Video: Just Economy Conversations: New Frontiers in Financing Homes

Online Event Archive Recorded: May 6, 2025

Innovation, technology, and shared equity are reshaping access to homeownership and creating new pathways for building wealth. With $44 trillion of U.S. wealth tied up in housing, a new generation of tools and approaches—spanning blockchain, shared equity models, and impact-driven capital—offer alternatives to traditional ownership structures. Our panelists are leading efforts to integrate policy, technology, and community-driven investment strategies that keep homes in the hands of families and neighbors, not corporations. We highlight real solutions, from owner-occupied equity investments to public-private partnerships that are actively closing the racial wealth gap. Learn how the next wave of housing finance can empower individuals, protect communities, and unlock sustainable wealth creation.

Moderators:

• Stuart Yasgur, Principal, Economic Architecture Project
• Andre Perry, Senior Fellow, Brookings Metro
• Jacelyn Matthews, Director of the National Training Academy, NCRC

Panelists:

• Kyle Kamrooz, Founder, Bonus Homes 
• Marcus Martin, CEO, Homium
• Vernon Jay, Founder and CEO, Equity Platforms

Transcript:

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Matthews 0:08
All right. So again, thank you so much for joining us here at NCRC, where we’re doing Just Economy Conversations. So this is an opportunity for us to continue the work and the conversation we started during our Just Economy Conference in March of this year. And so, just to give a little bit of background, my name is Jacelyn Matthews. I am the Director of the National Training Academy here at NCRC. For those who do not know, NCRC, in the work that we do, we are a organization, a member organization, where our mission is to focus on making a just economy a national priority and a local reality. We do that through a myriad of ways and partnerships with different organizations, local small business, banks, etc, but also through our ongoing trainings that we host. And so we noticed that something that we were doing during the just economy conference is that not everyone can make it to DC, so how can we actually continue the conversations that are started, things that are being sparked, ideas, those that highlight the work that’s happening in different organizations? So we partnered with economic architecture project to host one of our first just economy conversations for this year, and our topic here is New Frontiers and Financing Homes. I’m going to turn it over to our moderators in just two minutes, but I wanted to just make sure I say that we will have a time for Q and A so we’re going to ask that you put all of your questions in the question and answer box, not just in the chat, in the Q and A box, so we can be sure to get to the questions that you have. So like I mentioned, we are going to turn it over to Stuart Yasgur, who is the principal at Economic Architecture Project, and to Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, to get our panel started and also introduce our panelists. So I’ll turn it over to you.

Perry 2:00
Yes, hello everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you, NCRC for hosting us. It’s always a pleasure working with you. I’m Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and I’m also the new author of Black Power Scorecard, measuring the racial gap and what we can do to close it, and I’m going to just get kick it off to my colleague for introduction before I get into research framing.

Yasgur 2:30
Great. Hello everyone. My name is Stuart Yasgur. I lead the Economic Architecture Project. I lead economic architecture, and I’d like to thank you all for gathering with us here today. Just a line or two, just kind of to start. I do think that, as we’re kicking off, I think we need to acknowledge that this is really unusual times that we’re gathering in. You know, I think every every day, it seems like the headlines are announcing a new crisis from Washington. And while I think those things are very important and we need to pay attention to each of the these crises, we also have to be careful that they don’t start to dictate what the agenda is. We need to stay focused on those kinds of the issues that are really affecting people’s lives. And so that’s part of why I’m so excited today to be here speaking with you. We’re going to be listening to and learning from three of the 2025 Spotlight Innovators from the Valuing Homes and Black Communities Challenge who each you know, each of them have new approaches to enable markets to really step in and play a critical role, which is even more important now when, unfortunately, so many of Those institutions on the policy level are coming under fire, so I think that today’s conversation is gonna be really exciting and Andre I’d like to pass it back to you to kind of tee up the broader framing.

Perry 3:54
Yeah, you know, in 2018 my colleagues Jonathan Rothwell and David Harshbarger and I wrote up a study examining the value of homes in Black communities, many of you are familiar with this work, but please indulge me, as I give a little bit of a review. At the time, we measured the value of homes in Black neighborhoods where the share of the Black population is greater than 50% and we compared those to places where the Black population is less than a percent. Now, before controlling for or attending to many of the factors that may contribute to that, we know that just the raw value of homes in Black neighborhoods are 50% less than their mostly White counterparts. But after controlling for or attending to things like education, crime, walkability, all those fancy Zillow metrics, we found that after controlling for those factors, there’s a 23% gap, which amounts to about $48,000 per home. Cumulatively, it amounted to about $156 billion in lost equity. Now we generally know that our history of policy-making had a lot to do with that redlining, racial covenants, urban renewal, single family zoning ordinances and a number of policies that were anti-Black in nature certainly had a role in those things. But it’s uncertain how much each of those policies contribute to it, but we know that in general, that the innovations of that of those days to exclude people from communities have a demonstrable impact on not only the material value of homes, but how we look at Black communities overall. And with that knowledge that innovation can be used for bad and for good, that sparked a challenge from my colleague Stewart to reach out to me to say, hey, let’s make this the foundation for a new set of challenges and innovations. But instead of innovating for exclusion, let’s innovate for inclusion. Let’s learn how to value homes where whoever is in those communities. And so it’s in that spirit that we land in this moment in time that many of the people here today, along with others, this is our second round of this challenge, Valuing Black or Homes in Black Communities Challenge that these are innovators who are finding new pathways to ownership, new pathways to equity, new ways to value people in place. So each individual innovation is unique in itself, but I will also just want to take the time to say we also need a framework on how to value people and place, whoever they may be. And I think these innovators that you’ll, you’ll learn from today, will represent that spirit. So I’m going to pass it over to Stuart, who’s going to share a little bit about the challenge.

Yasgur 7:45
Great. Andre, thank you. Yeah. So I think the, you know, the devaluation of homes in Black majority neighborhoods is obviously an enormous problem, a problem of historic proportions. So as we started to work on this, you know, I think it became clear that it’s not one innovation or another that’s needed. In fact, we needed a whole new generation of innovations that could address this problem at the structural level. And so that’s what we set out to do. We set out working together for about six years now, we set out to foster a new generation of structural innovations with the potential to address the devaluation of homes and Black-majority neighborhoods. And so that’s a pretty audacious goal, but we kind of follow really concrete approach to make progress towards it. So, you know, we think that we need to do a few things to achieve it. First, we need to help people recognize that it’s problem, that the problem is important, and that it can be addressed and addressed at the structural level. We talked about that as introducing a new framework. Second, we need, once people see the problem, they need the opportunity to act so we need structural innovations that people can move forward and act on today. So we talk about kind of identifying a supply of structural innovations. And third, no matter how powerful those innovations are, they’re going to need a whole range of kind of partners, investors, philanthropy, philanthropic funding, policymakers, thought leaders, all these folks to work with them to really enable these innovations to come to fruition. We talk about that as building the demand for structural innovations. And if we do those three things, if we kind of introduce this framework, identify supply and start to build the demand, we have the potential to foster new generation of structural innovations to address devaluation. And in the last number of years, you know, a number of things have changed. So we’ve certainly seen federal policy change. We’ve seen new pieces of legislation introduced. We support over 20 different innovators. We’re seeing changes in for-profit companies as well as citizen sector organizations. And so a lot of the progress is heartening, but I think particular, one of the things we’re really interested in today is that as the innovations we’re going to look at today, all of them kind of prompt us to think differently about. How we start to finance homes, and it’s such a critical aspect in the housing crisis we’re all experiencing right now. So I think Andre and I our goal for today is to spend as much time, kind of learning from and listening to the innovators as possible. And so with that, I’d like to kind of introduce our three spotlight innovators who are with us today, and then, Andre, I’ll pass you the baton. So first we have Kyle Kamrooz from Bonus Homes. We have Marcus Martin from Homium, and we have Vernon Jay, who’s here with us today, from Equity share. Andre, do you want to get us?

Perry 10:35
Yeah, yeah. So let’s start off with Kyle. Please introduce yourself and your innovation, including your name and organization and the goal and aspiration of the innovation itself.

