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p/ark7Buy real estate as easily as buying stocks
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Meng Xu

Ark7 - Buy real estate as easily as buying stocks

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Ark7 is the simplest way to invest in real estate, period.
Diversify your portfolio, earn passive income, and choose your properties from our curated list in the hottest markets in the U.S. No platform fees, no management hassle, no minimum investment.

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Meng Xu
Hunter
Hello, Product Hunters! I’m Meng, Co-founder and CMO of Ark7. We are excited to launch Ark7, a real estate investment platform we have been working on for over two years, on Product Hunt! Have you ever wanted to invest in real estate but did not have the time or money to commit to buying and managing a property? We created Ark7 to solve this dilemma. Ark7 is a real estate platform that lets you buy property shares like you buy stocks and—unlike REITs—lets you directly choose the properties you want to invest in. 🏡Our Story When our founder, Andy Zhao, an ex-engineer for Google, first considered investing in real estate in the Bay Area, he found it required a great deal of time and money to purchase and maintain a property. After discussing these barriers of entry into real estate investment with Jim, a friend and longtime real estate agent, Andy decided he wanted to create Ark7—a company that makes investing in property as easy as buying stocks. ✔️How Our Users Benefit from Ark7 We created Ark7 to make real estate investment accessible to people who want to invest but do not have the time or funds to do so. Users can benefit from using Ark7 to invest in properties located in different cities with low-cost shares at as low as $5 without the hassle of having to manage properties. Our full-service platform gives users control over their investments including: picking properties, managing their portfolio, and viewing their income. Ark7’s investing model is especially a good way for beginners to dip their toes into real estate investing without having to risk a large amount of time or money buying and managing a property by themselves. 📈The Details On Our Process Our team carefully vets each property we buy so we pick properties most likely to appreciate and have stable monthly rental income. Important property data such as photos of the property, the neighborhood it is located in, and legal documents are available for registered users to view. Users can also see property appreciation and any monthly dividends made from their investment on their Ark7 account. Additionally, since we offer properties in Austin and Berkeley, users can divide their investments across multiple properties. Our platform can be an easy way to diversify our users’ portfolios that is less volatile than the stock market. Right now, we have over 800 users who are mostly engineers at the big tech firms in the west coast. We are currently looking for early-stage users to give us feedback on our product and platform. You can sign up for free to start viewing the details on our current property offerings. If you have any questions, you can ask us here or join our community Slack: https://ark7-investment-forum.sl... We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the platform!
Richard Pickering
@mengxu This seems like a cool idea. Can I ask a few questions on your business model? Is your strategy to generate revenue from the spread between the rental yield on the property and whatever dividend yield you pay to investors, i.e. the investor gets a slightly lower rental yield, all else equal? Another question - if investors want to sell their shares, who do they sell to? Presumably only to other investors? Thank you!
Di Ye
@richard_pickering I'm guessing you're right. Take this property on their website for instance - https://www.ark7.com/investments.... If you were to invest in this property yourself (get a mortgage, purchase, rent to tenants, and manage it yourself), the return would be higher than the 14.79% that Ark7 projects. So I guess they do all the work for you and they keep the part of the return that's higher than 14.79%.
Meng Xu
Hunter
@richard_pickering Hi Richard, thanks for your questions. 1. Ark7 income consists of two parts: Sourcing fee: 3% of each property market cap listed on the website; Property management fee: 8-10% market rate of monthly rental income. Currently we are not charging the property management fee as a promotion for early users but we will start charging in one year. 2. Yes, once our Reg A filings are approved, we will build a trading platform, so that investors can trade shares on the trading platform.
