FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How do real estate transactions work with crypto?
The team from B4REAL have extensive experience not only with the real estate market, real estate companies and the broader real estate industry as a whole, but we also have been involved with digital currencies since the 1990s and helped facilitate real estate transactions that involve digital currency to buy property.
When using crypto assets to buy a house, whether it's a house with bitcoin or other digital currencies, the biggest issue facing agents/home sellers is the knowledge gap due to relatively low adoption.
Until B4REAL, the process for someone wanting to buy a house with bitcoin would be somewhat tedious.
Firstly, the home seller and the listing agent would have to be ok with the transaction - if that didn't occur, you would need to convert your bitcoin back into fiat currency.
The next problem you would need to overcome is mortgage lenders being prepared to give home loans.
A financial institution like a bank, outside of considering your financial situation, personal objectives, savings in your bank account for a down payment, and credit history, when adding bitcoin transactions to buy a house with bitcoin or other digital currency, now you need to prove where your capital gains came from.
Even if you are able to prove your capital gains came from legitimate investments, not drugs or money laundering, you still risk the banks declining your application due to their risk policies related to crypto markets - this is a problem that we solve with our finance arm, B4FINANCE.
The next option you have if you don't wish to sell bitcoin to buy a house is to use a CeFi/DeFi lending platform which typically offers over-collateralised loans, meaning the loan to value ratio (LVR) could end up as 100%, however to get that, you'd lock up 200% of the value IE $1M loan would require $2M to be locked up.
Other problems that made it tedious to buy a house with bitcoin or other digital currency before B4REAL is that you'd usually be liquidating your assets early, which would trigger a capital gains tax event, and if the property fell through for unforeseen reasons, you the incur premature tax implications.
In a perfect world, sellers would accept bitcoin payments and life is great, however, it isn't that clean cut - you have to prove funds to secure finance, hopefully find a crypto-friendly lender, convert crypto back to fiat currency and then buy real estate.
For sellers/agents, or listers as we call them, the process isn't all to different to what they are used to.
The reason for this is that in most cases, the sellers will wish to receive their domestic fiat as payment and in Australia, the agent simply needs to specify the currency/currencies that are used in their forms.
The biggest roadblock that we fix for listers with our platform is removing the knowledge gap and making it simple to conduct real estate transactions with digital currency like Bitcoin.
Does B4REAL accept Bitcoin?
Yes B4REAL is accepting bitcoin.
We also accept other digital currencies such as:
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B4RE (B4REAL utility token)
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B4B (B4BIZ utility token)
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BTC (Bitcoin)
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ETH (Ether)
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MATIC (Polygon)
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ADA (Cardano)
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USDT (Tether)
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USDC (USD Coin)
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XEC (eCash)
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DASH (Dash)
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BCH (Bitcoin Cash)
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DOT (Polkadot)
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LTC (Litecoin)
How do real estate agents interact with B4REAL?
The B4REAL platform, when released towards the end of 2022, makes it simple for the real estate market, specifically agents, to start to sell properties that involve crypto.
For these listers, they will be able to advertise real estate properties inside of our platform, utilise crypto tools such as escrow and conversion and ultimately sell property exactly like they do now and let us take care of all the 'complicated' crypto stuff.
This makes selling and buying real estate with bitcoin and crypto much easier and allows agents to tap into early crypto adopters who hold substantial digital wealth and are interested in either buying property for themselves or even as an investment to diversify their portfolios.
What is the B4REAL Staking System?
Firstly, staking is something known in the crypto world as a means of using your crypto holding to generate a yield/return by effectively 'locking' it up.
To keep it simple, staking is a mechanism that allows crypto holders to put their tokens to work so they generate passive income.
One way to think of it is as a high-yield savings account that generates interest (a return) when you deposit your crypto into that account.
Staking is popular because it allows you to put your money to work instead of it sitting in your savings account devaluing due to inflation.
When staking is completed, the original tokens are returned back to the user.
The B4REAL Staking System is the first system in the world that directly allows participants to lock up their crypto and earn a yield that can directly be spent on a real-world, real estate purchase.
That's layer one. The second layer is an advanced DeFi layer that allows users to generate an additional yield which can then be reinvested into a tokenised property portfolio, which can then have its yields reinvested to which creates compounding returns - very exciting stuff!
Take a look at the detailed explanation over at the B4REAL Staking System page.
How does B4REAL help with a mortgage?
B4REAL doesn't directly provide finance solutions, instead, we can help accelerate home ownership by providing a mortgage through our lending arm called B4FINANCE which provides crypto-friendly home loans.
This means getting a mortgage and buying a house with bitcoin is much easier when doing it through B4REAL.
The B4FINANCE credit product is cutting edge in Australia and is competitive when it comes to rates.
Is Bitcoin a preferred currency for B4REAL?
Look, whilst we consider Bitcoin to be the evolution of money, it is just one of the digital assets we accept.
I've bought Bitcoin in the past and wish to start buying real estate, how do we get started?
If you're holding Bitcoin, or other accepted digital assets, and wish to buy real estate before we have completed our platform, then we are able to manually facilitate transactions for you which will make the process simple and streamlined for you.
Simply fill in our contact form and we will call you to discuss your requirements.
Am I selling Bitcoin with B4REAL or do you handle conversion?
We have a simple process of Bitcoin or other digital currencies being sent to an escrow wallet.
Once the property goes unconditional, we are able to convert the stored cryptos into domestic fiat for the lister (if they wish to receive fiat instead of crypto).
How do your tokenised fractionalised ownership portfolios work?
We are partnered with a company called Tribe Digital Ventures, and we work together to tokenise real estate which you can then invest in, by simply purchasing the tokens associated with the real estate you're interested in... isn't blockchain technology amazing!
Blockchain real estate Australia? We will be delivering amazing STO opportunites for investors.
This decreases the barrier to entry for investors as it costs less to start building a property wealth portfolio.
This feature will be live towards the end of 2022.