Domingo Valadez, Co-Founder & CEO - Homebase

This week's guest is Domingo Valadez, Co-founder & CEO of Homebase, a platform that lets people invest in tokenized residential real estate for as little as $100. As real estate prices continue to get more and more unaffordable for people, Homebase aims to be the destination for US renters to invest in the US residential real estate market via fractionalizing NFTs.

Show Notes:

0:50 - What is Homebase?

2:05 - Why Solana?

4:06 - How does it work?

7:09  - Benefits using web3 and Solana

9:17 - Us vs International

11:11 - How things can evolve for Homebase?  

14:18 - Regulatory landscape in the US / next US markets to expand to

17:04 - User journey from first wallet to being a homeowner

20:04 - Voting  

21:14 -  Retaining people in Crypto    

22:57 -  Exciting things in on-chain residential real estate.

24:38 -  A builder Domingo admires in the Solana ecosystem

Full Transcript:

Brian Friel (00:05):

Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest, Domingo Valadez, the co-founder of Homebase, a digital platform for fractionalizing residential real estate via NFTs. Domingo, welcome to the show.

Domingo Valadez (00:28):

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Super excited to be here.

Brian Friel (00:30):

Yeah, super excited to have you on as well. You guys are a hotly anticipated recent launch. I've seen you guys on Twitter. It's one of the most, I'd say, unique and more pragmatic applications I've seen most recently launch on Solana. Can you give us a quick overview of what is Homebase and how can users start using it today?

Domingo Valadez (00:51):

Yeah. Homebase is a platform that lets people invest in tokenized residential real estate for as little as $100. The main value property right people is just getting exposure to an actual physical rental property and starting to get some of that passive income, starting to get that appreciation over time in terms of how you can participate and invest, you can just go to our website, make an account, we do force you to put a KYC and that's just to follow us regulations. So right now we're limited to just US investors unfortunately, but have plans to make it international as we continue to grow. But right now it's a matter of KYCing. You also have to set up a 15-minute call with one of my co-founders, Alex, and that's just to make sure that you're a sophisticated investor so you get to know us a little bit. So we're very transparent with our team and what we're doing, but we had 38 people participate in our very first home and now have 1500 that want to participate in our next one.

Brian Friel (01:41):

That's awesome. So residential real estate investing, that's something that I'd say a lot of the demographic with Solana maybe skews potentially on the younger side. This is something that people think is interesting but have historically been left out of this world of investing. What made you guys decide to do something in a purely digital way that's different than traditional residential real estate investing and what made you guys choose to launch this on Solana?

Domingo Valadez (02:05):

I grew up in a family that has always seen real estate as a great way building wealth over time and just growing up I've very quickly seen it become unaffordable for most people in my generation. So I was working at Google for five years, still couldn't afford anything in the Bay Area and I was like, "This is absurd." And so it was like how can we make this affordable for people where they can actually get some skin in the game with the properties they're living in? And so that was really a big culmination for why Homebase and so then I've invested in my own residential property, myself and my hometown of McAllen just going into that flow, so many third parties, how to work with a bank, took literally three months to buy the property and that was just awful as well. So it's kind of like what can we do that's completely digital that just makes the experience really, really easy for people?

(02:49):

And so that's where the idea around Homebase came from. We're making it where people can invest in properties for as little as a hundred dollars. And so real estate's also a industry that loves silo data. You have big players that really hold their data near and dear to their heart and don't want to share it, and that's the complete opposite of public blockchains, right? It's like, "Let's just get data. Everyone should have a fair shot at understanding what's going on and if you know how to utilize that data, you can make some great decisions with it." A big piece of it came from the mission as well of I've been following Bitcoin since 2017, love the decentralization aspect of it and so wanted to see how we could get real estate in a very transparent open source way. That was a big culmination about why even build in a digital space using blockchain to do this.

Brian Friel (03:33):

Love it. I think that story resonates with a lot of listeners potentially I myself in Bay Area. Similar story there, so it's similar frustrations. I guess I'm a little curious how does this at a high level work under the hood? Kind of back to my earlier question, a lot of folks maybe don't know much about real estate investing. There's a lot of paperwork involved. What role is Homebase playing? What parts of this are done on chain? How do I go from, "I'm just a normal crypto user with NFTs." To now, I can say, "I'm a part of this homeownership project." How does that all work under the hood?