Meng Xu
Hunter
@richard_pickering @di_ye1 Hi Di Ye, Ark7 income consists of two parts: Sourcing fee: 3% of each property market cap listed on the website; Property management fee: 8-10% market rate of monthly rental income. Currently we are not charging the property management fee as a promotion for early users but we will start charging in one year. All the fees that we charge are listed on the website. The return for Austin-S3 you have quoted is a return yield based on an all-cash offer. The return for a mortgage purchase will be indeed higher than the return for an all-cash offer. But currently in the competitive Austin real estate market, the sellers are not accepting the buyer offer with mortgage.
Richard Pickering
@mengxu Thanks a lot for your reply! So is the sourcing fee paid when an investor buys into a property, a bit like a one-time trading commission? Appreciate your clarification on the trading platform. I think that will be a big feature for your clients, because you cannot offer a market for real estate investment that is truly more liquid than the underlying if investors cannot sell out just as easily as they can buy in. I guess that will depend on your ability to get users on your platform and thereby grow the secondary market. In the early stages, while the number of users is low, I can see how you might have to act temporarily as a buyer of last resort in order to promote customer delight --> user growth --> larger secondary market --> more customer delight etc etc. If you can get that off the ground (and obvs manage how you are financing the property purchases themselves...), then this could be really interesting.
Pythagoras
How are you different and better than Fundraise? Many have tried to do this and failed. Why do you have what it takes?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@wisepythagoras Hi, thanks for your comment. So one big difference between us and Fundrise is we are not crowdfunding platform, because we have purchased the property before we list on our platform instead of raising enough fund to purchase a property. When investors buy the property shares on our platform, they may start to enjoy the monthly rental income cash flow right away. When you mentioned many have tried "this" do you mean the crowdfunding business model? or which business model do you mean? I just want to make sure I understand the question correctly.
Pythagoras
Yeah, basically this whole investment model. I've seen a few pop up over the years and they simply disappear later on. I'm not a real estate expert, but it looks like it's a tough business. Is Ark kind of like a private reit?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@wisepythagoras The difference between Ark7 and private reit is we are not a fund, we don't have fund managers and we don't manage investors' money or portfolio. We are more like a tool for real estate trading, with which investors can manage their own real estate investment portfolio and take the market risk themselves. According to some users, we are more like robinhood for real estate.
Jessica Gottlieb
@wisepythagoras @mengxu so would I get a 1099 DIV form or a Schedule K1 at the end of the year? Help me make sense of the structure? Would users benefit from the real estate depreciation or does Ark take that?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@wisepythagoras @jessicagottlieb Hi Jessica, you will get a Schedule K1 form. our structure is like this. We build a LLC company for each listed property on the platform. So when you are purchasing shares from our listed properties, you are becoming the shareholders of the LLC companies instead of Ark7 Inc. and will get K1 form.
Mike Staub
You should partner with https://www.producthunt.com/post... and offer a way for groups of friends to buy a house together. Securitizing the equity of real estate is a game changer! Do you use blockchain technology for this?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@mikestaub Thanks for recommendation! We will reach out to zerodown to see if there is a way to corporate. We haven't used the blockchain technology yet, but we welcome any technology that could improve users' experience.
Aris Alexis
@mikestaub nice in theory, but have you tried to buy a house with friends? Well I did and nobody is friends with anyone anymore sadly. Better to treat it like stocks with strangers in my opinion.
Mike Staub
@aris_alexis Thanks for sharing. I have lived with friends before and it was a great experience. As long as there can be liquidity and strong contracts, I don't see what the problem could be. Can you elaborate?
Aris Alexis
@mikestaub living with friends, flatmates and the like vs buying property with them is a totally different experience. Business with friends ends up badly frequently or changes relationships from friendship to transactional. That's a subjective view of course.
Meng Xu
Hunter
@mikestaub @aris_alexis Yes the idea originated from buying properties with friends. The biggest headache with the model is if one of friends want to quit, it's very hard to find a buyer for a portion of the property. That's why we standardize and securitize the property ownership to make the ownership trading easier.
Ivanna Wendel
Wow! This is awesome idea! Good luck!
