Platform presets compared — same $ amount & holding period
Same investment amount and holding period from above, three representative fee/liquidity profiles. RealT-style platforms take a cut of rental income; Lofty-style platforms skip the ongoing fee but charge more to trade; institutional-grade infrastructure tends toward flatter, lower fees with a smaller (but still real) liquidity discount.
| Platform profile | Net yield | vs REIT | Break-even | $/yr expected |
|---|
Why tokenized real estate isn't as liquid as it looks
A REIT share trades on a public exchange with real depth — you can sell it the same day at whatever the market says it's worth. A property token can't do that. RealT keeps roughly 5% of a property's token supply aside specifically to help seed secondary-market liquidity and lists tokens both on its own internal marketplace and on Levinswap, a DEX on Gnosis Chain; Lofty runs a built-in peer-to-peer marketplace but charges a marketplace fee on both the buy and sell side of a trade, so a round-trip in and back out can cost a meaningful chunk of the position. Either way, these are thin markets for a single property with a limited investor base — the bid-ask spread can be wide, and in a stressed moment there may simply be no buyer at a fair price at all. That's the liquidity discount this calculator prices as a one-time cost, amortized across however long you actually plan to hold before you'd need that secondary-market exit. See RWA tokenized Treasury yield for the equivalent wrapper-risk math on T-bill-backed tokens rather than physical property, and RWA private credit yield for tokenized loan pools with default risk instead of a liquidity discount.
Reading the comparison
At $25,000, an 11.50% property-level gross yield, a RealT-style 2% rental fee, an 8% secondary-market discount, a 5-year expected hold and a 4.00% REIT benchmark, the platform fee and 0.15% gas cost bring the recurring yield down to 9.35% before liquidity is even considered — a 5.35pp edge over the REIT. Amortizing the 8% discount over 5 years costs 1.60pp/yr, landing at a net yield of 7.75%, still a 3.75pp (≈$938/yr) edge over the REIT, and the position clears break-even in about 1.5 years — well inside the 5-year hold.
Run the same $25,000 through a Lofty-style profile instead — no ongoing management fee, but an 8% gross yield and a wider ~12% liquidity discount reflecting the buy-and-sell marketplace fees on a thin peer-to-peer market — and the picture changes. The fee-free recurring yield only clears the REIT by 3.85pp, so amortizing the bigger discount over 5 years (2.40pp/yr) leaves a net yield of 5.45%, a thinner 1.45pp edge, with break-even pushed out to roughly 3.1 years. Both profiles still beat the REIT at a 5-year hold in this example, but the RealT-style profile pays back its liquidity cost about twice as fast — the number that matters if there's any real chance you'd need to exit early.