Buy, sell, and own shares of real estate ποΈ Daily rental income and appreciation potential without the headaches. Sell anytime. Backed by @ycombinator
Start earning rent today β
- Tweets 1,390
- Following 734
- Followers 15,935
- Likes 3,421
We just crossed $100M in volume π
Building the world's first real estate exchange hasn't been easy, but it's been the most rewarding thing we've ever done.
Thank you to everyone who's supported us since day one. We're just getting started, and there's a lot more coming soon!
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Investors in 25 Rocky Ridge Rd just got paid from the sale & made a 19.04% realized return! π
Dave, the co-owner, lives in Vermont. He listed the property on Lofty, managed it himself, sold a portion of his equity to investors, and bought the shares back in under two years.
Investors earned daily rent and could sell anytime.
This is the first of many. Investors made a serious profit on Lofty, and owners can pull equity out of their properties the same way Dave did.
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Lofty retweeted
We're excited to announce that our new liquidity pools for @lofty_ai are live for our users to beta test.
There are only two available for now, but we'll be watching the metrics closely. Barring major changes, we'll release the new version for all properties by the end of next week.
This is one of the biggest overhauls we've done on the platform.
- if you lend property tokens, you'll receive your rewards in property tokens
- if you lend USDC, you'll receive your rewards in USDC
- rewards stay inside the pools to auto-compound and provide additional liquidity for the ecosystem
- thanks to fractional property tokens, you can now withdraw fractional ownership, meaning a position like 16.789 tokens won't force you to only withdraw 16 whole tokens like before
- there is now a 24 hour lock period, meaning if you deposit assets, you'll need to wait at least 24 hours to take them out
Overall, these changes should allow the pools to stay more stable, less volatile long-term, and set us up for the infrastructure required launch our "not a mortgage" product later this year.
If you're a Lofty user, please help us stress test these over the weekend!
ALT New liquidity pools live on https://lofty.ai, where anyone can invest in income producing real estate properties. No minimums required
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Lofty retweeted
24/27
@lofty_ai launches its first international property in the Dominican Republic!
Congratulations to @lofty_ai on launching its first international property in the Dominican Republic π©π΄
Lofty is a leading fractional real estate marketplace with 40K+ investors, 180+ properties tokenized on Algorand so far, and over $100M in TVL.
And there's more to come.
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Lofty retweeted
Dude is the ceo of @lofty_ai powered by $ALGO @Algorand ...if you have any issues with Lofty or questions..dude literally write you and communicate with u directly ...just a cool experience imo π
We're excited to announce that our new liquidity pools for @lofty_ai are live for our users to beta test.
There are only two available for now, but we'll be watching the metrics closely. Barring major changes, we'll release the new version for all properties by the end of next week.
This is one of the biggest overhauls we've done on the platform.
- if you lend property tokens, you'll receive your rewards in property tokens
- if you lend USDC, you'll receive your rewards in USDC
- rewards stay inside the pools to auto-compound and provide additional liquidity for the ecosystem
- thanks to fractional property tokens, you can now withdraw fractional ownership, meaning a position like 16.789 tokens won't force you to only withdraw 16 whole tokens like before
- there is now a 24 hour lock period, meaning if you deposit assets, you'll need to wait at least 24 hours to take them out
Overall, these changes should allow the pools to stay more stable, less volatile long-term, and set us up for the infrastructure required launch our "not a mortgage" product later this year.
If you're a Lofty user, please help us stress test these over the weekend!
ALT New liquidity pools live on https://lofty.ai, where anyone can invest in income producing real estate properties. No minimums required
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On Lofty, investors own 100% of the properties.
They discuss them directly with each other and the property managers in the Community Forum, and propose governance votes that tally automatically. Zero need to ever reach out to us.
Fully decentralized real estate is here ποΈ
We delayed this feature over at @lofty_ai for a few years, but I'm happy to announce that Governance 2.0 is finally live with the launch of the new community forums.
One of the toughest problems to solve for what we're building has been to coordinate owners of the assets on the platform, the property managers they elect, and a way for high-trust discussions, all without Lofty sitting in the middle trying to scale a platform ops team.
I think we've finally done it. Any investors on Lofty can now navigate to the "community" tab on the platform and gain access to property specifc forums, where any and all discussions can take place between owners.
You can only post if you actually own at least 1 share of the asset. Your ownership percentage is displayed to everyone else when you post.
Owners can directly propose a new governance vote in app now with Robert's rule in place. Once someone has seconded the motion, there is a timed discussion period before the vote goes live.
Once the voting period is over, the results are automatically published and settled onchain.
Early usage from our users is very promising and I'm sure there will be more improvements to make, but this launch completes one of the core pillars of what we set out to build.