Maikal
Looks awesome, so bad it’s only for the US
Meng Xu
Hunter
@miguel_039 Thanks Maikal! We are planning to open the opportunities for investors worldwide in the future! You could subscribe to our newsletter and keep updated with our progress.
Simon Landry
@mengxu I'm trying to find the newsletter to subscribe for this exact reason, but can't find it... :/
Meng Xu
Hunter
@rhymeswithsimon You could just simply register and will get all the email updates! Sorry I didn't state it clearly.
Amplify My Business
Have you thought of offering this as a service? My company would be very interested in offering something like this for our clients (we buy the properties, they invest in them)
Meng Xu
Hunter
@amplifymy_biz Thanks for reaching out! You could shoot an email to me: meng@ark7.com and we could find a time to discuss it.
Vlad
Looks very promising. When do you think you'll get your Reg A filing approved? Also, I can't seem to join the slack, it requires an email with @ark7.com
Meng Xu
Hunter
@ark7 @vladis_lav Hi Vlad, we are expecting the Reg A filling to be approved within this year. But it purely depends on the government. You could try the Slack link here: https://join.slack.com/t/ark7-in...
Reinhard Holzner
Interesting idea! Looking forward to when this comes to Europe (afraid of the US housing market that I do not know)!
Meng Xu
Hunter
@reinhard78 Thanks Reinhard! You could register and subscribe to our email newsletter to keep updated with our expansion plan!
Rahul Nair
Sounds interesting. Definitely try this app. Congrats on your product launch team.
Dave Andersen
I think this has some real promise. Does ark7 provide the property management or is that outsourced? If it’s outsourced and there are different management firms that are engaged, will that be transparent and part of the investment details for investors?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@dave_dot_io Hi Dave, thanks for your question. We do all the property management ourselves. And to stand with users together, Ark7 also purchases 1%-10% shares of each property listed on the website. We keep all our investors informed with our property updates in our blog posts and email newsletter.
Edwin Miano
wow I love the idea behind Ark7.... You guys are great. I hope you can add some more modes of payment that are also mostly available also in Africa.
Meng Xu
Hunter
@edwin_miano Thanks Edwin! We currently only accept the users with the U.S. SSN and american bank accounts. But please keep updated with us, we will notify our registered users when we accept international investment.
Bilal Chaglani
Hey ?makers this is an amazing idea!! I for one would love exploring investment options here.
James Quinn
Well done! Thanks for sharing
Mari Matsuzaki
Great product, hope this will expand worldwide :)
Paddy Doran
Was thinking about an idea like this the other day - very cool ?makers
D.N. Lord
Nice. Love this idea!
Jack Davis
This is super interesting since everyone is always on Zillow all the time, especially since the pandemic started. This might be a game changer!
Di Ye
Very cool idea! What do those "objective return" on the offerings mean? Is it the objective annual return? Meaning if I invested 1k, the next year I should expect 1.15k?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@di_ye1 Thanks Di Ye! Objective return means the combined return of rental income return and appreciation return. Yes it is annual return. The rental income is based on the local rental market and the appreciation estimation is based on the historical appreciation data provided by Zillow and Redfin. You will receive rental income every 3rd of the month, and you may gain the appreciation value when you sell the shares.
George Kourdin
The two main benefits to real estate investments are 1) Leverage and 2) Taxes. Can you talk about/how this compares to buying property on those 2 fronts?
Meng Xu
Hunter
@george_kourdin Hi George, thanks for your question. Currently we don't have leverage option, but in the future we will partner with banks, so that users can invest on Ark7 with mortgage based on their own credit scores. We are currently providing K-1 forms so users can enjoy the tax benefits accordingly.
Angeline Tan
Finally, an easy to use and all useful info at my fingertips, real estate investment platform. Kudos Ark7
Angeline Tan
Hi @mengxu, thought you might like to know there's a tiny typo in the Profile Set Up page. Investment Profile is wrongly spelled as "Invesetment Profile"