Domingo Valadez (04:07):

I'll share the Homebase side, then I'll share the user experience side. So it's actually quite complex to make it work. It took us seven months to build out the legal frameworks to how to do this and then building out the software for tokenization took about two months for us to do. But just to walk you through this first home, how we did it effectively, we found a property that was suitable. We put it under an exclusive buyer seller agreement, so Homebase had full rights to sell the house on behalf of the owner. We then spun up a special purpose vehicle that was sole intent was to purchase that property, and so then we created NFTs that represent ownership in that special purpose vehicle and we had a mint date on that mint date. It was basically like the day we started selling the property.

(04:45):

And so people could literally go to our website, these are people that have already KYC accredited, non-accredited, could then buy tokens with USDC and they would mint them directly on our platform. And so they would get those tokens immediately to their account and then in tandem they would get DocuSign documentation sent to them. So they have to sign a legal LLC operating agreement, they need to sign a security token purchase agreement, all this legal documentation that basically says like I am buying tokens using USDC and I'm now a member of this LLC that was created. So once we acquired all the money that was necessary, we then closed up the SPV and then actually completed the transaction. And so the owner received the amount of money that they were trying to sell on his first property, and then once that was closed, we then filed with the local title companies to basically transition the title from the owner into this new SPV we created.

(05:40):

So the piece that's truly on chain are the NFTs we created to represent ownership, but we're pretty much a Web 2.5 company where we do need to know who exactly owns what tokens, and we only whitelisted wallets can effectively trade them between themselves. So we file these as Reg D 506, security, private placement offerings, and in that regulation you have to hold the investment for at least a year. You can't trade it for that initial year, and then after that you can sell it through our platform either back to us or eventually want to allow for peer-to-peer trading, but we need an alternative trading system license for that, which we don't have yet. So the majority of it's going to be people selling it back to us and then us reselling it to the next person.

Brian Friel (06:23):

That makes a lot of sense. That was going to be one of my follow-up questions because given the permissionless nature of most tokens by default on chains, I was wondering how that works within a legal framework. You mentioned this first home that you guys tokenized from what I saw, it sold out within the first two weeks. It was a great success, but you guys basically just proved a use case that, "Hey, within the legal framework of how this exists today, this actually works." I think we could get into in this podcast talking a lot about where you guys see this going in the future and how this whole process is going to evolve. But can you talk a little bit about even just this first home that you guys tokenized and sold, what were some of the immediate benefits that you saw using Solana or blockchains in particular that might be different than the normal process?

Domingo Valadez (07:09):

I think a lot of the benefits are for users, not for us as the company doing it. So there was still a lot of complexity when it came to structuring all this and every single home we tokenize and sell on the platform has a lot of complexity behind the scenes, but for the end user, people could literally invest in this first home within five minutes. That's how long it took some of our users to purchase these tokens. And then they're just relying on us to do all the paperwork on the backend. Moving forward, we're going to be distributing out all funds using USDC, we're actually partnering with Circle. They're our money transmitter. They're the ones basically sending out all the funds to every single holder and we're going to be doing that monthly.

(07:46):

So as an end user, you just became a fractional owner in this property. You don't need to deal with any sort of property management headaches. You get your passive income and when you're ready to sell, you can just sell it back to us. We're going to be partnering with blockchain home registry to showcase the value of the properties monthly, and so you'll be able to sell it at true fair market value as dictated by five different data points of trusted institutions saying, "This is what the value of that property should be."

Brian Friel (08:11):

That's pretty awesome. One thing I want to hit on too is you mentioned that there's accredited investor checks, but is this also open to non-accredited investors as well?

Domingo Valadez (08:19):

We can have up to 35 non-accredited investors participate per home offering. It's limited to that just by the Reg D 506 B offering that we do, but we can have unlimited accredited. So moving forward, we think the 35 non-accredited spots will be taken pretty quickly because of course that's the main use case for people where they see the main value in what we're doing. But yeah, we plan to switch to Reg A offerings in the future and that'll allow anyone to participate. No limitations whether accredited or non-accredited.