Kamrooz 10:50
Well, thanks for having me first and foremost, appreciate it and and looking forward to having some good, good dialog. So my name is Kyle Kamrooz. I’m actually right now in DC. Live here actually half the year, and then the West Coast. My background has been in in lending and finance, FinTech and built to technology as well. So housing has kind of been, I like to say, my jam since I was 19 years old. I might look like I’m 21 right now, but I just turned 45 so been in it for a long time, and I don’t know much else in life, but housing seems to you know, I just have a passion for it. And so Bonus Homes is the name of the company. We are institutionally backed venture capital and by some of the largest investors in the country, including investors who backed companies like Airbnb, meta, Uber. And we are, in essence, our thesis and our why is really, and there’s a reason why I’m in DC as well, our thesis is to bring wealth back to the middle class. Ever since I was a young, young lad in you know, I grew up in the middle class. The middle class has definitely deteriorated over the past 10-15 years, and the gap between the upper class and everybody else has just widened massively. And one of the things that we are addressing is we are addressing this, this concept of, you know, mobility and moving is actually financially punitive. For a lot of people, you have to either get rid of your home. If you want to move, you have to, if you want to pull out equity of your house, you have to go into debt. And there’s all these things to be able to do, and unfortunately, you know, life happens. And we basically built a really created a new category called a home appreciation partnership, a HAP, and what it does is it allows rewards homeowners for moving, and allows them to move without missing. On what the upside of this property can be that they’re leaving. And so I’ll go into more details about it, but at the end of the day, our focus is basically creating a new financial instrument, which we have that allows people as an alternative to selling the home, to being able to bonus their home and get the benefits of that, which I will go into more detail in a little bit.

Perry 13:30
Marcus as Kyle, please introduce yourself and your innovation, including your name and organization and the goal aspiration of the innovation. Great.

Martin 13:39
Well, thank you. Dr. Perry, Thank you, Stuart. Thank you to the NCRC folks. I’m really happy to be here and looking forward to the conversation. Very honored to be a part of the Economic Architecture Challenge. So my name is Marcus Martin. I’m the CEO of Homium, H, O, M, i, u m, and that’s kind of a combination of the concept of the home and premium. If you couldn’t, couldn’t follow that. Really, what we do, very simply speaking, is provide a fair and transparent shared appreciation mortgage. That fair, transparent shared appreciation mortgage, and we could talk more about what a shared appreciation mortgage is, but ultimately, what it provides potential homeowners is an ability to bridge the affordability gap, and it’s particularly important in this current market environment where house prices obviously continue to go higher, rates don’t seem to want to come down, and wages certainly haven’t kept up with the cost of housing. So what we’ve been fortunate to be able to start providing the market is really a very simple tool, what we like to call it, financial tool of dignity, and that’s ultimately the actual loan structure that does not charge any interest to the borrower and truly just depends on a one to one and shared equity in future state when the homeowner decides to sell or refinance and cash out again. We could probably go into more detail around that as we get into the conversation, but we’re really excited about the simplicity and the straightforward transparency of it, as well as how impactful it can be and how many variety of use cases we’ve already begun to work with, particularly institutions in the municipal housing finance space and private capital as well, which I think is really the secret sauce to the product that we have, which is now going on, six years old. And ultimately, the idea that you can marry public need and public good with private capital, and do it in a way where it doesn’t take advantage of the homeowner, is our North Star and that that is our business and our product is built and really excited to spend a little more time on that. As far as my own background, I’m 25 ish, plus, plus, plus a couple of years in global capital markets, investment banking, what I would like to call impact capital markets, which was part of the business that I was really fortunate to help be early in, had led a majority-minority investment bank and spent a lot of time in the municipal finance space. And all of those elements, including digital assets, which we’ll get into at some point in this conversation, all those elements have come together, I think, with this opportunity to move from large-scale institutional liquidity provision, but what happens in the actual individual asset and the structure of the loan on the consumer side, and what are the net effects to the borrower? And we all know many products today that transfer the value of that future home away from the borrower and to investors, and that is not the way Homium is structured. And so we’re really excited to spend more time on how homem works and some of the current pilot programs we’re getting going on, and just how we can be a part of really participating in the just economy. So again, thank you for having us.

Perry 17:02
Last but not least, Vernon. Please introduce yourself your organization and the inspiration for your work.

Jay 17:10
Good afternoon, everyone. And I just want to say it’s an absolute pleasure be sharing space with so many change-makers and innovators. Again, my name is Vernon Jay. I’m the CEO over at Equity Platforms, and the innovation that I’m going to be speaking about today is our newest platform called Equity Share, and it’s where we combine crowdfunding and smart contract technology in order to streamline affordable housing development. And really we’re allowing community stakeholders to own fractions of large assets, gaining access to the property’s cash flow and appreciation. I’ve been in the private equity space for 19 years and completed over 200 million in transactions, mostly in multifamily. And I’ve been involved in the blockchain space since 2016 and through my time in PE I’ve discovered two fundamental issues. Number one, the higher I went into the space, the less I saw developers that looked like me. I mean, the fact is that Black developers only represent 2% of the pie. The reason is pretty simple. You know, the barrier to entry into large-scale development is extremely high, and as banks, because banks require you to have done if you’re getting started in the game, banks are going to require you to have done similar deals before they can lend you capital. But if you can’t get your foot in the door, then it’s a chicken and egg situation, unless you have a rich uncle, a rich dad or somebody to be a guarantor for, you know, five to $10 million to get you to get you going. So I thought that was fundamentally wrong, and I wanted to create a system where those developers who have shown resilience, have shown decades of hard work, like myself, right? I use this system to bolster my portfolio, and now we’ve white label it so other community developers can do that as well. The second thing that I saw that’s a fundamental issue is that community members, people who actually have stake in the community had zero opportunity to take part in developments that are reshaping their communities. So it’s like these developments have been happening to them instead of with them. And what’s interesting is that, you know, our client base are twofold. We’ve got the new developers who are up and coming. But then we also have the large developers who are doing quarter billion dollar projects, half a billion dollar projects, where the community is no longer just sitting by and letting developments happen to them. They are making noise. They’re stopping developments in their tracks. Because to be quite honest with you, people are seeing people in the communities, and I’ve had great conversations with you know, leaders in the community. They see developers coming in, extracting value, giving a little bit of community benefits agreements, a little bit of change here, but at the end of the day, they walk away once, once they’re able to refinance or sell out. And I think that’s a major issue, and what we’re providing to those larger developers is a bridge. Is a bridge to say, look, community members, we’re here not only to do this development, but we’re here to do it with you. And I think you know what, what we’re doing with Equity Share is creating the sharing equity economy. And I’m we’ll discuss more about it a little bit later, but I’ll land the plane by just giving a touch of what I believe is a sharing equity economy, which is actually one of our, one of our trademarks for equity platforms. And if you look at Airbnb, Toro, even you know, Uber, these are companies that 20 years ago, you would have probably laughed people out of the room if you thought that you were going to ride in somebody, a stranger’s car, right, who didn’t have a taxi medallion, or if you were going to stay in a stranger second home, second room, that that just wasn’t really there. And the reason why really wasn’t there is because monopolies and lobbies these strong arm you know, corporations and organizations had a tight hold on these marketplaces, and companies like Uber, Airbnb, they’re still fighting to this day. They’re fighting the oligarchs, right? And I think that was the sharing equity economy 1.0 where we saw the birth of these, these companies. I think the second birth and the second renaissance is with the disruption of banks, because it’s very clear that redlining is still prevalent today. I’m a victim. I’ve been a victim of redlining, where companies and banks they say they lend. I’ve got a great profile, but when they see the zip code, a particular zip code that is not affluent, all of a sudden, oh, we don’t, we don’t really have the capital, and we’re being picky. These are actual words that I’ve heard from lenders that were or banks that were being picky about where we’re putting capital. And especially as interest rates rise, banks are tightening. So there’s an incredible void in the marketplace right now when it comes to providing capital to community developers in underserved communities, as well as making sure those community stakeholders have an opportunity to take part in the redevelopment of their neighborhoods. So I’m excited to just bring my expertise and, you know, bring birth to this new sharing equity economy, which, you know, I’ll get to discuss later in the conversation.

