The 7 top questions + answers from the Ask Me Anything Telegram session
On Thursday, 6th of September, Žiga Silič the CEO and Co-founder of Elements Estates did an AMA with the community in the Elements Estates Telegram group. In this article, you will read the top 7 questions + answers from the session. Read how Mr. Silič explains the Elements Estates project, expresses the importance of the ELES tokens and reveals the recent new big step toward our goals. Feel free to comment and ask if you have any more questions. Enjoy!
Dear all, before I start answering your individual questions, I have written a short intro.
Let me first share some light on our journey for Elements Estates project. Since the beginning of summer 2017, when the idea was born, and from September 2017 onwards, when core team started working on business model, legal set-up, getting right people on board and external partners, reviewing and testing different solutions, we finally achieved a unique project and product as such. We have reached many milestones for which personally I am as well very proud on. At this moment I will put emphasis on one of them:
I am happy to announce that we have already reached our Soft Cap goal of $2.500.000 participation in private sale.
Now let me start with answering your questions.
When will the Whitelist and KYC (Know Your Customer) be available?
For every KYC process there is a lot of demands to be met in order to be in accordance with legislation and rules. We took care of this, developed the system to make the whitelisting and KYC process possible and made a partnership with trustworthy company for this process.
So now that we did all that, you may expect the whitelist to be opened within 2 weeks’ time.
How will we be able to monitor the investments of the real estate fund in separate phases?
Well, we have a classical infrastructure and profile of people behind. What we do is we first analyze potential real estate projects, we make thorough due diligence (static, dynamic with cash flows, risk analysis, etc.), different scenarios weighted and investment decision. Later on it will be presented on Platform for voting. After decision and acquisition of project a skilled project manager takes over, a set-up of external partners and supervisors is done and a start of the monitoring process etc. Projects will constantly be monitored, timelines and costs re-checked. We will have 5 phases on projects and final date on finish of the projects, like you can already see in beta platform.
I think ELES tokens will be very valuable someday and can I (in the future) rent a place on your platform, (for the holidays) in fiat money? Who will do the transfer? Will you also have some kind of crypto/fiat gateway?
Yes, that is the project. You will be able to exchange your tokens for an ownership of a certain house, villa, property, or go for holidays, where you will rent different facilities with our token. In other words, for buying or renting you will pay in ELES tokens, where ELES will act a currency. In case of Fiat, we will have on our platform a partnering exchange that will have a very easy way to exchange different fiat to our ELES. That is also a very good question, and I thank you for it, because we see a lot of demand for nice real estate from classical markets.
For touristic purposes we have different projects on the table, from houses, villas to hotels and camping’s.
Did you consider going for security tokens instead of utility tokens? I don’ understand the utility of the token right know?
With regards to utility, we will not do any dividend or rental payments out, but we will reinvest up to 80% of profits back to platform, liquidity pool and real estate projects, which we will develop. Because our main objective is also to buy from Financial Institutions NPL/distressed assets, we can come into position and acquire this projects with great discounts. By restructuring, we increase the value of projects as such and the portfolio as a whole.
On the other side, with every transaction on the platform, half of the tokens will get locked through smart contract for 3 years and therefore effectively taken out of circulation, which will have positive effect on value of token. On one side increase in value of the portfolio and on the other decrease of token circulation.
And with regards to going for security tokens instead of utility tokens: Yes, this is an option for the future, no decision yet. We however have an infrastructure behind that will quite easily allow us to transform into security. It is a serious option for the future, also when legislation and regulatory will be clearer for security tokens.
What will be the difference in project development between the soft cap $2.500.000 and hard cap $50.000.000? Or mainly, how many real estates from the pipeline can be bought?
We have for more than $100.000.000 in total of projects on the table, coming from different countries of South-eastern EU region (SEE), which was in last years left behind in comparison to western countries in terms of distressed assets restructuring and sell-off of NPL from Financial Institution. We are targeting projects between $2.000.000-$8.000.000, depending on the final amount that we raise, we want to get best projects inside and as well diversification among assets class and countries. With a single project it is meant a complex of houses, villas, apartments, or flat (each unit will cost much less), or hotel, comping place, building with business offices, etc.
As most projects struggle in fundraising, can you tell us a little more than soft cap reached? How far are you right now and are many discussions ongoing?
To be honest, it is not an easy market:) We are still in private sale and there will be many meetings with potential participants in the near future. I am also within next two weeks time in London, later on this September at congress from Agora Group in Dubai together with Peter, and so on. Just in general, I can say that we are already bidding on some real estate projects as we want to have some properties on the platform before the start the crowd sale, or latest before the end of crowd sale.
Will it be possible if two customers buy a house on your platform, let us say in some kind of auction or something, and then you ‘flip’ the house and make it beautiful and fully functional. And then me and my ‘partner’ sell the house with profit and you get a commission or something. Will that be possible?
We will have one token for the whole portfolio, we are not doing tokenization of an individual property. If you and your partner, for instance, will want to buy a house, half & half, you will each transfer half of the needed tokens through a smart contract, and you will then become owners together. We however will not do more than one, or two different signing to land registers in respect to many different ownerships, at least not in the beginning. In case of security token, tokenization would be possible.
At first, we will be in restructuring and development of real estate on our own as this is also our great advantage in know-how and experience. Later on, we will as well offer brokerage services for properties not in our ownership, especially when land registers get digitalized and bring blockchain to its full use in terms of smart contracts.