Brian Friel (08:47):

These terms, accredited investor, unaccredited, Reg A, they're very, I would say US-centric. There's a lot of particular nuances to US investing laws that maybe contribute to why folks like us are interested in these kind of products. We can't always afford residential real estate in areas that we live and work. Is Homebase exclusively focused on the US Do you guys also see this problem internationally and can you talk a little bit about maybe how the US differs from some other major markets internationally?

Domingo Valadez (09:17):

The US probably has the toughest regulation when it comes to this. So for us, we very much wanted to tackle one of the hardest markets and also two of the three co-founders are US based, are three co-founders in Canada and both markets so similar, very, very expensive real estate in any sort of big city all feel priced out. So we really all align in the mission behind this. Our initial launch market was in McAllen, Texas, so that's where I'm originally from. So it was very near and dear to my heart to launch there and see properties that I grew up with actually get access to the internet and get tokenized in that capacity. But we'll stay likely in the US for the near medium term, but we do want to allow international investors to participate as well. So we've already been reached out to by a few big players internationally that want to be LPs in our future properties and then they can sell it to some of their customers as well, and that's how we'll open it up and expand the pie to international investors as well.

Brian Friel (10:12):

I love that. So you mentioned when you did the high level overview of how this process works, essentially onboarding people one by one, taking video calls with them, making sure they understand the process, having to give them tokens that there's restrictions on how they can actually be sent to different people if they want to resell. It oftentimes having to go through you guys that whole process and then I'm sure even just the whole process of you setting up these legal entities as Homebase and your Web 2.5 company right now, there's a lot of legwork that you guys are doing on the back end, abstracting this out.

(10:45):

I think listeners of this could imagine a world where one day this is all pushed more to the edges, to the actual token holders and owners themselves. How do you guys think about how this is going to evolve over time? Which pieces of this do you think potentially in the next couple years could be more evolve, looking in areas where you guys maybe at Homebase aren't doing as much legwork and which areas do you think are going to be a little bit slower to evolve over time?

Domingo Valadez (11:12):

US real estate's very locally driven. Not only do you have to follow federal regulation, you also have to follow state regulation. You also have to follow local regulation all the way down to the county level. And so understanding each of those three layers of regulation is really important. And so that drove a lot of where we first launched. So Texas is very pro landlord, they're pro tendency in common, so it was very easy to fractionize the property there and they don't have any sort of transfer taxes. So if I sold my tokens to you, other states or other cities would charge a tax on that, Texas doesn't. So that was a big piece that kind of decided where we even launched on the piece about where we're going and what do I think is going to get better over time. One of the big reasons we even did this on chains, we've had a lot of people say, "Why don't you just fractionize this without blockchain that's so complex, you're making your process harder."

(12:00):

It's really about the secondary financial implications of what it means to have things decentralized and on an open platform. So for example, we're already in discussions with an on chain lender to allow people to collateralize their tokens to actually take on chain debt. No bank, no credit score required, literally just you collateralizing your tokens to take on debt and that to me is a beautiful thing. You cannot own any piece of a home without a mortgage under your name or a bank, someone getting involved and checking out your credit score. So that to me is really, really exciting and something we can already do with the first home moving forward. Another piece would be as regulation gets looser, having more clarity around allowing peer-to-peer trading. So alternative training license is what we're going to be going for relatively soon, and that's going to allow for people to trade within themselves so they don't have to sell it back to Homebase, but actually allow for peer-to-peer trading.

(12:55):

To me, it's really just like all of the applications that then could get built on top of having real estate completely tokenized on chain is what gets me excited about the Web3 space. I think the pieces on the regulation that's going to push back is making sure everyone's KYC, making sure you know who your users are, making sure they didn't launder any of their money. But yeah, I think that's one of the biggest benefits of Web3 and creating liquidity in a market that's historically been pretty illiquid and at a very, very high prices.