Yasgur 22:24
That’s great. And I think we’re already getting so much of a sense of how different these ideas are. Can we start with the personal little bit of the moment of inspiration? Can you share a little bit of what sparked your vision and what’s what’s inspiring you to do this work? Marcus, are you okay to get us going?

Martin 22:43
Yeah, happy to do it. You know, I think I came to this work naturally. It wasn’t one thing that happened. I think it was consistent engagement and working in traditional investment banking, trying to bring impact, solutions, community outcomes, through private capital sources, bond issuances, things like that, where I think that particular light bulb came on for me with Homium, when I think about just all of my work across sort of the credit, fixed income environment and solutions at the community-level that seemed to work, some many that didn’t work over the pilot period. I think Homium really caught my attention in terms of its potential to scale because of its simplicity, and then it really caught my attention because of its fairness. And I joined Homium after our co-founders, Brett Markinson and David Jetty originally pulled this thing together six years ago, thinking about the home equity that’s trapped in most families houses, particularly those that are on fixed incomes, and almost early on, as an anti-displacement strategy or a home improvement strategy, the goal was, you know, provide a very fair, transparent way to unlock your existing home equity. So as you think about Homium being able to sort of sit in any part of the life cycle of homeownership for first-time home buyers, which is where we’re finding a good amount of traction right now, and down payment assistance to that unlock, which was where it originally started, through to, of course, later years in life, better than a reverse mortgage. You know, it’s an anti-displacement and potentially a part of the recipe for maintaining or creating multi-generational wealth. All of those pieces sat really well with me, and then when I recognize the one-to-one equity share, which even CFPB has noted in a recent amicus brief at the beginning of the year, that Homium really may be the only exception to the rule in the shared appreciation market, because we don’t extract any more value from the homeowner than just the exact amount of equity percentage that they borrowed in dollar terms to begin with. Through the life of the loan, you don’t pay any interest, so there’s no debt service. So it dramatically reduces, you know, the debt to income for most borrowers and all of those factors were fascinating to me with. Really drove me into joining the Homium team and taking over the leadership opportunity was the ability to partner with, you know, municipalities and other institutions that are either looking to continue a mission of providing access to affordable home ownership, or to get into that mission. If you think about what’s happened in the last decade or two with non-traditional developers, really, to Vernon’s point, so difficult, to use the existing infrastructure to build the affordability units that are needed for people to be able to live and start a family and move up in the homeownership ladder, especially. And so seeing institutions of faith and nonprofits and others who I’ve been working very closely with for many decades in my career, but seeing them move into the position of sponsor of affordable or workforce housing development was not only awe-inspiring, but somewhat frightening when you think about the gap and what’s needed to really support our communities and access to housing. So for me, all of those points and then thinking of how Homium at scale really is a fascinating new asset class that has, you know, gives you this exposure to unlevered, meaning there’s there’s no, well, we could talk about what unlevered means, but basically just very clean, simple equity, but you’re not the majority owner, so you’re not exposed to the taxes. You’re not having to deal with the day-to-day maintenance, right? The homeowner still has that full utility. But, you know, I think Vernon brought this up. It almost, for some people who’ve been fortunate, it’s almost like that, that wealthy uncle or someone who can come in and step in and share, you know, some of that burden upon purchase, and seeing that at scale is really fascinating, because what you’re talking about is just a pooled exposure to house price appreciation. We can get into whether homes will continue to appreciate or not. If you look at Case Shiller, which is essentially the index that looks at home price appreciation over the last 100 years, on any five year period, it’s gone up pretty substantially, and it’s certainly outperformed treasuries and a lot of inflation-protected investments. So these are all tools that we see big institutions using to manage money. Well, obviously Homium, if it’s successful, could also be one of those tools, but it has to start somewhere. And so I joined the opportunity with Homium, personally, because I fell in love with the ability to structure each loan to each borrower. And we all like to say, meet people where they are, but when you’re talking about underwriting credit that rarely occurs. Homium does exactly that, where it allows every single loan to be tailored exactly to what the borrower needs, and provides an abundance of education and continues to maintain the relationship with the homeowner so that there’s no surprises in the future. So all those, I think, points, you know, along with the work that I had always been doing, presented this opportunity. And, you know, I fell in love with the opportunity, and six months in, I’m even more in love with what we can possibly do given the environment.

Yasgur 27:59
Vernon, same question, kind of, can you share a little bit about, kind of, what sparked the vision and your inspiration here?

Jay 28:05
I think I mentioned before, you know, I’ve been in private equity for quite a while, and multifamily. And, you know, I started to, I use some of my quote, unquote winnings, you know, as you go through the space and you grow, use some of my cash to start building my own portfolio of assets, and I started building that in 2016 and in that same year, I dove really deep into blockchain technology. I traveled all over the world, Dubai, Hong Kong, all over this country, learning about how real estate and blockchain intersect. And as I started to build on my portfolio of assets, and also dig deep into the blockchain space, I realized that there was a there was a huge misconception. It was a huge misconception that blockchain technology was crypto and it was Bitcoin or these other tokens or cryptos. But it’s it’s not. Blockchain technology is one of the most efficient ways to create ledgers, and that’s what people I think that’s what we need to really understand at the basic level, right? If you’re, if you’re looking to transition, transfer value, transfer information, keep clean records. There’s nothing better right now on the market, and I can’t see, you know, for the near future better than blockchain technology. So as I started to build my portfolio, and I think, you know, in 2020, was the aha moment, the light bulb went off because I started to rent some of my units to I worked with the city of New York and rented some of my units with two recently homeless families and the first deal that we did, or the first tenant that we brought in. I mean, it completely changed my life because, you know, as we handed her the keys, you know, she broke down in the most grateful tears. It was never before that moment that I felt more purposeful, like I had a purpose here. I could, I can actually do this, and I wanted to do that 1,000 times over. I have the. Wherewithal. I have the expertise, all I need is the capital. I just need people to believe because I’ve done almost two decades of work in this space. So really the only hurdle was capital. So I had this idea to combine crowdfunding and tokenization in order to exponentially grow my portfolio. So my first call that I gave was one of my best friends. He’s my what my best friend for about 18 years now. His name is Akil Ash, and he’s our CTO over at Equity Platforms. And he actually helped Venmo and PayPal build out their blockchain system. So I called him, I said, Look, you know, I’ve got this concept. I’ve got this idea. I want to create a token that’s backed by our assets. I want to get people in the community to be able to invest, people who have an affinity towards the community, and then I want to create that. I want to have a community where we can grow together, and our cash flow, we can send, I can send out dividends from the income from our cash flow, and they can gain the appreciation in the assets as well. So we just got right to work and we created the first digital token backed by affordable housing, called equity coin. So we created that through crowdfunding and tokenization. I increased my portfolio about 12-fold within four years. So we created the test case. I was the first test case for my own assets for our newest system, Equity Share, which I mentioned earlier, and that’s really the white-label version of equity coin, where any community developer around the nation can come to us. We can create their token backed by their assets. They can create their own community and have people to people to people to come on board. And when you have blockchain technology, it makes things so much easier. I mean, I send out my dividends to my 119 investors, it takes me about seven minutes total, whereas some of my counterparts, they’re still sending snail mail to investors, a check in the mail, which has a host of issues. It might arrive, people move. You don’t, you don’t have any purview into their bank account, so you don’t know if they actually cashed it. There’s you need a whole system, a whole administrative system for dividend sharing. That’s one part of the equation that is completely removed, because no matter if you have no matter where you are in the world, as long as you have an internet connection, you’re able to see when you got your dividends, the value of your dividends, and you see it all in real-time. So I think you know what that was, the spark of what we do. And I think at the end of the day, what we’re looking to do is help community developers, not only if they’re small, also if they’re large, create efficiencies in their system in order to make it so that people in the community can actually take part in those assets as well. So it was a it was a moment for me, and I’m excited to even dig even deeper.

Yasgur 33:00
That’s great. Kyle, can you share your inspiration for this work?

