Reitium’s Michael Moll on opening up real estate investment for everyone

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New technologies are allowing products that the world could never have conceived of in the past. Taking real estate for example, the idea of investing in property, for a little as $100, in a matter of minutes would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago. Now, thanks to blockchain technology and Reitium, it’s a reality. Michael Moll, co-founder and CTO of the company, joined CoinGeek.com to discuss how it works.

First, Moll defined exactly what Reitium is. “Reitium is a global equity crowd-funding portal and secondary trading exchange,” Moll explained. “So we allow people to compliantly invest in real-estate for as little as $100, earn rental income on a monthly basis, and sell their portion back to the global market, in a compliant way, in under a minute.”

They accomplish this feat, and the many regulatory needs of real estate investing, through innovative use of blockchain technology. “We have three ledgers,” he explained. “We use the blockchain to have a global property ledger, with all the properties, and all the documents that align with that. We have a ledger of all the investors, their accreditations, their identities, and their anti-money laundering (AML) processed money. And the final thing is a register of all the shares, we call them security tokens, and all their ownerships and all the rights that relate to that.”

All that technology on the backend is impressive to industry insiders, but it means nothing to the average customer. For them, Reitium have focused on an elegant application. “We’re really inspired by Apple design theory, in the fact that they don’t need to know anything about blockchain,” Moll said. “They have a beautiful, simple to use, mobile interface or web interface where they go, they scan their ID, in twenty seconds we validate, that’s a real person.

“They load their money from any wallet: crypto, fiat, credit cards. We scan that money; we know that it’s gone through AML. They then look at a beautiful, Tinder-style way of looking through properties. They see a property they like, they click invest, they set their amount, they click buy, and now they own that property. Every month they get their rental income.”

The focus is entirely on taking the headaches of real estate investment off of the customer, so that it can be the easiest experience possible. That opens up investment opportunities to segments of society that never had the chance before. “This is real-estate investing for dummies, but we don’t call them dummies,” Moll joked. “These are our valued, valued investors, and they’ve never had a chance. But now with Reitium, its dead simple for anyone to invest in real-estate in as little as under a minute.”

The way Reitium started was when Moll’s co-founder, Thomas Park, looked at his own real-estate sales history and asked how technology would replace it. “And he said, let’s go digital,” Moll told us. “We brought all those ideas together and said, where is the great beach head? And we saw what the pain was, was people couldn’t afford to get really good real estate. They were being priced out. But then we also saw that Uber, AirBnB, all these companies, Kickstarter, were really pushing what we call the sharing economy and the crowd economy, and then now we have 4 billion people through mobile internet who are accessible to the market.”

From that idea, Moll and Thomas have created Reitium, and used technology to introduce new opportunities to the world. “Blockchain is a way of creating value, having trusted documents and transferring that value,” Moll concluded. “It was the perfect powder-keg. And we said, you know what, real-estate is for everyone. We trademarked that, but we also stand behind it.”