Exploring Blockchain Real Estate And QuantmRE

Tracy Hazzard and Monika Proffitt join together to talk about the two interviews they had with the founders and CMO of QuantmRE, John Livesay and Matthew Sullivan. They dish out the topics they explored from the blockchain, real estate, and QuantmRE. John Livesay discusses with Tracy about cryptocurrency and some of the new things they have coming out where you can make a foe investment. Monica also talked to Matthew about the whole path of the genesis of how he got to thinking about real estate, the same way that she has been doing with her Rise Markets. They also dive deep into equity, assets, and more.

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Exploring Blockchain Real Estate And QuantmRE

I’m Tracy Hazzard.

I’m Monika Proffitt.

We are going to talk together about the two interviews we had with the Founders and CMO of QuantmRE. I interviewed John Livesay.

I interviewed Matthew Sullivan. It was so much fun. He was a blast and he had the weirdest stories to tell me about his long and varied working history. It was amazing.

John Livesay and I have been friends. We have gone to events and people thought we were brother and sister. We’ve only known each other for three or four years or something like that. That’s how well we know each other that we get along, some other people think we’re siblings.

I have a couple of friends like that where people either think that we’d been dating forever, or they think that we’re siblings. I’m like, “Neither one of those things but okay.”

Everybody's working out their next step based on what they already know. Click To Tweet

I was happy to invite John on. I knew he was working in this new venture. First off, he’s a great guest always because he has his own podcast, so he knows what he’s doing there. He doesn’t get involved in ventures. He has advised a lot of startups. People get a lot of Angel investing and things like that, and he wouldn’t join in. He’s the outside consultant. He’s helping them learn. He wouldn’t join in if it wasn’t something phenomenally interesting to him and worth it. For him to jump into something like this and when you’re talking about blockchain, cryptocurrency, all of these things, I’m like, “What are you doing, John? I’ve got to know more.”

He’s like, “Perfect. You have a podcast to put that on, so let’s do this.”

What I thought was fascinating about your interview with Matthew was it was talking about the whole path of the genesis of how he got to thinking what he’s thinking. That’s similar to what you’ve been doing with your own Rise Markets. Tell me a little bit about what you were thinking when you’re interviewing him.

First of all, he has had such a varied background. You’re going to hear stories about being able to commute to work in a helicopter, crazy stuff. Things the average person does not do. That was interesting to hear the different things he’s done overseas, domestically. His background in real estate is phenomenal and pretty wide and varied. Everybody’s working out their next step based on what they already know. His concept is a bit different from mine. It’s perfect, they fit together so well. We’re going to be rounding out this blockchain meets real estate space beautifully. I love seeing the players in this space doing what they’re doing. Each one of us might know a little bit more about great lending that is happening domestically or someone else knows about Regulation S and they know all of these incentives to bring in foreign investment. People are piecing together the pieces of expertise they have and they’re putting it into this very cool streamlined hyper-trustable platform.

Then there are some people that are just like, “I just know the hyper-trustable streamline stuff. I guess real estate will add that.” Still, that’s a very huge value add. His particular take on it was just pulled from his extensive knowledge and innovative lending and looking at equity from a single-family home perspective. He was talking a lot about his opportunities in California because there’s a huge single-family home market size there. That’s not necessarily where a lot of people in other markets are looking at. A lot of people are focusing on density only. They’re focusing for different reasons, mostly because they don’t have a single-family home background and he does.

It is because I’m right here in this market that he’s talking about, so I see it. The interesting thing is that it is already a lot of investment market here. I live in an entire neighborhood that is predominantly Asian investment. A lot of people who are renting these homes go to UCI as professors or in the medical field and other things. They’re in long-term rentals because they’re stationed here for the time of their residency or something like that. There’s a lot of that going on. Their owners of the house are not living in this country. We have a lot of that going on. Then we have a large aging group here who have been in Irvine, specifically that’s where I am, for decades. Their house values have gone up and down and all over the place. They’re looking at what’s next and that reverse mortgage is awful scary. I thought that was an interesting angle that they were taking for that generation.

