Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another S.L.D. Meet up, your host, Alvaro Nune, to bring you another successful and interesting guest today we have with us, Natalia, the founder and CEO of Propi, which is a Silicon Valley company revolutionizing home purchasing through smart contracts and blockchain. And I'm going to tell you, I've seen over the last few years the growth of Propi and it's incredible. So Natalia, thank you for being here with us.
Thank you, thank you so much for having me on live Instagram. Yes, and look, I'm very excited about having a proper conversation about what has been going on with Propi, but let's take us a little bit more backwards on why inspire you to start Propi and what was that gap that you saw in real estate that you wanted to solve. Yeah, well, I think my love for real estate that was with me since childhood. My mom has been in construction and I've been seeing all those magical restorations of home she was doing and building homes for people and this happiness of the community when something is being built.
But then I pursued a software career, I became a software engineer and my first company was in early Internet times doing different cool projects. And then I think those two passions just got combined. I got into real estate, became a real estate developer and saw so many problems globally when it comes to transactions, especially for all transactions, serving international buyers and I thought, okay, it's time to marry both of my passions, software and real estate. So that's where I decided to move to Silicon Valley and start Propi.
That's amazing. I always say that your business is the vehicle to live your dream lifestyle and it's basically the summary of what you just said, you combine different passions and then found an issue and brought the solution. So pretty cool stuff. Now you're here in Miami, one of the best cities in the world.
We both love that. And for everybody out there, whether it's a real estate or because you can be real estate in so many different ways, right? You can be their agent broker, you can be a buyer seller, but anybody that is interacting with real estate and are looking at now AI and blockchain, how do you see reshaping the industry of real estate over the next few years. The first thing that's fascinating part of AI is that we are just seeing the surface, even though we're all using all those other lands, charge a good deal, and so on, but it's just stretching the surface infrastructure is being built right now.
Well, every vertical will be transformed and we still cannot comprehend how much our lives will be transformed. Just like with early Internet, we did not expect to connect with people online like we do now. We did not expect to buy groceries online or anything to be delivered within half an hour to your whole. So now we're scratching the surface.
It's still too hard for people to comprehend and to imagine the future. And hopefully it will be a very positive and optimistic future where we will be all empowered to follow our passions and connections with our loved ones. But in real estate specifically, I love the future impact where anybody, especially new generation will be able to get into home ownership easier, because right now it's an obtain not obtainable dream for the new generation. We want to make it simple user friendly couple quick experience.
We want to add more efficiency to fight the housing affordability issue. So the transaction code strings. So there's a lot to add to that, but both the blockchain rails and the AI rails, their final rating for applications like property for vertical applications and really say that other different industries to finally be useful for the new generation. Very interesting because as I hear everything that you're sharing, it all comes out to simplify the way that we're doing things right and to accelerate the process to break those barriers that we've been encountering for so many years.
And I see that you recently just launched a new AI agent every every thoughts about her because when I first found out about her, I'm like, and I say her because it literally seems so real and it helps with so many different tasks. So tell me about what led to create every what was the first impression. Like somebody like a friend a colleague that you can work with, but that is relentless and full of energies every time you need it anytime is like, wow, my new best friend in real estate. Exactly, I love hearing that.
And that was the whole idea of preparation for years will be preparing to this moment to launch a agent Avery that is humanized. So our team feel and have and appreciate her as a colleague. And then our clients in the industry also look at her as someone who will help to close transactions faster and make their business thrive. So that's real.
They do the best what they can do serving their clients while I agent Avery just closing the deals and take care of everything that is happening on the back end. So she has this personality and everybody can follow her on Instagram on TikTok. She's fun, young, professional. She lives her own life and I helps us to actually bring this daily things that are relatable to people to our followers.
But most importantly, she is the smart expert that executes transactions. She opens transactions 24 seven checking emails and checking everything that is coming through our portal. If there is an image and a dropping a purchase agreement executed to us through any channel, she tracks everything and opens transactions right away on the spot invites everybody to the transaction and send the earnings money to the link to our buyer. And then the buyers just send the funds specific number.
They just connected online banking. So I had this record breaking timing for opening up all the transaction, which was six minutes from the moment of a purchase agreement signed to the deposit funds to be received by us and all the parties modified in six minutes on Saturday. It means that people can really start transacting and then the sellers are fascinated because okay I'm seeing these people are serious. They sign and they send the funds right away.
So that's just the start of the transaction. So she just helps throughout the whole transaction. She also you can call her if you go to property.com slash Avery. She can call you back if you give her your number.