1. Make real estate equity into a tradable digital asset. (We did this by tokenizing the equity at launch in 2021.)
2. Make the experience of buying and selling real estate more similar to buying and selling shares of stocks in your brokerage account. (We did this by introducing secondary markets in 2022 and then AMMs to real estate transactions in 2024.)
3. Provide a way for the various parties of a real estate holding to communicate and coordinate, make legally binding decisions, all without giving up privacy for users. (Launched now in 2026 with governance 2.0.)
4. Rebuild debt products for real estate from first principles now that real estate trades digitally and has good liquidity. (Upcoming lending products we plan to launch later this year in 2026).
5. Suite of fintech products in our ecosystem. Best in class bank accounts offering the higher than average interest rates, and credit cards that you can use to pay your mortgage/loan payments, while receiving cashback. (Coming in 2027).
Funny how in 5 years our roadmap never changed. Things got shifted around, but the core pillars remained the same. Even with the advent of AI, we're fortunate that it's only a tailwind for our team to be more productive and lean, while knowing our moats are perfectly safe from it.
We've always been building a new type of platform. Some people didn't realize it, and some people didn't believe us. But every day it's closer to reality.
ALT screenshot of https://lofty.ai's new community forum feature
ALT screenshot of a voting result using the new governance 2.0 mechanism
ALT screenshot of owners receiving property updates
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First-time investors get $50 free when they invest $50:
lofty.ai/property_deal/Tepuyβ¦
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A guy in Delray Beach needed cash, but it was a bad time to sell and he didnβt want to give up his mortgage rate.
So he sold pieces of his rental to strangers. They earned 17.5% annualized.
Chris owned a profitable short-term rental, but a lot of his money was tied up in the property.
A HELOC meant paperwork and monthly payments. Refinancing meant giving up his original interest rate.
So he listed the property on Lofty and sold shares for $50 each.
Investors started collecting rental income from day one. Then, when Chris was ready to sell, he bought back their shares and put the whole property on the market.
Those investors earned a 25.98% total return, or 17.5% annualized, in under 17 months.
Basically, Chris sold some of his equity instead of borrowing against it.
Everyday investors put up the cash and earned the return that would normally go to a bank.
Lofty never touches the money either. When someone buys shares, the seller gets paid directly. Itβs peer to peer.
Chris got cash without a new loan or a worse mortgage rate. Investors made 25.98%. The whole thing wrapped up in under 17 months.
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New property live! Introducing a two-unit mid-term rental in Roanoke, Virginia.
It has five years of operating history, mostly rented to traveling nurses and other medical workers π₯
New investors get $50 free if they invest $50. Limited time!
Invest now: lofty.ai/property_deal/1411-β¦
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Lofty retweeted
I'm happy to announce that we've completed share migrations on @lofty_ai.
This means all investors received new versions of their existing shares 1:1. The new shares are fractional by nature, which means you can purchase 0.01 shares if you want now.
But the best part is that we can now update the order interface, so that your default order method is based on the dollar amount you want to invest versus number of shares in the property.
As I've said before, this opens up the door to so many opportunities.
Starting now, you can make reoccurring investments on Lofty. It's on by default. No matter what the share price is for a property, you can always index a specific amount successfully into it each month.
You can also change this frequency settings to weekly. Let the great DCA begin!
PSA: for those users that have previously lost access to their wallet or shares from the MyAlgo hack, you will now be able to use these new versions of your shares freely!
ALT Purchase modal on mobile for https://lofty.ai for making orders in dollars instead of by share numbers
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Lofty retweeted
This is always nice to see hear :)
I've personally been making some big updates to how our support is handled at @lofty_ai the last month or so.
Soon, we'll get to a 24/7 support cadence for our users with the help of LLMs.
Let me know if you've noticed a difference in how quickly bugs are resolved and our response time.
Lots to improve still!
ALT Email blurb about a customer praising Lofty's support service.
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Lofty retweeted
Automatic re-lending is live on @lofty_ai now. Turn it on to auto-compound your returns.
We're actually going to migrate to a completely new market making architecture soon. When the migration is done, rewards won't actually be distributed separately. Instead, they'll stay inside the pool, automatically compounding.
So, this feature is only going to be live and necessary for maybe a month. Normally, we wouldn't have wasted time to build it, but our team is moving so fast these days, it was actually worth it to do this for now :)
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Lofty retweeted
After I posted this about one of our competitors in the USA shutting down, someone DMed info about another company in Canada shutting down called Addy.
Looking through it, it just means we are going to double down on @lofty_ai's strategy. This company did the same thing. Structured offerings as securities through SPVs. Investors were passive and had no say in asset selection, management, exit timeframes, or anything else. Company has to have a heavy real estate operation component, vetting, sourcing, and managing the assets/investments.
