Tell me you’ve never bought a house without telling me you’ve never bought a house.
Buying houses are expensive because:
- Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions and suck up a % of the costs. They also provide the necessary service of aggregating information about the market and negotiating on your behalf
- Due diligence on the state of the property. This means inspecting that there’s no mold growing everywhere, checking that proper maintenance has been carried out, etc
- Property law developed over literal centuries to provide the legal framework that we have now, if you damage something as you move out I can sue you to recover costs involved, we have statements about property state before closing, if the building doesn’t meet code we negotiate about who pays the costs
- Property registries matter because legally speaking that’s a part of how you prove ownership. The county knows who to send the tax bill, if you default creditors can impose a lien, these are legal technologies that developed over time
This is why you can’t just pledge your house as collateral and borrow against it in a HELOC like you can borrow against your stock portfolio. The bank needs to verify that nobody else has a claim on your property and that the property actually exists and is worth as much as you say it is.
A house NFT has none of the legal protections of a SPA and all of the risks. If it’s not up to code you’re fucked, if the county has a tax lien there’s nothing you can do, etc. Us engineers like to think that everything is an engineering problem, and that’s often true, but law seldom works that way.
Buying houses are expensive because:
- Realtors are a state-sanctioned monopoly for real estate transactions and suck up a % of the costs. They also provide the necessary service of aggregating information about the market and negotiating on your behalf - Due diligence on the state of the property. This means inspecting that there’s no mold growing everywhere, checking that proper maintenance has been carried out, etc - Property law developed over literal centuries to provide the legal framework that we have now, if you damage something as you move out I can sue you to recover costs involved, we have statements about property state before closing, if the building doesn’t meet code we negotiate about who pays the costs - Property registries matter because legally speaking that’s a part of how you prove ownership. The county knows who to send the tax bill, if you default creditors can impose a lien, these are legal technologies that developed over time
This is why you can’t just pledge your house as collateral and borrow against it in a HELOC like you can borrow against your stock portfolio. The bank needs to verify that nobody else has a claim on your property and that the property actually exists and is worth as much as you say it is.
A house NFT has none of the legal protections of a SPA and all of the risks. If it’s not up to code you’re fucked, if the county has a tax lien there’s nothing you can do, etc. Us engineers like to think that everything is an engineering problem, and that’s often true, but law seldom works that way.