Question 1

How is tokenized real estate actually different from buying a REIT?

Accepted Answer

A REIT share is redeemable for cash the same day at whatever the public market says it's worth, because it trades on a deep, regulated exchange. A property token from a platform like RealT or Lofty represents a fractional economic interest in a single property (usually held through an LLC), and it can only be sold to another buyer on that platform's own thin secondary market or a DEX pairing — there's no guaranteed same-day exit at a fair price. In exchange for that illiquidity, tokenized platforms typically advertise higher gross yields than the roughly 4% average REIT dividend yield, but the honest comparison has to net out the fee, the liquidity discount and the gas cost that a REIT investor never pays.

Question 2

What is the secondary-market liquidity discount and why does it matter more here than for a REIT?

Accepted Answer

It's the haircut you'd realistically have to accept to sell your token position quickly on a platform's internal marketplace or a DEX, before the underlying property itself is sold by the sponsor. RealT keeps roughly 5% of each property's token supply aside specifically to help provide that liquidity, and also lists tokens on the Gnosis-chain DEX Levinswap; Lofty runs a peer-to-peer marketplace but charges a marketplace fee on both the buy and the sell side of a trade. Either way, these are thin markets — the bid-ask spread can be wide, and in the worst case there's simply no buyer at a fair price. A REIT doesn't have this problem because public market depth absorbs the sale; a single tokenized property's investor base usually can't.

Question 3

Why do platforms like RealT charge a fee on rental income instead of a flat AUM fee?

Accepted Answer

RealT takes roughly 2% of each property's gross rental income before distributing the remaining ~98% to token holders in USDC — a fee that scales with the property's actual cash flow rather than the size of your position. That's a different model from Lofty, which doesn't charge an ongoing management fee at all but instead charges a marketplace transaction fee (commonly cited around 3% on each side of a secondary-market trade), and from institutional-grade infrastructure providers like Securitize, where market context suggests flat fees in the roughly 0.5-1% range are more typical than the 2%-plus-carry structure of a traditional unlisted real estate fund. None of these are apples-to-apples until you convert them into one annualized percentage-of-position number, which is what this calculator does.

Question 4

What's a realistic break-even holding period for tokenized real estate vs a REIT?

Accepted Answer

It's the number of years the tokenized platform's higher recurring yield (after its management fee and gas costs, before the liquidity discount) needs to run before it has earned back the one-time secondary-market discount you'd eat if you sold the token early. A platform with a large yield edge over the REIT benchmark and a modest liquidity discount can break even in well under two years; a platform with a thin yield edge and a wide discount can take much longer, or never break even if its fee-adjusted yield doesn't beat the REIT benchmark at all. The break-even number only tells you when the trade starts paying off if you actually hold at least that long — sell earlier and you've paid the liquidity discount without collecting enough extra yield to offset it.

Calculadora de rendimento imobiliário tokenizado

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