Brian Friel (13:23):

Yeah, I think you're right. There's this element of composability that comes with this when this is native to the internet, it's online and there's a token, anyone can [inaudible 00:13:34]. Then like you said, build a lending market around that. And there's a world where one day you guys aren't even involved with that decision, it's just someone can just sole end or another project can say, "Hey, we already have this lending market and we accept these tokens now as collateral." My gut tells me that you guys are doing this by the book. That regulation is going to be the rate limiting step in all of this as it starts to go. How do you guys see the current regulatory landscape in the US and you mentioned that there's some differences not just federally, but on state levels and on county levels. Can you talk a little bit about that and why maybe you guys are choosing to start in Texas and where you guys, I mean maybe foresee the next markets that you guys are expanding to as well?

Domingo Valadez (14:18):

You're absolutely right. Regulation's going to be the inhibitor on doing a lot of Web3 related transactions for properties. I think Coinbase getting sued by the FCC is going to provide a ton of clarity around... Or that's my hope at least a lot of clarity around how Web3 companies should be operating. I think there's been a lot of confusion around what's legal, what's not legal. So just to keep our users safe, we chose the web2 legal approach where we tried being as closely to the book as we can in case things go wrong or awry. Our users are completely fine and we feel very confident with that. But of course as we continue scaling the company and getting bigger, we love for these secondary applications like a Solend. To just say, "Hey, we just created this lending platform, we actually don't need your permission to do it. We can just trade."

(15:05):

That to me would be amazing because that means we're succeeding in actually bringing homes on chain and tokenizing them and letting people do what they want with their assets. But the regulation's really going to kick in until then. Texas was great because it was very landlord friendly, very easy to fractionize the property and no taxes associated with that. We’ll likely continue to stay in Texas for the near to medium term, we're in McAllen now, plan to go to Austin later this year.

(15:31):

Other markets we'd likely open it in would be Colorado is also pretty open to this. So is Florida, specifically Miami is pretty pro Web3 and pro tokenization. It would be very, very city state dependent on what laws they have in place and how we can make this work. For example, even us opening it up to international investors, that requires us to redo some of the legal structures we have to allow for international investors to even invest. So we're going to very much rely on partners that say... There's a lot of demand in Latin America, for example, specifically from this country, "Okay, that's going to be the first country we allow to invest internationally just because of the regulatory piece of that." And we don't want any of our users to worry about that. So we're trying to remove all that complexity for end users while Homebase deals are all the complexities around that.

Brian Friel (16:19):

That makes a lot of sense. Miami, Florida doesn't sound like the worst place to be a homeowner as well, so that aligns pretty nicely. Taking a step back as an end user who's thinking about this, let's say that somebody has a Phantom wallet, they've experimented with sending some crypto to their friends, they maybe have a few NFTs. What would they need to know to feel confident in taking this next step and being an owner of residential real estate? Is it as simple as just showing up to your guys' website, hitting connect wallet, filling out a couple forms in a Zoom call? Is there anything that they need to do after they've already completed the purchase or other things that they should be aware of? Essentially, could you walk us through the user journey from getting their first wallet to actually being a homeowner?

Domingo Valadez (17:05):

Yeah, absolutely. So funny enough, for our very first property, we actually had a lot of new to Web3 users participate. So plug for you guys, we had Phantom as the preferred wallet for people to create and effectively onboard into the Solana ecosystem. And I think something that was very beautiful about this was people could upload their money into Coinbase, send Solana or USDC and Solana to their Phantom wallet and see it happen in two seconds within the call that we were helping them do it. So I don't think it's the same thing for other chains, but that's something that Solana does really, really well. So once you have a loaded wallet, you as you mentioned, have to make an account on our website, you do need a KYC, you set up a quick call with us, just it's your way of understanding who we are as founders and you can ask us questions directly.

(17:50):

It's really just to build trust with people. But once we have a home that's live, you literally just go to the property page, you connect your wallet that we've already whitelisted preemptively, and then you can just buy however many tokens you like. So every single token is denominated in a hundred dollars, so everything's transacted in USDC and you can just buy however many tokens you like, they immediately get minted to your wallet and then you get sent DocuSign links to sign that'll make you truly a fractional owner of the legal entity we spun up to acquire that property. So once you purchase it and everything closes, you don't need to worry about anything. We know exactly whose wallets hold what tokens, and we just start sending you your proportional amount of net rent every month and then you can decide to sell whenever you'd like.