This sadly just doesn't work and I think it's unlikely to ever work. It's fine if it's a real estate fund meant to remain small, but profitable for owners. Anyone trying to build a multi billion tech outcome from a model like this is just going to run into the same failure points over time.
Not to mention that structuring these as securities means more compliance/back office costs that kill your unit economics.
I'm pretty sure the only way forward in this industry is Lofty's way. And we're not successful yet either, so many different problems we run into. But, at least they're not the same issues that we've see in the industry repeatedly with no real way to fix.
It also appears that after the shut down of this company, the investors are stuck in the SPVs, which are hard to unwind and don't really know what to do.
If you know someone involved with this product (as a user), please refer them over to me. I'm going to see if Lofty can maybe help them out. All the tools we've built that let's owners operate their own investment as a DAO, should allow these Addy investors to have a path forward to either continue with their investments or figure out a way to wind down.
howardchai.substack.com/p/adβ¦
We learned from our YC batch that startups usually don't die from competitors, they die from bad execution, so I usually don't talk about @lofty_ai competitors much.
But it appears that one of our larger and oldest competitors is shutting down.
I do want to take the time to address this, because I think it validates a lot of our learnings and assumptions at Lofty.
1. Nice expensive properties tend to have lower yield, while cheaper properties have higher yield. It's just how the math works. But this means if your users only want "high yield", you'll be forced to chase properties that aren't in the best locations, often with troubled tenants, and aren't in good condition. The operational cost often outweighs the yield in the long run. We learned this in late 2022 and have since pivoted away from those types of properties. The ones remaining either got ownership groups that know what they're doing or have since been sold off by their owners. I think this was right long term call.
2. Real estate operations is really hard to scale. If you manage assets for your investors, you can make more money per property by charging more fees, including a portion of returns, but you'll be liable and responsible for managing, essentially, hundreds of small businesses. It's really hard to scale this with technology, because it's fundamentally a real world operation. Someone has to drive to the property to look at issues and call people to fix them, and that's the easy part. Some of our users still have trouble accepting this, but we've never managed or will manage any properties on behalf of investors. If this means we're not the best fit for some investors, then so be it, but our bet is real estate investors who know what they're doing want to manage their own assets. I think if we figure out our model here and refine it in the right way, it'll be the right bet as well.
3. Liquidity is the most important thing for any market period. You need to do everything you can to build a system to grow this. The trading price is also the trading price. People don't care what you or some 3rd party think a property is worth, they'll trade at the prices that they want to and think is reasonable. It turns out, real estate prices are ONLY stable, because they're so illiquid. Make them trade like equities and they start to behave like it in price movements. Except the supply is so small that small trades and move price far easier than in the equities market. We're making most of our bets here this year. Time will tell if they pan out or not.
In the end, I should celebrate the demise of a competitor intuitively, but I'm not sure if articles like this are a good thing. I think a rising tide can lift all boats in an industry, but if most of the news are about bad actors, then it makes new investors and users hesitant to try out products like this, including ours.
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Lofty retweeted
We removed the 7-day APY figure for all liquidity pool returns on @lofty_ai and replaced it with cumulative returns since their launch.
As time goes on, we have longer duration data, which is better for quoting to users, versus short term high variance data.
I hope people find this new layout to be more helpful when making decisions and the data will be accessible through the SDK as well.
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Lofty retweeted
We learned from our YC batch that startups usually don't die from competitors, they die from bad execution, so I usually don't talk about @lofty_ai competitors much.
But it appears that one of our larger and oldest competitors is shutting down.
I do want to take the time to address this, because I think it validates a lot of our learnings and assumptions at Lofty.
1. Nice expensive properties tend to have lower yield, while cheaper properties have higher yield. It's just how the math works. But this means if your users only want "high yield", you'll be forced to chase properties that aren't in the best locations, often with troubled tenants, and aren't in good condition. The operational cost often outweighs the yield in the long run. We learned this in late 2022 and have since pivoted away from those types of properties. The ones remaining either got ownership groups that know what they're doing or have since been sold off by their owners. I think this was right long term call.
2. Real estate operations is really hard to scale. If you manage assets for your investors, you can make more money per property by charging more fees, including a portion of returns, but you'll be liable and responsible for managing, essentially, hundreds of small businesses. It's really hard to scale this with technology, because it's fundamentally a real world operation. Someone has to drive to the property to look at issues and call people to fix them, and that's the easy part. Some of our users still have trouble accepting this, but we've never managed or will manage any properties on behalf of investors. If this means we're not the best fit for some investors, then so be it, but our bet is real estate investors who know what they're doing want to manage their own assets. I think if we figure out our model here and refine it in the right way, it'll be the right bet as well.