NTE 4 | QuantmRE — QuantmRE: Nobody wants to have an investor that doesn’t know what they’re doing.

There’s just a lot of equity that’s tied up in assets that have been held for a long time. That is one thing. Especially over the last 40 years, if somebody decided, “We’re going to bite the bullet this year,” and then waited that all out and watched that mortgage finally go away, that’s a lot of equity. That’s a huge amount of personal net worth that’s untapped without a huge lifestyle change. Who wants that? A lot of people don’t. The reverse mortgage, soon we can say, is only one of many products that can get you what you want for your lifestyle, especially as your life needs change and as you age, it’s great.

When I interviewed John, he was talking about some of the new things they have coming out, which is like the Houzz or Zillow of this understanding you can make a foe investment and see, “Did your portfolio grow? Were you able to do this?” It gives you a sense of tasting what this is going to be like because it is this great unknown, “Is it too much risk? Should I be doing it? How can I get a taste of that?” I thought that was a brilliant marketing strategy on their part. It helps to ease that education process on how it works.

That’s what you want to do. Nobody wants to have an investor not knowing what they’re doing and then be like, “Buyer’s remorse, it’s your fault.” Nobody wants to be there. Even in 3D printing because I know that you have a podcast in 3D printing, and it seems like that’s leaps and bounds away from this topic, but it’s not. Even in consumer products and 3D printing and manufacturing and distributed manufacturing, nobody wants to be doing it wrong and suddenly be like, “I’m taking my ball and going home.”

That reminds me of this great story. We had this woman who I absolutely adored who was our assistant for a while. She would post up some of our blogs and every so often she would do some things. She would find these great articles out there because she was always searching and so it was fantastic. Her husband’s in the military and she moved away. Grace is her name. Grace came back and had said they bought this house down in Texas and it had a doorbell that was cracked and broken. It was the case cover for the doorbell. She said, “I know enough about this 3D printing stuff to explore and try to find someone to 3D print this for me.” She wrote a whole blog on the site. You can read it because it’s an interesting story of her going out and trying this 3D print thing because she thought she had enough knowledge from our podcast and from working with us. Not to 3D print herself, she knew she was going to hire someone.

She hired someone to do the design work and everything and they weren’t far away. She brought her doorbell to them so that it would be a perfect fit and gets the whole thing back and installs it on her door and it looks good, it fits right. It did everything she was supposed to do, but she had one regret. She forgot to clearly spell out that she would prefer it to be in the color that originally was. Instead, they did it in some bronze color, whatever was in the machine probably. She was like, “Rookie error, I didn’t think this all the way through.”

Also, rookie manufacturing error. Why would you make a decorative item without specifying color without asking your client?

When there’s no more need, people rush out. Click To Tweet

That’s how the process goes in these early days. You’re right, it’s not totally buyer’s remorse but it was like, “Rookie error,” and that kind of thing. It’s exactly how it goes. I’m glad you brought that up. We’re starting to see the possibility of a real estate bubble bursting in the next few months for sure. We have a top podcaster who is in the note closing business, The Note Closers Show, Scott Carson. He is of the opinion that he’s going to be doing a lot more distressed note business coming forward. What opportunity does that have for QuantmRE being successful and because the need is going to get bigger?

Everybody wants to see some balance. When we have the market shift from like a God of need, and then people rush. When there’s no more need, people rush out. What we’re looking for is stability from our volatility. If we can get stability, it’s going to come from having multiple different people playing a role. It reminds me of a story I heard about one of the things that have made bitcoin less volatile than it might have been. Apparently, according to the myth, there was quite a large adoption of Bitcoin purchasers in the Japanese housewife demographic. It’s not exactly your most risk-taking demographic. When Bitcoin would start to jump up too much, they were not interested in hyper-crazy gains. When it fell too much, they would buy. By buying and by buying in bulk like that the way that they were, no one person did it. It was just a one psychographic did it because enough of those people of that psychography were in it. That had its own stabilizing factor. There’s going to be something amazing if we see this real estate bubble burst, but it’s followed also or it’s in tandem with this new asset where more people can take less actual amount of risk, but get involved in the asset class. We might find ourselves recovering more quickly.