Kamrooz 33:05
Yeah, so basically, I know there’s about 200 people or so on the call, and obviously I can’t see you see everybody, but if I would say how many of you, if you went to Zillow, or if you haven’t lately, I encourage you to do it, type in your property, the home that you grew up in, and see what the value is today of that home. And I would guess that similar to what Marcus mentioned about home values going up, I would guess that a lot of people would see that today, that home value is a lot more than what it was, whether you owned it, your parents owned it, or whomever owned it before. And that’s really the whole point of what we’re doing, is homes are one of the most predictable wealth generators in human history. And a lot of people imagine if your family were was able to keep that home. So a lot of people today, because they want to move, they have a couple options. One is, they have to sell the home, which is majority of what people do, and they sell it. Why? Two main reasons they need the money that their equity, that they’ve earned, that that with the home appreciating, their mortgage balance going down, and the other reason is, is that most people don’t want to be a landlord. Most popular people don’t, don’t want to manage that. It is, it is it is literally, it is a nightmare for just in general, just to do all that, that stuff and and so people want to do that, so they have to sell this property, this appreciating asset. So that’s what society has thrown us. That says, Hey, congratulations, Kyle, you now had another kid. You got a new job promotion for whatever reason you want to go. Go across to, you know, and live in Topeka, Kansas, right? And, yeah, you live in Arizona. And wonderful, live your life mobility. And the problem is, what? Well, if you want to move, you gotta get rid of this asset. And it’s not like a car, where the assets going to depreciate value, right? Especially in a lot of the markets that not in every market, but in majority of markets in the country. And so that is really the only solution. And so that’s that’s been the premise, which is just like, why is there only one way if I want to move, which happens in life, on average, people move any every three to seven years, especially with families and so forth, right? Whether you upsize or you downsize, either way, and yet, society says the only way you can do this is to get rid of that asset which we know will be worth more in the future. That was the problem. And that was kind of my aha moment when I started in real estate at a young age, and I saw that specifically 2010 my father had a $500,000 condo, townhome, and he needed to move, and he had about $100,000 of equity in that home. So he had about a $400,000 loan on the house. Well, he can’t get a any type of financial, you know, cash out, a HELOC, second mortgage. He wasn’t old enough for a reverse mortgage. There’s nothing out there. His only option to pull that $100,000 out is what? Gotta get rid of it. And my father told me, and I’ll never forget it. He’s like, you watch this house. In the next 10 years, this house is going to be worth over a million dollars, right? And he got rid of in 2010 2010 2011 again, regardless of timing that just was this specific moment, and that house in 2021 was worth $1.1 million. My father, who’s 73 years old, has missed out on hundreds of 1,000s of dollars of wealth that he would have had had he had a mechanism to keep that home. He needed $100,000 and it cost him so much more later on. And so that’s been the that’s been the premise, and this has been a mission for me, to be able to solve this, and with a lot of tailwinds over the past five years, four years, I would say, with this concept of shared appreciation and so forth, we were able to kind of put together all these different pieces to create this new financial instrument that basically allows you to have cash out 100% of your equity as if you sold it, move on with life and move on your own terms, but still participate in the future upside, and that’s what we created with Bonus. And so thanks to my father and just seeing that, that painful process of him, you know, and again, you know, he’s, he’s a sample of of what a lot of people are, right? He is, he’s, he’s, he’s older now. And but guess what? That two to $300,000 of wealth that my father could have had had he had held on to that asset, that would mean a lot for him at this stage of his life. And so how many millions of people out there move, sell a house for $350,000, $450,000, whatever the dollar amount is, and 15 layers, right? We know this with time. 10 to 15 years goes by pretty quickly in life. And how many people out there have missed out on that home now that’s worth $800,000 – $900,000 and could have had an extra couple $100,000 of wealth that they could have had for their family, for their kids, 529, plan for for any, for anything, for life, life happenings. And so that is really what, you know, the the movement and the mission of what we’re trying to do with, with with Middle America. And you know, I’m super passionate about it, just because I lived it, and I’m a little bit, you know, this, this, this kind of, I want to say, mad scientist, but like, putting all these pieces together has been interesting. Building a financial instrument is not for the faint of heart. It’s been really, really a lot of work. It’s taken several years, but really proud of the team and being able to actually do this in real time. You know, you go to our website, you see testimonials, you go to our YouTube or Instagram, it’s pretty powerful. And we’re just I, I feel like it’s a dream, and I thank God every day.

Perry 39:33
You know, there are lots of challenges that many of your innovations are trying to overcome. Many will we have policy folks in the audience? We have people from Finance Agency, housing agencies, folks from Pennsylvania to New Orleans to Washington D Washington, DC? Can you sort of pinpoint the policy or the specific challenge you’re trying to overcome? You can be very specific in terms of policy. You can be very general in terms of the mindset. But what are you trying to over overcome? Let’s start again with Kyle, because you mentioned something, if I’m a skeptic, and and, and someone says, Hey, but don’t we. Shouldn’t we have homes move, change hands completely. Isn’t that a healthy thing? How does wealth move? So what? What are some of the challenges you have to overcome in your innovation?

Kamrooz 40:46
Yeah, I think first and foremost, whenever you build something new, you’re always going to be categorized, I’ve never heard of it, and you’re going to be put in this bucket of, oh my gosh, this is scary, because we’re right. We’re humans, we’re it’s the fear of the unknown, and so for us, and just, just like, you know, Vernon and Marcus, right? We’re creating something, you know, if you guys remember the early days of Uber, imagine getting into a car a stranger that doesn’t have a medallion, right? For those who’ve taken cabs a lot, and so forth, you know, you got this validation of the medallion, and you had those types of things. It was crazy to think about getting into a car. Now with Uber, we shove our kids in the car, like, Okay, go ahead. I know you’re gonna go. You’re good to go. I trust, you know, I trust, I trust them. And so, so anyways, I think it just takes time with trust. And so that’s, that’s, I would say, one of the biggest things we’re at right now is, and if you go look in our example, when you go look at our FAQs, the very first question in our frequently asked questions is, this sounds too good to be good, true. What’s the catch? Right? And that is going to be our that is our biggest hurdle to get over, which is just education and awareness. So for us, it’s that standpoint. It’s the standpoint that we’re able to do everything we’re not we’re not doing anything that’s wrong. As a matter of fact, we encourage people to kind of look at this through with a microscope, to really understand this. And so that is probably the biggest thing in regards to the second question is specifically about, Well, are you? Are you? Are you, you know, not transferring or allowing the transfer of wealth to the new family that might be able to do that. And you can argue with that, you know, in that sense of it. I mean, I would, I would, I would go to say that one of the reasons why I love the housing industry is other than health care. It is one. It is the largest industry. You know, you’re talking about 50 million homes out there, single-family homes out there. You’re talking about 40 million people right now have a mortgage under four and a half percent. And when you think about that, the sheer size is massive and our mission is, over the next decade, is to help 50,000 we call them bonus members, but families, if we can help 50,000 okay, we’re not going to be able to do millions, but if we can help 50,000 families in these markets create an extra 100 to $2,000 of additional wealth that they never would have had otherwise, our mission is to bring five to $6 billion back to those 50,000 families into those communities that they participate in, right? And so from a from a macro perspective, we’re such a small pond in a massive, small fish in a massive pond in that sense of it. And also, just to be honest with you, I also just to kind of hit that head on what we said, what I tell people is we should have choices, that there’s only one choice today if you want to move, and that’s to sell. And so we’re just creating opportunity. Not everyone’s going to say, Yeah, I want to do this, but we want to give people the opportunity where you can sell or you can bonus, and you want to have optionality, especially in a world where we have nine different cereals when you go down an aisle, right? We should be able to have optionality on what we should do with our largest asset at the time of moving. And so we’re just trying to give option number two. And so that’s kind of how I would, I would tackle it. And also, the last part is we do have a housing shortage. We also have a big rental shortage as well. And so there’s also that, that that aspect of where we come in by being able to actually, in essence, turn these homes into investment properties for these homeowners is a big part and a big solve that we see in a lot of the markets that we’re in as well. So hopefully that helps answer the question, you know.

Perry 44:32
Vernon, same question, the big, biggest challenge, I mean, one right off the top. It does make a lot of sense that this antiquated, inefficient paper trail system needs some revision. I mean, in the very least, that seems like a challenge to overcome. But what are some other challenges that you’re innovation is addressing?

