell you what the asset is about.

Where is it generating income? How is that income coming through? You know, what's the outlook on that asset? What's that true ROI on the most simplest forms? And not, you know, including time value of money and this, that and the other, which really doesn't affect you affect your bottom dollar in any way or form.

And then we give them the option to hey, if you want to compare to how Fundrise does it or how Crowdshoot does it or, or Cardray does it or how BlackRock does it in their documents, you can go through, you can put in your numbers in this little calculator, and you can do that as well. So educating customers is the single most important thing for us. And the most is the key to ensuring and developing that generational wealth and financial future. Thanks for that response, Mohsen, Nassajah.

I hope that answers your question. And we do have Michael who just came up on the stage. Mohsen, if you have time for one more question, we'd like to get a get that question from Michael. Sure. Michael, great.

Michael, please share with us what you would like to find out from Mohsen. If you're new to Clubhouse, you'll need to come off of mute. Okay, does it work now? Yes, it does. Yes, thank you.

Thank you for having me. It's a great discussion and it's really exciting. I actually I'm interested in a very early on investing, and I'm interested how you use non-fetchable tokens if the risk profile is changing over time. So think of a kind of Greenfield project, very early on, high risk, not even a feasibility study in place, just an idea. Could you attract investors very early on with a concept and move that into a kind of digital model and move that into a more concrete design?

And how would that be too early? Or could you carry on that idea through a development first of a digital model and then of something which becomes reality over time? How would you see that kind of early lifecycle approach to investing? Yeah, so, Michael, everything is possible from the technology tech stack perspective, right? The technology will enable it.

The question becomes, does the project pass our due diligence? Are we willing to list it on the platform? It's just anyone can go list a Greenfield project on a VC. Instead of having VCs, you could go for a direct IPO from day one if you don't have to go through the due diligence and the underwriting process on your traditional capital markets, right? But that's not the case.

You have to go through that underwriting. You have to, you know, provide the, you have to pass the due diligence on it. You have to provide the feasibility studies on what you're looking at doing. And there's got to be something tangible to purchase. If there's no underlying asset, and if it's just an idea, at that point, it's an ICO.

It's not a security token offer. There's no underlying asset that's securing it. You're just saying, hey, I have an idea, and this is what I want to build. So it's from a tech standpoint, it's definitely doable. And it's been done.

And that's what we saw, you know, in the early stages of the ICO boom back in 2014 to 17, where good projects got funded like that. But, you know, that's not a security token offering. That's not tokenization of real estate. That's very high risk asset, as you pointed out yourself as well. Now, you can always build digital representations of assets on things like the central land or other meta world, meta versus out there, which you can create NFTs for, and then you can, then you can sell those NFTs and do something on those sites.

But on a cruise platform, you know, we don't, we're not focused on acquisition financing. We're focused on core assets or core plus assets. And what that means is income producing or little value add assets, which have a steady cash flow and a medium to low risk profile to ensure the investors' safety in the long term. And to make sure that their money is not going to waste. The biggest, the easiest example I give is if my grandma's investing on the platform, I want to make sure she's not losing all of her savings on something that would never work out.

So we've got to make sure that, especially when we're looking at opening it up to everybody out there, we want to make sure that everyone has access to the right kind of investments. And in order to remain compliant, we've got to do that as well. That's very interesting. Thank you so much. Of course, if there is an option into a lease or something, a kind of 99 year lease into property, and it's undeveloped, of course, it's a very high risk profile, but it's an option to develop.

Yeah, it's an option to develop. But then you're getting all of these investors with an option to develop. And what happens if that development doesn't happen? What happens to their money? Who maintains their money?

Where does it go? So there's so many question marks on there. And we're in the early stages of token offerings, not just with accrues, but in general in the entire space. You want to have mass adoption. You don't want people to run away because they face significant losses from day one.

Eventually, when the market matures, you may get more riskier deals on various different platforms, but not this early on. Okay, thank you. Great answer. Thank you so much, Michael, for your question. Well, I cannot thank you enough, Mohsen.

You have been so, so educational in this conversation. And I'm just really excited about what accrue is getting ready to do and your passion around inclusion. I just really appreciate about just your whole approach. So good luck to you. And thank you for being on Constructor.

I do want to ask you one last question. If someone wants to learn more about you or get in touch with you or just learn more about accrue, how would they do that? Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was phenomenal. This was great.

You know, I was super excited for this conversation. And it's beyond what I expected. And this was absolutely great. So loved it. If someone wants to get a hold of me, you can always email me directly.

You can always go to accrue.co, aka.ru.co. And you can contact us over there. Contact me on LinkedIn, if you like. I'd be more than happy to put my contact information in the chat as well. But again, you have the information on screen.

Go ahead, check it out. You know, go to accrue.co, see our platform. You want to contact me. I'm up there on the about us page as well. My email address, you can contact me anytime you want.

Thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much, Mohsin. And you have a great rest of your day. You too.

And everyone have a great rest of your weekend or a great weekend. Thank you. So I'm just going to say a few words from our sponsor to wrap up. We want to thank Yes, Your Exceptional Space for sponsoring today's show. For more about Your Exceptional Space, please download their paper by clicking Get Started at yes-spaces.com.

I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner. And I'm going to be your host for today's show. For more about Your Exceptional Space, please download their paper by clicking Get Started at yes-spaces.com. I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner. And CEO and founder of Constructor.

Follow me on social media. You can find me at BrittanyCT on most socials. If you'd like to participate in future discussions, join our clubs, the PropTech Club and Smart City Community Club. You can set notifications for future events that you want to participate in. Also, you can look us up.

You can find this episode at ConstructorConstructRR.com. And you can learn more about us there. Thank you so much, everyone. And have a great weekend. Thank you.

Bye bye.