That makes me wonder whether or not Satoshi is a woman.

I’ve seen a lot of, “Satoshi is a female,” t-shirts. I almost got one and then I slacked out and I missed the first 50 free ones.

For those of you who don’t know and are new to this and are on this because we’re mostly talking about blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto is the “inventor” of Bitcoin. There is this uncertainty as to whether or not it’s an actual person or it’s a group of people or it’s a woman. It could be a woman and not a guy. That’s an interesting reason why would all of these Japanese housewives adopt it. That’s an interesting one. I do see what’s going on. That’s the big opportunity for QuantmRE, for Rise Markets, which is yours and for some of the other real estate ICOs that we’ve seen go into play here.

Maybe an ICO so much is real estate trading platforms like Zillow needs trade. We’re all doing it in some different ways. Some people are more on the debt side, some people are more on the equity side. I was talking about this with another one of our guests, Lisa Loud. It was like we’ve got to be doing more to bring in more mass adoption. How are we going to do that? We have to incentivize, we have to educate, we have to make this not scary and also make it easy to try it.

That’s where I see an economic situation like a bust will help in forcing adoption because you have a desperate need. We have a need to balance this out and not end up in more economic trouble with bankruptcies and foreclosures and all of those things going on. If there’s an alternative option, I’m going to take it.

Let’s back up from any particular model. You find two bankruptcies. One of them was a bankruptcy that’s traditional. Someone else is going to buy that. Out of bankruptcy and foreclosure, it’s going to be cheap. That one buyer is going to get the cash together and take it eventually. If the second bankruptcy is the same asset that goes down just as much, it’s distressed. A bunch of people have a chance to buy a little piece of it and not risk all of it to go all the way in on that entire house and that entire asset. That’s less risk. In and of itself, that means a market like this is going to give people the chance to go, “I’ll gamble a little bit.” We might see some of the conservative nature of people who get a place to steward the economy more, which is fine.

That’s why I think we might be able to stabilize and keep from hitting a real rock bottom here and having that multiyear effect. Instead, it’s more of a short-term dip and market correction as you might refer to it. I’m excited for Matthew and John and for QuantmRE to see how they are adopted and how fast they go. I think rather than being a litmus test, it’s going to be this indicator of how blockchain companies, how these kinds of ventures will be able to get adopted. Become the model for how to educate and communicate so that it becomes successful for every one of you offering these kinds of ICOs and these kinds of adventures who are going to be helping in the real estate world as well in some of the other categories.

The supply chain is going to be disrupted. There’s going to be so much more opportunity not only to make supply chain easier to push around but also disrupt it. In the case of human trafficking, tracking inventory, when you have a nefarious inventory like human beings and young girls, it’s going to be amazing to see that put somewhere permanently and then being able to take some action against it. I feel there are so many great possibilities in blockchain in general. I picked real estate and maybe this is what Matthew picked real estate for as well which is it’s not a moving target. A lot of people understand it. Everybody engages it. Whether they’re buying or they’re renting, everyone’s in it. If they’re lucky to have a home, they’re in it.

There’s not as much new to explain to them.

I buy three shares of Apple and I don’t know anything about the likelihood of Apple being profitable next year.

You’re probably safe.

How many people are staring at like real estate porn? Those pretty pictures that come out if they want to see. It’s like window shopping.

That’s the one reason why I was so excited about the tool that John was talking about them being able to try it because I have a lot of people who have said things to me like their favorite thing to do is to go in-house and decorate or to go on Zillow and troll houses like, “I’d like to but here,” but they’re not on the market. They’re not ready to move, but they are still looking at houses all the time or people who go to open houses every weekend.

I’m not going to say I’ve never done that.

To all our audience of the New Trust Economy, we want to remind you that you can find us at NewTrustEconomy.com. You can also find us on social media at New Trust Economy. Monika and I will be back next time, each of us separate and then again together with some episodes. Thanks so much for sharing this with us.

Thank you. We’ll see you next time.

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