Jay 45:02
I think it just getting to the brass tax right. And the brass tax is that we’re, we’re hitting redlining, like straight on. Redlining, even I think of the New Deal right as one of the, one of the issues of our modern time, where White citizens were given, were provided, subsidized homeownership, and then Black and Brown citizens were given subsidized rental ownership, and there, and I take that ownership word out, because rent rent you don’t own. And that’s you do that over time, over decades, over, you know, generations, and you have what we have today, which is the average homeowner has 40 times more wealth than  the average renter, right? I mean, less than 2% of real estate developer development firms are Black-led, which I mentioned earlier, and that’s, that’s a stat from the Urban Land Institute. You know, Black developers, we receive less than 1% of institutional real estate capital. I’ll just say a few more statistics that really are the hitting home as to why we’re doing this, which is, you know, white business owners are 2.5 times more likely to get loans than Black owners, right? You go into the ownership, you know ownership, White ownership, is 74% versus Black ownership, 44% so there’s a, there’s a huge gap, right? And really, the gap is caused by decades and generations of policy, purposeful policy, that has been put in place, that is still today has remnants that I felt as a developer myself and as a developer in underserved communities. I’m from these communities, I’ve lived there, so I’m not afraid to go in and be able to own these assets, provide value, you know, have a good relationship with the tenants, and I think being able to provide a provide tools for developers that are going into these communities and trying to actually reverse gentrification, are not trying to get people out, but actually provide a way to have gentrification from within, right? So instead of saying, Okay, you gotta, I’m gonna buy this building, kick everybody out, it’s like, no, I’m gonna, we’re gonna buy this building and try to get people in the community to actually own a piece of these assets. And when I’m in East New York, North Miami, South Los Angeles, you know these underserved communities that have tremendous value, tremendous value, but they’re not providing, they’re not getting the adequate capital from the banks to be able to develop, right. When I go to these communities and you see somebody, you know, if you see somebody throw a wrapper on the floor, a candy wrapper on the floor, I believe that people throw a candy wrapper on the floor or throw a litter on the floor, because they don’t feel like they have ownership in that community. If you feel like you don’t have ownership, you’re not going to take care of your community. So if you can change the mindset, my if you could shift the mind and be able to provide people with an opportunity, and I love that word that you had. I think that’s that’s what you brought up opportunity, right? Just having the opportunity to own $1,000 worth of a large property that may completely change the landscape of your of your community, own $5,000 of this property now it’s like, no, I’m not going to throw anything on the floor. I’m not going to litter or do anything that’s going to be at a detriment to my community, because I own because I own a piece of it, right? And I think really that that is the crux of what we’re looking to do with this sharing equity economy, with the birth of the sharing equity economy.

Perry 48:54
You know, Marcus, you know, one of the problems I’m constantly working on as a policymaker is – it’s a problem in this context that wealth begets wealth, and if you don’t have it, it’s hard to get in the game. Can you talk about how policy is set up to which, if you have something already, you can get more, but if you don’t, then it’s just a high bar to entry?

Martin 49:32
Yeah, and I, and I, I’ll address that, and then also sort of parlay that into the questions around, you know what some of the barriers may be, and you know, so just quickly to respond to that, Dr. Perry, yeah, I mean, anecdotally speaking, I think everybody on this call is probably familiar with the reality that if you’re unable to enter homeownership, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to generate wealth, right? To actually build wealth, create more wealth, and then pass wealth down, right? And, and, you know, the idea of wealth begets wealth, really is leveraging the way credit system, the credit markets, the way the banking system, frankly, tends to work, right? So if you’re a renter with you know, a high rent-to-income ratio, and you’re sort of beleaguered to renting for the entirety of your life, despite how important of a role you play in your job, in the community, paying your taxes, doing everything that we were all told to do, right? If you’re unable to own a home, there’s a high, high likelihood that you’re not generating wealth ever. Now, obviously there are rare events where that may not be the case, but traditionally, speaking, without owning a home first, it’s almost impossible to start building wealth upon that. So to answer that, the way Homium works is very simple. We provide a flexible loan that fills the affordability gap for someone to own a home, and that loan ultimately not to go too far down the rabbit hole the way the programs for Homium work. But ultimately those loans are pooled into what you know, for those that are reasonably familiar with sort of finance and investment, you ETF or an exchange traded fund that is not what it is, but just consent. Just conceptually, it’s thinking of an index of all of these individual shared appreciation mortgages on every single house. Pulling those together, you know, at scale, creates this large sort of new asset class that could be investable. I think, just peeling back a little bit, though, and thinking about the challenges, we really look at it from three angles. Main Street, right, which is the borrower, and what are the hurdles to thinking about how you provide this type of product to those who are looking to access homeownership. There’s K Street, we’ll call it, which is, you know, for those unfamiliar, you know, it’s probably the one thing we don’t have to explain. But K Street sort of thinking about the policy in DC and right the legislative and agency side, and then Wall Street right, which is ultimately a huge part of the process of mortgage underwriting, right? And it’s a huge part of the activity that takes place in order to purchase a home, you’re borrowing money, and that, you know, execution of borrowing money has a lot of different components to it, beyond just when the loan is made. In a lot of instances, mortgage underwriters will sell those loans into the market. And I’m sure everyone here is familiar with Fannie and Freddie and the role that those agencies play. So that’s a huge part of what Wall Street, what large-scale investors depend on in order to create the secondary liquidity so that more mortgages can be underwritten and more homes can be purchased. That’s the way that the normal functioning mortgage market works, if you have enough income, if your debt-to-income isn’t too high, and if you can bring a whole lot of cash to close, and that’s really anywhere in this country now when you think about purchasing your first home. So again, walking it back a little bit, the challenges on Main Street, first and foremost, is getting people to trust us. Kyle said, and I think Vernon may have mentioned it. We are working very hard to make it clear that our one-to-one equity model is very innovative, because there are no other angles to this. When you look at home equity investments, there are a lot of them out there. They have really unfortunate structures that will transfer that future value of the price of the home to the investors, right? So you might borrow 10% worth of the home and you might owe 50% worth of the home in the future, just as an example. But there are many flavors of these types of affordability stop gap measures, but they’re, you know, if I may say so, from my position, they’re predatory. And they’re predatory because they don’t depend on a very fair, simple approach, which is just just saying, if you borrowed $100,000- excuse me. Let’s say $100,000 home purchase, and you borrowed $10,000  that would be 10%. The future, what’s return or what’s owed in the future, with no interest payments along the way, would just be that 10% so if the home goes up to $120,000 and you sell the home, right, that $10,000 that you borrowed, you would have to repay $12,000 that’s it. Right now, we are very careful with also making sure that the simplicity of it doesn’t get lost in the design and the flexibility. There’s a choice. Ultimately, Main Street now has a choice to say, how much do I need to not only fill the affordability gap, but maybe even lower, what would be the cost of that first mortgage? Right? Because this is a second mortgage, which, combined with no interest on the Homium loan, will lower your monthly payments pretty dramatically. So we can remove the barrier for most families who are in a rental model, if they’re choosing to go into homeownership by providing this this affordability gap loan, if you will. But it’s new, like Kyle said, like Vernon said, many of us have lived through many predatory calls or scams or what have you we know what reverse mortgages tend to do. We know what a lot of these products do. So getting Main Street familiar with the fact that there is truly a fair money loan in the marketplace is the first hurdle. One of the first hurdles on the K Street side, if you will, or if you will, sort of the agency or the legislative side. A lot of that has to do with tax regulation and things that I definitely won’t bore people on this call with. But I would say simply to get to Wall Street and to think about what could happen if you really were able to start funding these types of loan models in our communities with more scalable, sustainable capital from Wall Street. There’s a few things that would need to happen with regards to some tax policy. Currently, as it stands, our programs are all running on tax-exempt or nonprofit dollars. So any government agency, any municipality, any foundation, both corporate or otherwise deemed tax-exempt, nonprofit, they can participate. Interestingly enough, there are nonprofit loan models, shared appreciation mortgages that extract way more than one-to-one, but they qualify. But then there are taxable investors who would like to participate in the scale that we’re helping pull together that cannot participate right now. So, again, that’s off to the side, maybe for this audience, but it’s front and center for us to try to align the reality of being able to bring scale capital into a fair model that can really address the affordability gap and not suppress the purchase or sale price of a home, allow those to remain, you know, market-based, and allow those homeowners to purchase with comfort and then sell in the future without any limitations, which does generate wealth. And of course, that future sale can be recycled if, if a municipality is leading one of these programs in private capital and others are participating to give that scale, that money can be recycled so that that example I gave of the home appreciating and selling for $120,000 when it was purchased for $100,000. Well, now all those proceeds and that appreciation that comes back to the fund, it can go back out to the new homeowner, who is now staring at the $120,000 price and saying, Okay, how am I going to come up with the means to purchase this, this home for my family. So getting through some of those barriers, we think of K Street and Wall Street also includes some of the agency related activity. We’re very fortunate to have a great relationship with the agencies. And, you know, I’ll be very respectful, obviously, since this is a broad conversation, but what I will say is it is very important for market-based solutions to be able to find their way, if they’re very fair and transparent, into the capital stack of those who need it most that there should be no reason why that gets held up. And you know, I’m being very optimistic and forthright. I don’t see that happening. I think that there is an understanding that market-based solutions, if they’re tuned appropriately and controlled appropriately, can feed to the outcomes we’re looking for in our communities without the discriminatory and redlining that we’ve seen in the past. So I think those are some of the major hurdles, I’d say, but those are really pie in the sky hurdles. They’re not stopping our pilot programs, which collectively, we’re looking at almost $50 million across three different cities in the country, or one state and two different cities and in the country to start launching these shared appreciation mortgages, in fact, in the next couple of months. But we know to get to true scale. And Kyle, I will say this, we want to help millions of homeowners. I am not, yeah, I’m saying that because that’s our view. Our view is we think this can be a Wall Street, investable product, and we feel very much like the community lending side of this will get a tremendous boost in closing the gap, particularly for those under 120 to 140 AMI, that’s also very important. We do have a an AMI cap on our product, because we are intending to target the most vulnerable and those who are near or working class.

