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Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

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101–109 of 109 posts

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#101
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any loss above 20% will be covered by the options purchased at the inception of the contract that go up in price if the real estate market suffers a larger drop (>20%). So we personally guarantee up to a 20% drop with our own capital and use financial instruments to hedge any drop greater than 20% so as to make you whole regardless of the size of the drop.

Thanks, that's much more clear. I'm still confused about how you make that guarantee on the first 20%. You keep it in reserve? Edit: generally, I wonder if you have a huge perception problem even if you've designed a responsible insurance product due to the fact that people are (reasonably) suspicious of taking on enormous amounts of counter-party risk from a pre-seed start-up.

Yep! That's exactly right. We keep that in reserve in a 3rd party account :)

Also, you have a great point on the perception problem, which is what we are trying to tackle right now. We have genuinely designed a product that is meant to be the most customer-friendly buyer model out there, but because we are a seed-stage company, many people are just concerned, because we lack a long standing reputation in the industry.

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#102
post #27

Have you considered measuring RF activity in areas to approximate the number of people? I'd also imagine that a higher ratio of telecom bands as compared to wifi bands would indicate more bias visitors and therefore potentially more future growth.

This is a great idea! We do not currently do this, but we do take into consideration the availability of gigabit internet as well as overall connection speeds for different neighborhoods. This has actually proven to be statistically significant for a large number of locations across the united states.

Huh interesting, that does make sense

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#103

Against my better judgment, I'm gonna comment that I hate this. This is certainly a good business/investment opportunity. If your algorithms are any good you'll make a lot of money, and you'll help your customers make money. My problem with Lofty is that it is bad for society. Fundamentally, this is gentrification-as-a-service. You're driving additional demand to neighborhoods at inflection points, and if it works we…

These are precisely my thoughts, too. I try to keep myself from falling prey to the ultimate human indulgence of claiming to live in some kind of moral decline preceding some end times, but this is exactly the kind of thing that scares the shit out of me. Once people are paying 40% or 50% of their income to rents because they have no choice, what comes next? Combined with all of the enormous consumer debt...

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#104
post #86

This is a super interesting idea, and I have been wondering if there was a service like this. Is there something similar to this that recommends the house based on your stage of life? For instance, if you have a kid and your income is X amount, this is probably your best area or even if I wanted to retire with a set standard of living and maybe environment. This paired with home value appreciation that you provide wo…

Love this suggestion! We have been toying with the best way to personalize the properties shown to each individual user. Right now it's just by city, max price and property type. We also have added things like "near nightlife", "near trendy coffee spots", "near schools" in an attempt to capture what you have suggested here - albeit in a less efficient manner. A "stage of life" questionnaire would be a great way to en…

Do you have a way to subscribe to updates? Would love to try out your service when you implement this!

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#105
post #22

Are there any case studies you'd like to share, either here or on your site, or any other validation of your methodology? At the moment, it looks a bit like a "hot stock picks" newsletter.

If you're still interested, you can email me directly, and I'd be happy to send you some of the stuff I was able to dig up.

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#106
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlations change. You never know if gold might tank along with assets in the next recession. Or if yields will tank along with assets in the next recession. What if there's just hyper inflation? No one knows what's going to happen... You can go with Dalio's claim that as long as you have 10 hedges that are sufficiently un-correlated, your risk is incredibly low. But even that might not hold up under future unknown…

You're absolutely right about the correlation changes. However, gold's correlation to the general market was developed organically by human behavior over time. That does often change during crisis. However, options contracts are a form of derivatives, meaning they are contracts financially engineered to hold a specific correlation. So, you can build perfect hedges using options contracts, which is what they were orig…

There is no such thing as a perfect hedge. Delta hedging is not perfect and cannot be done continually.

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#108
I suppose such an investments would be useless after some time. Nowadays there are some powefull companies that manage an institutional-grade alternative investment fund that seeks to capture alpha from uncharted parameters in digital assets. By way of volatility harvesting and decorrelating algorithms, the firm identifies market dislocations that drive risk-adjusted investment opportunities. The first that comes to mind is https://cipher.tech/ and they can provide more opportunities for investments with high technologies ahead.

Re: Launch HN: Lofty AI (YC S19) – Real estate investment with alternative data

#109
Very cool. I just forwarded to a friend looking to buy. As a real estate investor, I can see why this would benefit a lot of people. I personally buy from a handful of turnkey operators (Midsouth Homebuyers has a 3 month vacancy guarantee), but may consider this in the future.
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