Today, a DC-based real estate technology company is making its debut to bring blockchain to real estate investing.
mogul, founded by CEO Alex Blackwood and COO Joey Gumataotao — both of whom have experience working with Goldman Sachs Real Estate Investment Group — launched its platform on Tuesday. With integrations with MoonPay, Awning.com and GLOBL RED, the platform allows users to invest in real estate securely with blockchain.
Blackwood told Technical.ly that he first got the idea a few years ago when he was going through his first ever real estate transaction and realized how “manual and archaic” the process was. So he took a month off between two roles at Goldman to figure out how blockchain could be added to the entire real estate investment supply chain. This research eventually turned into mogul, which was founded in 2021, and he brought in Gumataotao to help.
With mogul, property ownership and investments are tracked and recorded with blockchain, keeping them both transparent and immutable. This helps investors — especially during taxes, Blackwood said — because Mogul can run the investments through a few lines of code and pass the tax benefits on to end users. It also means investors can put as little as $100 into a property.
“Many of the reasons for that [traditional real estate] require such a large upfront investment – $50,000 in some cases – is because they need to mitigate against people leaving the transaction because you need a massive back office, you need a legal infrastructure and you need an accounting infrastructure in place to execute -and-out of that transaction,” Blackwood said. “So blockchain for us is really just reducing those costs and serving as a great back office.”
Blackwood said he hopes to target both blockchain-focused investors and traditional real estate investors who haven’t tried using blockchain or Web3 before. He added that he wants mogul to be so seamless and easy to use that it doesn’t even seem like the process is blockchain-related.
Users sign up for mogul and complete a “Know Your Customer” process to verify identity and risk. After that, they can deposit money directly on the platform with MoonPay (which can be connected to credit, debit and Apple Pay). The partnership with Awning.com offers analytics for inventory while GLOBL RED is used for brokerage services.
“Our goal is for everyone to have the financial literacy through property in a way that’s completely transparent, so blockchains can leverage that and create these efficiencies for them, so everyone can get involved,” Blackwood said.
So far, the mogul has completed a pre-seed with Tim Draper as lead investor along with Rosa Rios and friends and family. The company currently consists of only Blackwood and Gumataotao; the couple plans to hire a development manager as well as a marketing team.
But beyond the company’s original capabilities, Blackwood sees a huge opportunity to add the technology to the real estate world. According to him, blockchain can help cut down on transaction costs and operations by developing smart contracts and tenant agreements in a much shorter time.
“We really think there’s an opportunity outside of just the investment platform,” Blackwood said. “We are leveraging the investment platform to become the consumer-facing brand for the next phases of real estate.”
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