Yasgur 59:01
That’s great. And I think Marcus, you know, as you’re describing you, we’re also people are starting to get more of a concrete sense of how these pieces, how these things work. And maybe I think we can go further there, because I think people are starting to understand it. They’re starting to think through the ramifications and and so maybe Vernon, if I could ask you, kind of be first up here is, you know, we understand that through Equity Share, developers can get more access to capital. Community members go from having development happen to them to actually participating in becoming owners to developments that are occurring in their own community and having voice in a totally different way. But can you walk us through kind of more concretely, what does that? How does it work? How do we How does your work kind of enable people to participate in transactions that they otherwise just weren’t, didn’t have access to.

Jay 59:50
Well, it’s a combination of policy, right? It’s a combination of policy and technology. I mean, prior to 2012 it was virtually impossible for. Or non-accredited investor. And when I say non-accredited, I think the current, the current definition, is somebody who doesn’t make $250,000 a year, or doesn’t have a million dollars net worth, minus it doesn’t. You cannot include your home in that, in that calculation. The thing is, only 8% of America actually is an accredited investor. So that leaves 92% of Americans that cannot take part in, you know, most investments in the country. So Obama’s jobs act, actually. So prior to that, prior to Obama’s job JOBS Act, it was impossible. There was no options, no opportunity to invest in these, in these type of opportunities. So after that, you know, the Jobs Act created crowdfunding. Now crowdfunding gives the ability and a framework and a legal framework for regular, everyday investors to take part in investments that can reshape their community, whether it’s a startup, whether it’s a new asset, a new property, it could be a gold mine. I mean, there’s, there’s so many different things that you can invest in, but it’s the combination of the crowdfunding and then we on top of that, we just added efficiency to that. Because as a community developer, one of the hardest things to do is to remain compliant. That’s the hardest thing to do when you’re raising capital. You’ve got to answer to the Securities Exchange Commission. You’ve got to answer to FINRA. This is this takes a whole, you need a whole army of people, lawyers, technologists, to make sure your websites are on par with the regulation. So what we’re doing is we’re helping developers streamline these things, right? So you’re not only coming onto Equity Share to be able to raise capital, you’re coming onto Equity Share to remain compliant. I mean, our newest tool that we’ve that we’ve just added to our arsenal, is an AI agent that provides the tools for you to be able to create an offering memorandum. Usually takes you about a month to go through all of the hoops and hurdles to get all your your information down pat. You have to pay an attorney 50 hours to do work. Now we’ve truncated that whole process so we can create your offering memorandum. We can create your sharing, your share agreement for investors, all within a few 2048, hours versus 30 days. So we’re what we’re doing as a holistic and holistically, we’re taking these tools that are required for you to remain compliant and also raise capital, and helping you do that in the most efficient way possible. That’s, that’s where I see, you know, us being able to add value there and specifically, if somebody wanted to. And I’ll give you two examples of some recent tokenization that we’ve done. One is 400 acres in Maryland. So we have a developer. He’s looking to get his community involved. He’s creating senior housing and senior facilities because in rural communities, senior citizens are dying at an alarming rate, mainly because the hospitals are so far away from where they live. So if there are options and ability for them to have short-term care, it can literally save lives. So we created the gathering place token for him, and he’s able to raise capital from that, from his community. We’ve got the pursuit-to-own token in Delaware from a developer, Christopher Pitt, great developer. He buys single-family homes, he builds them up, you know, fixes them up, he rents them out to Section Eight renters, and then he uses a federal program to convert those renters into homeowners. So now people in the community, people around the neighborhood, can invest in his concept and his thesis in a way that is just easy to understand, easy to track. They can see their tokens in our Equity Share user interface, the value of their tokens, they can see their dividends in real time again. It is 2025 guys. And if you have a private corporation that is not on the NASDAQ, Russell 2000 or any of these other companies, or any of these other exchanges, your shares in your company are pieces of paper. The piece of paper shows and indicates that you are a shareholder in this corporation. Now, that sounds like 1900 to me. That sounds like a Coca-Cola share from when they first started, right? I think, oh,

Perry 1:04:36
Some of us were born in the 1900’s. Take it easy.

Jay6 1:04:39
Nobody here was born in 1900. So what we’re doing is we’re just digitizing it right, bringing it to the modern times. Make it easy for people to see it. Believe in it, it’s transparent, it’s easy to follow. So at the end of the day, we’re just providing these tools to make it easy. And when we make it easy, when we’re able to streamline, we’re able to give time back to the developers so that they can do what they do best, which is find those properties, maintain those properties, and give people in the community the ability to have thrive within the community instead of just living you know, there’s an opportunity here, and I love that theme of the word in this conversation, which is opportunity.

Yasgur 1:05:24
Absolutely. And I think one of the one of the challenges, Marcus, you pointed to a little bit, is, is, you know, for example, Homium is, is so flexible. It creates so many different opportunities that when people are getting used to it, it’s a lot to learn. So could you walk us through, kind of, maybe, like, in a bit more concrete some, maybe one or the base cases right of the home purchase, like how Homium really comes in and plays that role?

