We discuss today with Amariah Olson. Amariah is the Co-Founder of Yield Crowd.
Amariah, can you start off by explaining what Yield Crowd is?
Yield Crowd is an online portal for global investors to buy into a diversified U.S. real estate fund using blockchain technology. The company uses blockchain technology so that investors have more liquidity because the tokens can be traded amongst each other freely on the Block Chain in a peer-to-peer fashion. This is an exciting new possibility in the real estate investment sector, and we are one of the first Movers. Yield Crowd has issued 50 million dollars of YIELD tokens on the blockchain, and those will be backed by properties in multiple states across the U.S. Yield token holders can earn a passive income stream with weekly interest payments plus they earn appreciation.
How does the company work exactly? Can you walk us through the steps for investing and making passive income?
Absolutely. All investors need to do is sign up to the platform and create an account, which will give them an investment portal. They can see different info about their account, their interest earned, their current account balances, receipts of their transactions etc. Once the investor makes the account, they can purchase yield tokens with either Fiat money in multiple currencies, or they can come in directly with digital-currencies such as USDC stable coins. After the investor purchases the tokens, they will receive passive income typically twice a week. When the investor wants to cash out, they can sell the tokens on the peer-to-peer blockchain to receive the appreciation and their original principal back.
What led you into the token and blockchain sphere?
As sophisticated investors ourselves, one of the biggest problems that we have seen in the investment World outside of real estate is that most Investments such as stocks and publicly traded REITS is that the values are not stabilized, are controlled by the market, and the market doesn’t necessarily make the best decisions, and because of this, the values can fluctuate dramatically which can cause an investor to either have to wait 5 to 10 years for the values to recover or sell at a loss if the investor decides that they want to cash out of their investment. On the flip with real estate, there is no liquidity, entrance fees are very high, and it takes significant amounts of capital to invest in it. Sometimes we have had excess cash liquidity, and we found that there are no low-risk, easily accessible, high-return, stable, liquid investments available in the market. To us, this is a major problem, and we wanted to solve it. Blockchain made the most sense because it is a global technology that anyone with the internet has access to, and at the time that we started this project was gaining mass adoption and starting to become more than just a cryptocurrency, but rather a whole ecosystem. The concept of asset-backed tokens was very exciting, and we currently see it as the future for many financial products. So, we decided to solve the issues by creating a new investment product that is backed by real estate, which we have historically made high returns in; however, we did not want it to fluctuate like a publicly-traded REIT… what we created was a bond which has a contractually obligated face value increase so that it has inbuilt inflation, while also paying interest to the investors. The idea is to create a very stable investment which has much more liquidity than real estate while backing that investment with a solid business model of rental income streams and other real estate activities.
How do Yield Crowd and Yield Token improve the real estate property investing sector?
Yield Crowd improves the investment sector by offering low minimums so that investors can diversify into the real estate sector while increasing liquidity by tokenization of the real estate fund, so that investors can trade with each other on the peer-to-peer decentralized Stellar Exchange. And also opens up the U.S. real estate market to global investors while creating a more stable product than stocks, or public REITS, which have a floating value.
What is the difference in property investment the old fashion way with fiat capital and investing using blockchain?
Investing into the property the old-fashioned way either involves purchasing the property, which can require hundreds of thousands of dollars on the low end, or investing into a Private Equity Real Estate fund that often has high minimums of $50,000 to $100,000, with a lock up period of 5 to 10 years. Investing in a tokenized fund reduces the capital requirement, increases the liquidity, is 100% passive, and also allows investors to instantly buy and sell on the blockchain cross-border, using digital currencies such as XLM or USDC.
There are a lot of tokens on the market these days. What sets Yield Tokens apart from other tokens?
There are a lot of non-secured tokens on the market, agreed. However, there are very few secured tokens that are backed by real assets and contractually obligated to receive income from those assets. What sets yield token apart from meme coins, utility tokens, and cryptocurrencies is that the token is not just a ledger with no intrinsic value other than what the market trades the ledger for; instead, the holders own a legal agreement to the real estate portfolio to receive the income stream and the appreciation. The real estate portfolio exists in the real world and has thousands of real-world customers who pay for the rental of the assets to generate revenues for the company.