Brian Friel (18:35):

So there's no upkeep. Part of the joys of being a landlord is things break in houses, there's taxes, property taxes to pay, all this kind of stuff. All of that is abstracted away from an end user.

Domingo Valadez (18:47):

So any home we list on our platform, we charge an extra 5% fee and that's really just to have a capital reserve pool. So if anything breaks, like we as Homebase have a property manager, they'll go out and fix it and then we refill that reserve pool with rent. So the goal is to never ask people that purchased it for money, we can refill it ourselves with the rent we collect, which is what's beautiful about real estate, it's cash generating and in terms of property taxes, we handle everything from that end. We do distribute K1s to everyone at the end of the year because everyone has their own personal income taxes they need to pay. So we can't force you to pay them, but we can give you all the information you need to pay them on your behalf.

Brian Friel (19:25):

That makes a lot of sense. I was also thinking when we talked earlier about the layers of this that could be abstracted away and evolved over time, that's potentially one of them, but I'm not sure if people actually at the end of the day want that. Is there a world where there's Homebase down people are voting on how do we pay for fixing the plumbing leak? I have a feeling that that's a service that all owners here are pretty glad that you guys are handling on behalf of them.

Domingo Valadez (19:50):

Yeah, one thing that is true though is people can vote us out. So we're the default manager of the property, but if you're not happy with the job we're doing, you can absolutely vote us out.

Brian Friel (19:58):

Oh, that's interesting. How does that vote happen? Is that an on chain vote with tokens or how did you guys set that up?

Domingo Valadez (20:05):

Yeah, so not on chain right now, but theoretically you're truly an owner of the LLC and you have voting rights in that LLC. So if people just came together and said like, "Hey, we want to vote them out." There's a meeting set up, people say like, "Yay, we want to remove Homebase." We won't be the manager anymore. It'll be up to the owners to pick a new manager and then that's how they can start facilitating the management of that property.

Brian Friel (20:28):

Wow, that's fascinating.

Domingo Valadez (20:30):

Yeah, we truly want people to be owners.

Brian Friel (20:32):

Oh, that's really cool. So I guess I have a couple questions here to kind of wrap up, but you mentioned that you guys are onboarding a lot of net new users to Web3, essentially people getting their wallet for the first time, maybe they don't fully understand how to use these wallets or the gravity of sending things on chain and the irreversibility of a lot of this. Do you guys have any particular insights from getting on calls with these people and walking them through this process? Do these users stay in crypto in your view? Do they stay engaged with it? Is it a steep learning curve for them? Basically, how as an industry are we doing at onboarding these people who maybe find crypto not because of crypto but because of a use case Homebase where they're just, it's a solution to their problem.

Domingo Valadez (21:15):

So very transparently, I'd say some people do have difficulty and it's a 30-minute call, and other people it's very easy. So I think something a lot of users asked for was like, "How can we abstract the complexities of wallets even further?" We're thinking about potentially having noncustodial wallets on our website where we partner with someone that basically just showcases the wallets directly there and then for an end user, it doesn't matter if it's crypto, you just know you own tokens in a property, you didn't have to create any wallet, it was automatically created for you. But for the people that do know Web3 and have their own Phantom wallets, have their own personal wallet, they can do what they like with those tokens and use on chain, that sort of piece. So I think for the industry to continue to expand, we need to continue to make it easier for people to onboard, abstracting away a lot of the complexity is something that'll continue to be key to keep widening the pie for everyone.

Brian Friel (22:09):

Totally. I can't imagine the call where someone buys a bunch of shares in a residential property and then forgets their seed phrase so, these are things that we're thinking about as well. I mean, I liked that framing of essentially giving users the easy option to start and the optionality to eject from that and really take control if you really know what you're doing. I think that's awesome.

Domingo Valadez (22:31):

Absolutely.