And then she can tell you what is probably how different from others. What is what is it like to accept a stable coin or cryptocurrency for a transaction. So she's a she's a badass, very, very smart, but real real business and being this approachable, much like a human like friend. I love to hear all of these because I started to feel very fascinated with AI and we tried to be tea.
I was having all these conversations when I'm in the car instead of now like listening to audiobooks or anything and just like literally have conversations with try to be tea. And it's amazing because you can start constantly asking questions and getting information and having these debates and it's incredible. And now when it comes to what that specifically approach looks like for real estate, you guys have just developed it. And so there's a lot of questions such as Avery that can help you not just with information but also to execute things which is at the end of the day where I feel that most people are going to find so fascinating because it's not that it's only explaining you things.
It's actually executing things to accelerate in the process. So it's pretty cool. And you basically broke it down into most of the tasks that that she's doing and what people can look for when it comes to productivity advancement. But let me ask you because there is people out there right there old school there a little bit skeptical or they have a misunderstanding on AI.
So what will you say to those people? Misconceptions and a lot of misunderstanding in the early days of internet. It was almost banned in the United States and globally. But then the US was the first country to actually approving and making it legal, the usage of AI of internet by commercial needs.
And now then we have this blockchain risk to be banned right now it's almost all the blockchain related to related deals are fast and about to be passed with AI is a similar situation where both the community, the people as well as the legislature. So they want to be very cautious and they want to put kind of a pause or they want to have more time to research, but then other countries are accelerating the innovation in this area. So we cannot stop. Of course, we have to be cautious.
And that's why in profit when we do all those advancements will make sure that we allow AI to be in the process where fraud is not possible or it's almost impossible to occur. So for those skeptics that are afraid of innovation overall, like even I was afraid to to let the wheels of my Tesla go right it took me about half a year after I saw all my friends are basically using self driving. It takes time to adjust that's okay. But if you see that others are using it and a lot of verticals are changing, maybe you should embrace it and research and just try test it out because overall I think it brings more creativity to the society.
And in real estate, for example, when the other transaction will be automated, the most valuable advantage of this automation innovation will benefit the liquidity. So instead of five, seven million homes sold annually will see 20 30 million homes sold annually. So the interest of players will gain through this liquidity from an increased amount of homes being sold because the new generation when they move from one city to another with all this remote work. They will be able to buy home in any place they move because it's cheaper because it's hopefully it will become more affordable.
So that's how I see the advantage in every industry with more productivity and more advancements will have more time for the things we love. That's pretty interesting and really cool to hear. And I feel like that's also something that we love to touch base a little bit today because at the end of the day, probably was one of the pioneers with crypto real estate, right? And now more people acquiring cryptocurrencies and wanting to start using it for transactions.
How does pro pre ensure that is crypto escrow being easily done and secure? And as well as you know, we've been one of the first companies accepting cryptocurrency since 2017 for real estate and obviously also having our own talk and we just know how to operate with exchanges, the wallet, how to have the highest level of security. And that's so as of now we're one of the best escrow licensed escrow company in America, serving real estate developers and realtors and consumers when it comes to accepting cryptocurrency. Yeah, we have a variety of use cases where a building is accepting cryptocurrency and we hold the funds and the very secure custody for them.
And they get higher yield while they're holding stable coins. Then we have cases where a seller wants to accept Bitcoin and we found a buyer for them. So we just do Bitcoin to Bitcoin transaction. More often, of course, we transfer them because the matching is very rare when a buyer is using crypto and then the seller to use it.
That's very rare. So the main advantage here is that when someone is buying the Bitcoin, or Excel, or Ethereum, the main advantage is that we hold the funds for 30 days while the whole closing is going on. Very often the buyer also is applying for mortgage, so they have to wait for 30 days. Meanwhile, we're holding this cryptocurrency.
So they're not losing on the opportunity to get the advantage of appreciation. If there is depreciation that is happening this week, for example, they just have to add a buffer of cryptocurrency, but they don't have to exit and they don't have to pay taxes. What happens often is that maybe you found your drink home and you're not able to close it and your next drink home, you'll find will be in half a year and you don't want to sell and pay taxes. Wow.
I think this is such a cool information for people to understand and to learn more about because, to be honest, the reason that I got to meet you was because I was looking for that solution. I was having some clients that wanted to purchase a property with crypto and I'm like, okay, how do I do this? Right? I want to help these buyers, but I don't know how and then we ended up having a conversation about it and it was very fascinating to see everything that you've been doing over the years.