Martin 1:05:50
Yeah, absolutely. And I was, I’m not sure if I’m failing the order here, but I’m like answering questions as well. A lot of great engagement, so very appreciative questions for all of us, which is great, really, some incredible questions. So, yeah, so that’s exactly right. I mean, I think probably I don’t want to use a blockchain example, because many people may not be familiar with Blockchain, but I’ll just say, you know, I think everyone’s heard the craze around blockchain over the last several years, and part of the reality there was the application seemed to be endless and and that may be the case, right? And we’ll see what the future holds. I, like Vernon, work with Blockchain. We at Homium, primarily for, you know, improved ledger database management, ability to securitize smaller, single family, you know, mortgages into larger pools, but, but so, so you know that that’s sort of just happened on that. But when, when we think about Homium, it can be a below the ocean exercise. The reason why I say that is, is it, is it is right on the sort of, if you think of above water and below sea level. It’s right there at sea level. So it is one to one, which mitigates a lot of concerns around transferring wealth from the homeowner. It’s as fair as you can get, right? I mean, you return what you borrowed. It’s no interest. So in certain jurisdictions, certain applications, it can also qualify for, you know, a variety of unique purposes, like Sharia compliance and so forth. Again, not suggesting that wholesale. Obviously, that is very specific and important to recognize that. But just generally speaking, you think, wow, Homium can be used in so many ways. I think the key is to understand the core of the technology, of what what it is, what is the loan technology? The loan technology is stripping out all the fat that usually endures to the investors and stays with the homeowners. It is a 30-year mortgage that’s written side by side with the first mortgage. So it’s intentionally created to close the gap when you’re purchasing, but because it’s helping you access, basically equity capital for equity in your home at the point of purchase. It’s the same idea for unlock. So again, as I said at the beginning, Homium, in its simplest form, can be used at the beginning of homeownership to help support and close the gap for affordability. It can be used during homeownership. Somebody asked a question about small business lending. We’re dealing with some potential CDFIs and other community lenders that see Homium as a unique tool. Because if you’re fortunate to have owned a home, and you want to start a small business, and let’s just say, your home’s worth half a million dollars, which sounds 10 years ago, would have been an outrageous number to throw out, but that’s, you know, reasonable number in most parts of the country. When we think about, you know, the appreciation of a home from 10 years ago to today and a half a million dollars, that’s that’s that’s reasonable if you want to borrow $100,000 typically, an SBA loan would require you to collateralize the house right. In the Homium example, you could use that unlock for small business, you know, borrowing, you could take that 100,000 out and it’s a second lien, 20% owed in the future. Math doesn’t change. If you’re talking about somebody who lives in a home and they’re 0n fixed-income, and you’re looking at anti-displacement or agent place solutions. Again, it’s an unlock concept, where you’re helping unlock the trapped equity value, but you’re not overcharging the borrower for that exercise. You’re really giving them a fair money opportunity. And so when you think of it from that sort of sea level perspective, you know, there’s a lot of different ways it can go. I think from our perspective, the best way to sort of drill down is say Homium is best used to help support first-time homebuyers. It’s best used to help unlock track trapped equity for those that are in either a fixed income or a lower income position, where they’re more vulnerable to losing the home, thus losing, you know, that potential wealth, that important wealth asset, you know, or it can again be used in the later stages in life. And when you’re thinking about neighborhood revitalization, and you see that development pick up, and now you see developers say, Oh, wow. You know, pencils for me to go into these neighborhoods. Well, what tends to happen shortly thereafter is levels of gentrification, and obviously, you know, community members who are previously in that neighborhood may end up having to sell and move. It’s also could be used for disaster recovery. We’re talking to some organizations to potentially help with the wildfires in LA. I’m based in North Carolina, and we’ve been working with officials here to try to work on a program that can help support rebuilding western North Carolina. It is literally this flexible, because at the end of the day, when we’re not treating people any differently, at the point of execution, it is always one to one, whatever percentage of what you borrowed is what you owe in the future, no interest. So, you know, I think being able to level set on how flexible it is is a hurdle again, you know, it doesn’t disqualify itself from being applied in really any scenario of the homeownership cycle. I think it’s really more about working with intentional, mission aligned sponsors who have a serious desire to impact community, who might already have that mission, if they’re like a Housing Finance Agency or, you know, corporate with a big footprint in a specific part of the country, or a place based foundation, and we work very closely with them, for them to help guide us on what the impact box, let’s call it might look like, and then we can tune that and fund, you know, fund these programs, you know, with their support, and start lending and closing the gap. One thing I also want to quickly mention that I don’t know if I made clear, what Homium actually does is it brings the borrower into conformity, which is really important. So we think about the idea of community lending, and have done a lot of work in the space, and a lot of it what we call non QM, or non conforming loans. Those are critical. They’re very important. But what we tend to see are community lenders who have smaller balance sheets. They take that risk on, and it’s hard to sell it off. It’s hard to recycle it, let’s call it. So oftentimes lenders in communities get stuffed with the hard loans because they’re doing the work in their communities, but there’s not a lot of flexibility for them to grow or lend further to those needs. What Homium also allows community lenders and others to do is to do is to look at it from a conforming perspective. So if you’re borrowing to own a house, you don’t have to get into, and I’m not going to name any other products, but at the end of the day, when you can move to where you have 80% first mortgage again, I’m sure everyone in this line is familiar with that, you remove the private mortgage insurance, right? And you also put yourself in a position where you’re conforming mortgage that can be sold to Fannie or Freddie or, you know, into the capital markets. And that’s really important, because what you’re doing is you’re supporting the multi-trillion dollar, you know, machine by using a tool that’s creating this gap, this affordability gap measure, right? So it’s driving a tool of dignity into the scenario that we traditionally just see as a very market-based, sterile environment, right? And so I think that’s, that’s hopefully, that helped answer Stuart. I hope I didn’t get people more confused. But there is a lot to unpack.

Yasgur 1:13:18
That is great, and it’s, it’s an incredibly versatile tool. And I think Kyle kind of, if I think about bonus homes, I think bonus homes is one, is one of those ideas where people, you kind of see a light bulb, light up when they get it, but sometimes they can, you know, there’s, there’s steps before it, where they’re thinking, well, am I selling it, or am I owning it? And who has which piece? You know, can you walk us through kind of concretely, a little bit that the how to?