Brian Friel (22:32):

Well, this has been an awesome discussion, Domingo. Before we wrap up with one closing question, I always ask everyone I want to know for you too, what excites you the most right now from where you guys sit in this new field of on chain residential real estate, where are you guys heading next and what do you think is the most exciting next frontier? Is it new markets? Is it improvements in the way this is happening on chain? Is it in regulation? Or maybe it's something completely different that you guys are seeing?

Domingo Valadez (22:57):

I'd say one of the biggest drivers for me for building Homebase, we want to redefine home ownership and what that even means, I think we'll continue to see real estate prices keep getting more and more unaffordable for folks. And I think being a homeowner's going to start being a privilege, which is a really sad reality. Unless we have true government intervention come in and add more housing supply, I think it's going to get worse. And so with that reality, it's like it's up to private markets to figure out how do we actually make more people homeowners? So something we care a lot about at Homebase and something we're very mission driven about is making the tenants that live in these properties, also fractional owners of them. And so getting people comfortable with the idea of only owning 10, 20, 30% of their property, but still feeling like an owner of that property.

(23:42):

And so for this very first home, for example, Homebase bought an extra piece of it so that we can offer it to the tenant to actually buy it from us so that they can also be a fractional owner of the apartment they're living in. And so in 10 years we want Homebase to be the destination for renters. When you're moving to a new city, you use a Homebase platform, you find an apartment, you move in, you buy 30% of the value, and now you're a fractional owner of that property. So that's why Web3 excites me. You can completely do this in an open liquid market and we're trying to facilitate that through Homebase.

Brian Friel (24:14):

Yeah, that's putting skin in the game too, right there, you're a renter and you actually have upside if you treat the place well. That's pretty cool, and I think that's kind of spinning the model on its head in a really crypto native and interesting way. And I love that framing. Well, Domingo, this has been an awesome discussion. One question we ask all of our guests, and I want to know this for you as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the [inaudible 00:24:38]. Ecosystem?

Domingo Valadez (24:38):

Okay, this is going to be a total cop out, so I'll give you two. My first one's [inaudible 00:24:44]. I love that man's Twitter content. I feel like the way he speaks, he's clearly very, very technical, but also very good at bringing things to a high level and explaining things. And it's no secret that Solano ecosystems gotten a lot of heat from a lot of third parties where the day FTX went down, someone from the Binance blockchain basically told me I was dumb to continue building on Solana and was really trying to pull us to build on their chain.

(25:09):

And I was like, "I think the leaders of Solana are taking this very well and are being very, very thoughtful about how they're moving things forward." So that's the first piece really, really like [inaudible 00:25:19]. The second one's [inaudible 00:25:21]. I love his content. He's been a champion for Solana and you can always rely on that guy to call out people that are spewing fake news about the chain and really showcase his technical know-how of how things truly work behind the scenes. So I think those are probably my two biggest, I fanboy over both of them a good amount.

Brian Friel (25:43):

I think those are both great choices. And a sneak peak, you mentioned that the [inaudible 00:25:47]. Recording was just before this, but [inaudible 00:25:49]. Also mentioned [inaudible 00:25:50]. As his choice. So you're in good company there. Part of what [inaudible 00:25:55]. Was saying too is he loves people that are building pragmatic applications that can "Only be done on Solana TM." And I think Homebase is a really awesome shiny example of that. So thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through it. I'm super excited. I'm going to have to check it out, bring my Panama to it. I know nothing about residential real estate, but I think you've given me the confidence to give it a try today. For folks who want to check it out, where can they go to learn more about Homebase?

Domingo Valadez (26:22):

Yeah, you can go directly to our website, which is Homebasedao.io.

Brian Friel (26:26):

I love it.

Domingo Valadez (26:27):

Everything's completely transparent on our website, we even have a white paper that goes into all the technical pieces, whether it's the legal side, whether it's all the technical side on the blockchain component piece. So we're very, very transparent and we also have a discord where we answer questions as people have them.

Brian Friel (26:42):

That sounds great. Domingo the co-founder of Homebase, thank you so much for coming on.

Domingo Valadez (26:48):

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Brian, for having me.