And now I see that it's been growing way more than a lot of people even anticipated the description friendly transactions. And I see that you're working with some new developments and also different projects all across the board. But what do you see this rapidly growing more? Is it in luxury market commercial?
That's a great question. Because we had a whole range of clients, luxury properties and our first ever own chain transactions that were with a couple of colleagues. They work from nearly 200 to $3,500 properties in Hawaii and Florida. That's where investors, real estate investors, Airbnb investors, they are looking for specific properties and they want to add fast.
So they see that we provided them the whole information, inspections, everything is done in advanced Atlas clean. So click click and they acquire a whole within 24 hours. So this type of crypto transactions work for investment properties. But just last week we closed a $4.5 million retail property for a real estate developer in stablecoin and God was an international buyer.
And he was so thrilled that it took one day to do everything that they will work, transferring stablecoins to go like 10 minutes. So everything was so fast and he was fascinated that he could see in probably everything, the documents, the payment, everything is streamlined that he reached out to the developer and they said, Hey, we want to buy more units. That was a great testimony for us. And then the developer, when we had a meeting in person, they invited the transaction coordinator, their sales team to thank us for this great service.
And it's thanks to those re rails, the crypto rails that have been built in the past years that we're able to do so. Wow. Super nice. I think that having those type of examples or testimonials, it's a great example on how many people are utilizing this new technology or in this case, probably to accelerate purchases in the real estate industry and not just with units, but also with multifamily.
With multifamily is commercial. There is so many countless opportunities, but I'm kind of fascinated with this last project that you get involved, the writer and Mohawk. Like these are new development projects that are going to be fully approached on a unique way. So tell us what makes this project so different.
Yeah, these are incredible properties with a developer that has the mindset to build unique products. It's a very unique project in terms of the style of living the community building. It's in Windwood. Of course, it's Miami.
The way for crypto. Yeah, I love it. Absolutely. And they have this boutique style.
Incredible buildings with the stunning design. And the clients are both local, tech-driven, international, a lot of international buyers. I think it will be a very vibrant community. Of course, they have all those five ceremonies and Turkish, and whatnot.
You definitely have to check out both of those properties. Google it and writers. A writer is an incredible community. We sell several units there.
Mohawk as well in cryptocurrency. But the most fascinating part is that the developer himself has been crypto friendly since we know him since about a year ago and before that as well. So he wants to embrace everything tech-driven. We're also working with a tech and crypto friendly mortgage company called Milo.
And then we're working with a lot of people who are willing to get a loan against our Bitcoin. Then they use this part and then we close it. So it's a great kind of trio that allows clients to get a loan to get a loan. Those who have stable coins just to utilize them and then use it.
Of course, we do a very rigorous KNYC and AML procedure so that we verify the clients are not from functional countries that their passport details and everything is secure. We check their bank accounts, their crypto wallets. It's also very important for us to be very compliant with the US regulation. Right, because a lot of people that are skeptical is because they think that nothing in here is regulated, but it actually has a lot of regulations in a different way, right?
So it still makes things to be operated faster and way more interesting than the traditional way, but you still don't have to worry about some of the things that people sometimes think about. Like, oh my god, what is this coming from or what is that all happening? And I also like how you're leveraging other partners into these projects to be able to help people with that. Like I met the guy from Milo, the event that you hosted the other day.
And it is pretty cool to see that if I'm able to put my crypto and have that as leverage for a mortgage and then still able to get a property, there's different combinations. So that's why I find that in this world right now that we're living, there's countless possibilities to do really anything that you want to do with crypto and this new technology. But I feel like as we speak and people listen to this conversation, there's going to be some of the agents out there that obviously represent buyers and sellers that, okay, all this sounds great, but what are some of the practical steps that they can take on to get started. Some of the practical steps for real and for developers to get started.
It's a very different answer than two, three years ago when we just met. But then it was just like, okay, get $100 worth of Bitcoin, get your first coin based wallet at this point. Most of the real real owners would miss. They have wallet.
They have some points already. So it's a very different conversation. Now, the first thing a realtor has to do when they have a request from a crypto buyer is to make sure they pass KYC so that they don't lose their time. Unfortunately, there are a lot of AI scams and blockchain scams.
So in order to avoid scams, we recommend to go to profit.com slash KYC. On both sides, there are a lot of scams of fake sellers trying to sell their properties or buyers fake with the buyers that are claiming they have a lot of money, then they spend two, three months with you and get to know you, your family, and then say, okay, let's trade $1000 to get them $10,000 together. So obviously don't do that. That's number one.