For those individuals that are uncertain of blockchain and the volatility of crypto, what would you say to them?
They have every reason to be uncertain about the volatility of crypto; that’s its biggest problem. And that’s because there is no underlying asset. Coins such as USDC stablecoin retain a one-to-one pegging to the US dollar, which gives them stability. Blockchain technology is here to stay. It is still early in the market’s full development phase. It is changing the financial World in many ways already. Good business models based on solid investment fundamentals with contractual obligations and underlying assets to the tokens we believe will be the long-term future of blockchain technology.
You have over 20 years of experience in start-ups and business management. What led you to the real estate sector and Yield Crowd?
The sheer size of the real estate market and the ability to create Financial Freedom based on asset ownership and passive income streams is ultimately why we ended up in investment real estate. The US commercial estate market size is 17 trillion dollars. Even if you can carve only a very small fraction of a percent of that market, you can create a very successful business model. A lot of people don’t realize that it’s not the business or their skills that are dictating their financial success; it is the Market size and the Business genre itself that can create a big financial success or only minimal financial success. You can be in the top 10% in the Arts, and it won’t pay as well as the bottom 10% in investment real estate.
Prior to starting Yield Crowd, you founded Olson Capital Investments with your brother Obin. This came after working in the Hollywood film industry. How does working in different fields affect and alter the way you look at real estate investments?
When you come from a field as difficult as the Arts and Hollywood, with relative success in those fields only because you were willing to put in the hours, willing to put in the 100-plus weeks, and live a work life balance that’s all work and zero life, it teaches you to appreciate business models while not glamorous, that simply because of their market size, give back in a huge way to the business owner. In real estate, you can purchase an asset that you can then triple your money on by painting it and raising the rent, and then the asset continues to pay you rent for the rest of your life whether you continue working or not. What we learned from the Arts was a very difficult life, and what we learned from Real Estate Investments is Financial Freedom and, ultimately, time to do all the things in life that you want to do and spend time with the people that you want to spend time with
What is the future for Yield Crowd, and what can clients and investors expect next?
The future of Yield Crowd is to continue to buy more assets to diversify the underlying portfolio so that the investment becomes stronger and the risk becomes lower as time goes on. The more investors we have in the platform, the more assets that the fund will hold and the more liquidity it will create. In the future, there is a possibility, because we have seen a very high demand for it, that we will accept other real estate funds on the platform as new token symbols; so that investors can gain more investment options. We may also open the fund up to U.S. accredited investors in the future, if there is an appetite in the market.
Amariah, how is a day in your life?
Typically, I wake up in the morning, I open my inbox, and I am faced with 300 new emails from the morning. Sometimes it can be pretty overwhelming to have so many people, so many deals, that want attention. Learning how to properly delegate and focus on key information is critical to staying focused… This is why I try to meditate for 30 minutes in the morning to cleanse the mind. Also, very important to me is good nutrition. Eating healthy organic greens and trying to ensure that you get several hikes every week. I believe spending time in nature helps clarify the mind, leading to better decision-making.
What is something most people don’t know about you?
That I grew up on a farm; however, I believe this gave me a good perspective on the developed societal world and the rules and systems of the workforce matrix. A third-party perspective, if you will, stimulated the desire to gain freedom from the matrix through creating wealth and passive investment income streams
What makes you smile?
Seeing someone express kindness.
What scares you?
Extreme government overreach of individual liberties. The pandemic has brought to light a lot of problems in our political systems. I hope that the good of humanity as a whole will prevail, and be able to maintain individual liberty. I’m a big believer in Freedom, and I believe the government should be limited only to the most necessary resources required to run a democratic nation of law-abiding citizens.
If you had the power to change just one thing in the world, what would it be?
For people to have more kindness for themselves, their relatives, and the planet on which we all live.
The information provided here is not investment, tax, or financial advice. You should consult with a licensed professional for advice concerning your specific situation.
To know more about Amariah Olson and Yield Crowd, please visit https://www.yieldcrowd.com