3. Liquidity is the most important thing for any market period. You need to do everything you can to build a system to grow this. The trading price is also the trading price. People don't care what you or some 3rd party think a property is worth, they'll trade at the prices that they want to and think is reasonable. It turns out, real estate prices are ONLY stable, because they're so illiquid. Make them trade like equities and they start to behave like it in price movements. Except the supply is so small that small trades and move price far easier than in the equities market. We're making most of our bets here this year. Time will tell if they pan out or not.
In the end, I should celebrate the demise of a competitor intuitively, but I'm not sure if articles like this are a good thing. I think a rising tide can lift all boats in an industry, but if most of the news are about bad actors, then it makes new investors and users hesitant to try out products like this, including ours.
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Lofty retweeted
We're officially launching the @lofty_ai SDK after its open beta!
The launch of the SDK along with our previously launched market making rewards will allow anyone in our ecosystem to act as a market maker, providing liquidity for all, while earning income.
Go to your account page, under settings, click "API".
We can't wait to see what people build on top of this!
The SDK is live generally, allowing you to programmatically interact with your account and balances, while the market making rewards are currently live for only 4 properties.
But don't worry, we'll expand the program rapidly in the weeks to come.
Try it out and let us know what you think!
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We reviewed 18 real estate platforms side by side and compared their minimums, fees, payouts, liquidity, track records, and investment structures.
Among the active platforms we reviewed, minimums range from $1 at Concreit to $50,000 at Cadre. That's a 50,000x spread. In between, Fundrise starts at $10, Ark7 at $20 on its secondary market, Lofty at $50, and Arrived, Roots, and Realbricks at $100, while several commercial platforms require $5,000 or more.
But the minimum tells you almost nothing about what you're actually buying.
"Real estate platform" is really an umbrella term for four different products:
Some platforms let you choose shares of an individual property. Others place your money into a diversified fund or REIT managed by someone else. Debt platforms lend your money against a project. Whole-property marketplaces help you buy and operate the entire home yourself.
That distinction affects nearly everything: how returns are generated, when you receive income, what can go wrong, and how you eventually get your money back.
Liquidity may be the most overlooked difference. Depending on the platform, you may have a 24/7 exchange, monthly windows, quarterly redemption requests, or no secondary market at all.
A low minimum makes an investment easy to enter. It doesn't make it easy to exit.
Platform risk is also no longer theoretical. Three of the 18 platforms are no longer operating normally. RealT is in voluntary liquidation, Landa is frozen, and DiversyFund is closed to new investors awaiting sponsor-led liquidation.
The properties matter, but so does the company operating the platform.
Five questions to ask before you invest:
1οΈβ£ What am I actually buying? Property shares, a fund, a loan, or a whole home?
2οΈβ£ How do I get my money out? A secondary market, a redemption window, or a multi-year lockup?
3οΈβ£ What are the total fees? Management, servicing, and selling costs, not just the headline number.
4οΈβ£ What's the track record? Has the platform actually returned money to investors?
5οΈβ£ What happens if the platform itself fails? Who holds the properties, and what do investors get?
There is no single "best" platform. There's only the one that fits the job you want it to do.
We built one page that answers all five questions for all 18 platforms:
βοΈ A full review of every platform, with pros, cons, current 2026 returns, fees, and a bottom-line verdict.
βοΈ A snapshot table of every platform's minimum, payout schedule, and liquidity rules at a glance.
βοΈ A comparison tool with 153 matchups. Pick any two platforms and see their minimums, payouts, fees, and liquidity head to head.
If you're already weighing two specific platforms, the answer is probably one click away. Even if you never invest through Lofty, we hope it saves you from opening 18 tabs and trying to decode terms that were never designed to be compared.
Link to compare platforms π
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Compare any two platforms: lofty.ai/compare
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A guy in Joshua Tree needed cash, so he sold pieces of his vacation rental to strangers on the internet. 21 months later, he bought every share back.
Those strangers made 53%.
Here's what actually happened:
He owned a profitable short-term rental at 6251 Cahuilla Ave. It was a great asset, but his money was stuck in the property.
A home equity line of credit meant paperwork and payments. A refinance meant losing his original interest rate. So, he listed the property on Lofty and sold shares for $50 each in October 2024.
Investors started collecting rental income from day one.
Then, when he was ready, he bought his equity back and put the property on the market.
The investors who backed him earned a total return of 53.12%, averaging 28.05% per year, in under 21 months.
Look at what he really did: he borrowed against his own equity, and everyday investors were paid like a bank.
And the part most people don't realize is that Lofty never touches the money. When you buy shares, the seller gets paid instantly. Itβs peer to peer.
The seller gained quick access to cash without going into debt. The investors received real returns on a real asset. No bank, no middleman, and no money tied up for years.
This isn't a workaround. It's how real estate should work.
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