Start with KYC profit.com slash KYC. If it will pass this two minute thing, then okay, they're serious. If they're finding all the reasons not to do so, forget about these people and focus on those who really want to show their seriousness. That's the number one step.
The number, I guess for the cases, when you still don't have a crypto buyer or crypto seller, the best thing is to network Miami is an incredible place to network and find crypto buyers and crypto sellers. Even if you don't leave Miami, come here for albazal or considering almost every month we have incredible conferences like two weeks ago had the cancer conference. It was a crypto conference with incredible lineup. So these are events where you could find crypto friendly buyers and sellers.
And if you understand the topic, they will trust you, and they will want to choose a home. What do you think if you're realtor? So I guess these are kind of the steps for two scenarios. And of course, talk to Avery.
Have a good day. I do us coming. That's a number step. The number two step.
Talk to Avery and ask her what it means to call the transaction in crypto. How long does it take? What's the process? What do you recommend it to do?
She will tell everything. Everything we know it probably and we've collected such a huge knowledge base that it definitely will be something valuable. I love that. That's great.
And I think that I don't even know if it's number one or two, but I'll go straight to Avery just to talk about everything. So that's a great resource right there. Now, even though people have access to all this information and you shared so many valuable points today. I think that people need to have this mindset shift, right?
Because even though yes, you're aware of it. Yes, you want to do it. It is going so fast. But if you jump on this right away, you're going to be left behind because what is happening within the last six months, it feels that it's way faster than what has happened in the last 10 years combined.
So what is something that you will recommend for people to do that mindset shift? That's a great one. And I think it's more psychological mindset shift rather than, rather than anything else. It's not about being a great student of life even right.
It's about positivity and optimism and thinking out of box thinking about the past that we know is no longer the same in the future. So yes, of course, talk to your to your younger friends, your younger kids and see what they use to learn from them because they don't have this fear. So what I would recommend people who are still skeptical to just get rid of the fear. The fear for something new.
You act from lack of fear and with optimism and positivity. I think that's where the mindset shifts and you're ready to experiment and try new things. And maybe develop a plant and not be overwhelmed. Because as you said, the I inventions are here every week.
There's a new model. There's a new app. There's this vibe coding. Every week we see some tremendous changes.
But in order not to be overwhelmed with everything, just make a plan and start with the tools that are useful for professional life. Two, three tools, learn about them, ask again, ask your friends, especially those who are in tech or just younger and share the notes with others. I constantly learn not only from my team but from my friends for something that is personal. And I think that's very honored and very lucky to actually use the idea with our deaf team and learning from them.
Still, I don't know a lot, but they do. That's great. Thank you for sharing. I think that's very important for people to hear.
And as you mentioned, it's about how can you overcome that fear of the known or the new things that are coming to us and just lean towards that. And there's so many people out there, especially the new generation that's just all they think, all they know. Right. So I think it's also putting that ego aside and now wanting to learn from the younger generation versus only from the older generation.
So it's an interesting flip of the coin that we've seen recently on how you acquire knowledge from other people. We learn wisdom from the older and learn innovation from the younger one. Wow, I like that. That's a great way of closing it.
Learn wisdom from the older, learn innovation from the young. That's pretty cool. I'm going to close it with that one. I think that's something that wraps it up pretty nicely and not sure Natalia if there's anything else that we haven't touched that you would like to share.
So I think my final thought is that real estate professionals should not be afraid. Whatever changes coming, they will capitalize on this change. Just follow the trends, follow the right tools, and then treat real estate start treating real estate as a digital asset. Tesla is a software company.
It's no longer an automobile company. It will be a self driving robot, robot taxi. Real estate is becoming a digital product. So treated as is because we move the record to be very simple and focus for realtors focus on relationships.
And that's what we'll see in the future. And I think it's the best thing that we could drink for assets industry. Incredible. What a way to close it up.
I think that you just nailed it right there. So thank you again Natalia for all these amazing key points and golden nuggets and also for a brief innovation into this industry, but also to make it accessible for everybody. So I hope that everybody that is listening to this conversation is going to get all this knowledge and apply it in their career field and anything that you guys want to learn in regards to AI real estate blockchain, crypto, and crypto. Just going to prop the ink.
That's what you're going to see the latest updates. Check out Avery as well, your new best friend and also follow Natalia as is the one that is pioneering this wave. And again, I appreciate you for your time. Thank you.
Great pleasure. Thank you so much.