HACKER Q&A
📣 firstprinciple

Would you invest in real estate today? Why?


Context: My friends and I are starting a “Robinhood for real estate” – you can trade homes like stocks.

Our inspiration is that many ordinary people want to invest in real estate, but it’s still difficult for the average folks. Main bottleneck is usability. So, we are creating a Robinhood-like app – You can open the app, browse listings, and buy shares of a home. Then, as a shareholder, you can either sell your shares to others or get paid when the home gets sold.

Here’s more: https://forms.gle/CaErVA7NNsAfvsPM7

Question: Would you be interested? Why / why not? What segments of investors would be interested in this today?

  👤 bombcar Accepted Answer ✓
REITs already exist. "Investing" in single-family homes without the protections provided by the primary residence is a recipe for disaster.
👤 HarryHirsch
Never. Pain threshold has been reached. In the desirable areas, housing is reached the limits of affordability - in fact I'm aware of cases where people accepted job offers and then found out that the salary would not cover the roof over the head, so they bailed.
👤 rcfox
Does "buy shares of a home" mean that you're funding someone else's home purchase? If you owned >50% of the shares, would that entitle you to control who lives there?
👤 moistly
176 days too soon.