Buying real estate with crypto: shouldn’t this be easy?

RealOpen makes it simple. You can swap crypto for real estate at preferred pricing—with no need to search for a crypto-friendly seller. You’ll be a coveted cash buyer in the eyes of any home seller.

So, you survived the crypto winter, or maybe you’ve just established your portfolio, or perhaps you’ve been hodling since the first halvening…but have you attempted to buy anything significant with those digital assets?

If not, you might be a bit surprised by the cost and frustration involved in swapping crypto for tangible high-value assets.

Shouldn’t this be simple?

It should be simple. But it’s not. (Well it wasn’t, before RealOpen.)

Let’s say you have 20 BTC allocated for the purchase of an investment property. At the time of this writing that 20 BTC would ostensibly be worth roughly $760k.There are a handful of directions you could take to make this crypto-to-real estate swap. Let’s take a look at the mechanics, pros, and cons of these options.

Option #1: Buy from a crypto-friendly seller

Just find a home seller that wants crypto. Simple, right? 

Patience and purpose are both requirements for a successful real estate investment. You’ll have specific criteria for your target property—likely location, appreciation potential, cash flow returns, etc.—and selecting the ideal target is no simple task. Oh, but also we need  a seller that’s willing to accept crypto (good luck - while they do exist, the vast majority of home sellers just want cash.) 

I’ll skip discussion of the other complexities involved with completing such a sale; the point is that the crypto-friendly seller criteria dominates your search. It prevents you from making the best investment decision…and that’s contrary to the actual objective!

Pros: Fund the purchase with a simple crypto transfer, avoiding costly fees and annoying withdrawal limits

Cons: The pool of available properties is narrowed by about 99% as you search for a seller that accepts crypto

Option #2: Sell your crypto first

Instead of crypto-seller searching, you can just sell your 20 BTC for cash on a public exchange, withdraw the funds to a bank account, and then proceed as a cash buyer. This brute force approach will get the job done…but it functions at quite a cost (and headache.) 

That 20 BTC trade won’t be filled in one shot - the exchange will break it into sequential trades, filled as liquidity allows, with each fill price reflective of the immediate market liquidity (which was depleted by each previous fill.) By the final fill you’ll be 5-10% lighter than expected…and your theoretical $760k just turned into $700k. The slippage slope accelerates at higher amounts.

After the final fill you’ve got $700k in your exchange account - almost done, right! Eh…except exchanges weren’t built for withdrawals. It’s your cash, but it’s their platform, their rules, and their timeline. Restrictions vary, but you’ll be lucky if your daily withdrawal limit exceeds $100k. Withdrawal fees are another conversation as well.

Pros: You’re not limited to crypto-friendly sellers

Cons: Price Slippage costs you an obscene amount of money, and exchange withdrawal limits are really, really frustrating (and costly)

RealOpen: A simple solution

Let’s just take the pros from options #1 and #2 above, then drop all of the cons. 

Seriously.

With RealOpen you’ll fund the real estate purchase by sending a crypto transfer. RealOpen is a prime brokerage—we execute your trade off-market in a single fill…and then wire your proceeds directly to escrow to fund the real estate purchase.

Pricing

Remember the slippage exercise above - where your $760k melted down to $700k? You can nix that part too, as you’ll be leveraging RealOpen’s prime pricing (better than you’ll find on a public exchange.) No worries about multiple fills and price slippage: your trade is completed off-market as a single transaction.

No slippage. No withdrawal limits. No headaches. And you just saved 5-10% of the entire purchase price.

Yeah, buying high-value assets with crypto should be simple. And now it is with RealOpen.

Create a RealOpen account today to get started, or contact us to discuss your specific plans.