Kamrooz 1:13:43
Yeah, I will. And I was looking at some of the comments too, as Marcus was mentioning. So this is so great, great comments. And if I can address, I’m going to answer your question, but I’m going to address something our mission. And I was mentioning this before, right? Hey, look, you know, you have products out here. Obviously, what Marcus is trying to solve with First Time Home Buyers getting entry point, right? Our specifics is, you’ve already owned a home, right? We’re not dealing with first-time home buyers, right? Our instrument is you already own a home. How do you maximize the wealth on that asset without having to give it up? Right? And that’s kind of our thing now, to dovetail into that, at the end, I’m a product guy, and so this is one of a product. Our goal over time is as we start having more and more bonus homes that are not owned by a corporation, we don’t own the property. This is also another big thing, right? Because the when we bonus a home, it is not a corporation that is now going to take over the property, takeover title. It is still going to be Bob and Susie Smith. You know, husband and wife as joint tennets, whatever their original title is, and I’ll go into more detail. But our goal is to have everybody participate in the asset economy I’ve rented for so long in my life. You. And I always was like, my goodness, I’m basically giving my landlord this rent every single month, and I don’t I’m not building wealth from it. I’m building a shelter right, which obviously as very important. Our vision, with bonus, is not only to have homeowners, middle class homeowners, build wealth on an asset that they would have otherwise gotten rid of. Our mission is to have the actual renters of these homes across the country to be able to now, when they pay rent, they actually own a piece of the asset, and then they can start building it right and there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of interesting products out there where that have come out, and unfortunately, some of their business models have not worked like and again, not to, not nothing bad in a sense, but being able to, hey, you know, have a homeowner coming in and saying, we’re going to help you save money, but you’re going to pay a higher rent than the market, but we’re going to help you save money so that, you know, in two years, you can qualify for a Fannie Mae loan. There’s been a lot of those over the years. Problem with that is, you’re asking somebody to pay a higher than above average market rent. And so the reason why I go into this is because, because a v2 maybe a v3 of bonus and another product is, we want to delight not just the homeowner, but delight the tenant. And we want the tenant, if they’re inside of a bonus home and we’re able to do this, we want the we want bonus. We want the tenant, and we want the homeowner to all participate in this upside of this potential asset in their unique ways as well, too. So I kind of just wanted to kind of clarify as where we’re where the puck is going to be going over time. But as you know today, it’s crawl, walk, run, right as I, as I like to say. So just addressing now going back to and hopefully that helps some of the comments, like I said, great comments on the, on the, on the, on the, on the slack here, or on the messaging board. But just going back to Stewart to what you mentioned about, like, how this works. I’ll kind of give you guys an example of a real life. And I mentioned this when we were in DC several months ago, but I’ll give you a and we’ve had several of these. So I’ll give you an example of one of the early homeowners that we did. So we started with our own capital in 2022 we this was after, you know, interest rates spiked up, and the world was kind of like, well, what’s going on? And feds have raised rates. Raised rates. I think around November or so, we did a handful of homes. One of the homes that we were doing was an agent brought us this home in Surprise Arizona, and this homeowner, she was basically a traveling nurse. She was looking to move to Flagstaff, Arizona, and she had a house. Her house was worth $400,000 she had about 170,000 of equity in that home. So she had it on the market. Because, again, she didn’t hear about us. I think at that time, we didn’t even have a website, so this was just kind of word of mouth. And so she, you know, thankfully, we have early adopters that they take the take, take the leap of faith, right when you when you’re starting out, right, and you’re just like, you know, you’re just getting going. So, so basically, talk to the agents, like, wow, this sounds super interesting. And this homeowner was like, Yeah, I’ve, I’ve always wanted to keep this home because I’m, you know, I’m young. I know this house is gonna be worth more later on, but I need this 170,000 because I’m buying a new construction in Flagstaff, and I need to move there for my job. So it makes sense. So she had to list it. So she listed it for 400 and we bonus her home in two weeks. We gave her basically, so she didn’t have any buyers coming through her house anymore. She actually took the house off the market. She didn’t need to. And in essence, we don’t evaluate credit. We don’t run credit, we don’t care about income. We don’t really care about debt to income ratio so forth, and we care about the asset. And then she had this really low interest rate. And if you think and go back to what the statistic I gave earlier, which is, you know, 10s of millions of people, 40 million people, have a rate below four and a half percent. So she’s got this really low interest rate that she got at the right place, at the right time, and and she knew that she’s like, you know, I know I’m going from a 2.75 and at that time, rates were, I think, already starting to hit five, five and a quarter. But she had to move, and she still can qualify, because she’s putting, obviously, you know, quite a bit of down payment. So two weeks, wired money to escrow. She got her $170,000 alright, she had 30 days. I think it was 30 to 45 days before her new construction was, was ready on her new property, Flagstaff. So she, in essence, we worked out with her when she stayed in the house. We didn’t like, you know, kick her out or anything like that. We worked with her flexible move out, and that $170,000 has no payment, no interest rate on it. What happens is, just to get to the into the technicalities of it is, we then take the property. It’s still in her name. She still owns it. It’s now her rental property. She is now. Go. As soon as she buys this new one, she’s now going to be a multi-asset owner. So she’s on her path to wealth-building in society, right? She might have her for 1k she might have her, her some type of savings. Now she’s got her bonus investment account, if you look at it that way, right? This asset in flat in Surprise, Arizona, she got she cashed out, liquidate all her equity. She moved on with life, meaning she now lives her life bonus. Then takes this property, and we manage it completely, fully on her behalf. And now we’ve been doing it. So that’s November of 2022, so we’re about, we’re about two and a half years into it. So we’ve had tenants in there, so we don’t She’s not responsible for a single thing. She never pays for a leaky faucet, Refrigerator Repair. Tenant doesn’t make a payment. We can’t find a tenant, right? All of those are absorbed by bonus. Bonus takes all liability, all payments. We cover all of her payments, and we make them on her behalf for her, so she never has to worry about this asset again, and we’re doing it on her behalf. Like I said, she still owns the property, and so we’ve had this property for two and a half years that we’ve managed for her. Since then, we’ve again had to fix a bunch of things we were we’ve had to paint the outside because some of the fade and the HOA requires some you know, that the painting to be done on the outside. Again, we haven’t reached out to her to let her like, oh, we need this extra $100 or not. None of that. Right? Our agreement says we take full responsibility for everything all the way up to 30 years, basically. So she’s got, after five years, she can decide to sell, okay? And she can sell anytime she wants. And the goal is, obviously, this house that was in 2022 worth $400,000 will eventually grow in value. We did a independent valuation model that we do. Mortgage lenders do it all the time. Real estate agents as well. That House in January of this year was already $495,000 in two years, good community, seems like, I think a big semiconductor plant was just built over there, and so a lot of jobs came in. So it was, it was it was it was good, right? But the house went up a lot higher than we thought. So she’s already now, the house is now worth $490,000 okay, just in two and a half years, and she her percentage of equity is just she’ll get a third of all future upside on this property, starting at a value of $400,000 so if you take 490 let’s just round it to 500 for simple math, take 500 minus 400 because the current value is 500 400,000 is the value that we did in 2022 she’s gets 1/3 of that $100,000 so she’ll basically already $30,000 of new found wealth, and it’s only been two years, which is fascinating. So this lady cashed out $170,000 all of her equity in 2022 moved on with life. Doesn’t have to manage anything, bonuses, take care of everything. 2025 she’s already got 25 to $30,000 of new found wealth that she’s basically built. She keeps this asset for another 10 years. We anticipate another 100 of 150,000 of wealth that she will have built. So when you look at it, she’s going to have basically cashed out. And again, the longer you keep it, just like a, you know, a retirement account, an IRA, a 401, K, the longer you keep it, the more it compounds, compounds. And so this lady basically can get another 300 200 to $300,000 of wealth that she never would have had before. And so that’s an example of how it works. And at a later time, she decides to sell, put it back on the market, and now it traditionally sells. So that’s kind of a specific detail. Hopefully that helped.

Perry 1:23:56
Now we’re pretty much at time. And so this has been a fascinating discussion. And again, on behalf of Stuart and Economic Architecture, I’d like to thank everyone for joining the call. NTRC, thanks again for hosting, just very quickly for each panelist, I mean, very quickly and less than a minute, when we you know, the research showed that homes are devalued in Black neighborhoods, but they’re really it’s about people. When people are devalued, that the that devaluation of people comes out of the wash in terms of home prices, just very briefly. How does your product value people? And as a way to usher us off before we close out. So we’ll start with Marcus. How does your product value people?

Martin 1:24:59
Thank you. Thank you again for this opportunity. It’s a financial tool of dignity. I mean, I’ve said it a couple times, but that’s, that’s what I really, truly feel, at its simplest form, that there are no surprises, there’s no tricks. It allows an individual to be treated with respect and be given flexibility and be able to claim 100% of the American Dream that they were, that they were, you know, told existed. So that really is it. It’s a tool of dignity. And I think that there’s a need for more tools like this, you know. So I’m hopeful that for anyone who’s considering, you know, really fair money solutions like we’ve created, please reach out as well. We’d love to share what we’ve learned. And you know, we need more tools of dignity in the marketplace to address the ownership economy.

Perry 1:25:47
Kyle, how does your product value people?

Kamrooz 1:25:51
You know, I look at it where I see life has so much uncertainty and stress and fear, and there’s an ethos to what we’re trying to do. Yes, it’s a financial transaction, but at the end of the day, if we can give people and again, I go, I go back to my dad. My dad lives in fear and stress because he’s older, doesn’t have the money, doesn’t have these things and and, and if we can help people breathe a little bit better, enjoy and be present with life, knowing that they’re going to be building another financial asset. It might only be their only asset. They might not have something else that, that is that value that I think we give to people, that that they can kind of breathe, knowing that they have something that they wouldn’t have had otherwise for an unknown future.

Perry 1:26:43
Vernon?

Jay 1:26:44
Would say, you know, we’re looking for development to reflect the people, not replace them. So specifically, we’re we’re going after gentrification. We want gentrification from within. We don’t want people to be displaced, and we want to be able to create a way where developers and community stakeholders can thrive together. I think no matter what your socio-economic background, no matter if you’re a millionaire, multi-millionaire, whatever it is, this issue of display of disparity is going to come to your doorstep. I know friends who have beautiful penthouses in Seattle or LA or wherever, and you go downstairs and you have to step over tents, right? So I don’t care where you are in the spectrum, this is something we’ve got to face, and we’ve got to face it as a community and at no matter where we are. So I’m hoping to really hone in on that part of the equation.

Yasgur 1:27:39
Great, and I would let me just jump in for last moment here, I want to thank you all for joining us today. What an incredible you know, I, for those of you have seen that the Q and A the chat, it’s an incredible discussion and community of people who have joined the conversation today. It’s really remarkable and and the number of people are also asking for transcripts and further information. If it’s okay, can I just mention the next session? Okay, great. So this is the first of three virtual sessions the next one that Brookings and economic architecture are doing with spotlight innovators are on June 3, looking at restorative opportunities, and on July 8, rethinking ownership. So please. Thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you to each of the spotlight Innovators for this and Andre for you and your partnership in this, and for NCRC for hosting us all, please join us in our next Conversations. We look forward to continuing and of course, please buy Black Power Scorecard by Andre Perry, great. Thank you. Bye.