Frank from Ownify explains the company’s “bricks” system, a fractional homeownership model that lets buyers acquire a home piece‑by‑piece. Because U.S. law does not allow a title to be directly fractionalized, Ownify places each property into its own limited liability company (LLC) and issues 10,000 membership shares—called bricks—each representing 0.01 % of the home’s value. The value of a brick is derived from the home’s market value, which Ownify updates monthly by averaging three independent valuation providers (Clear Capital, Cucoon, and HouseCanary). Frank walks through a concrete example: the Baldwin home in Raleigh purchased for $355,000 in December 2022. He shows how the brick price fluctuated from $35.50 to around $38 over two years, and how the owners’ fixed monthly payment of $2,932 was split between rent (for the portion they did not yet own) and equity (brick purchases). Over the 5‑year term the owners contributed a 2 % down payment of $7,100 and built roughly $498 of equity each month, growing their equity balance from $7,100 to $18,551 by November 2024. Frank concludes by inviting viewers to schedule a concierge call for personalized details.
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Hey guys, it's Frank with Ownify. I wanted to take a minute to explain the concept of bricks. We talk a lot about owning your home brick by brick, buying it over time brick by brick. You're renting the fraction that you haven't bought, and the more bricks you own, the more bricks you stack, the fewer you have to rent. That's the whole basis of the concept of fractional ownership. So, how does that really work? Let's dive in. So, in the US today, we can't fractionalize a title. What we can do though is we can put a home into a limited liability company, an LLC, and we can use that to fractionalize the ownership or share the ownership of the home. So what Ownify does is the title to each home is held by a limited liability company, and every home is its own LLC. So when you engage with Ownify to buy a home, we will create an LLC and you become a member within that LLC, and your, your membership interest or your share in that LLC is is the way in which you legally own a share of your home. So legally, a brick is really a membership interest or a share in that LLC that holds title to the home. Now, each LLC issues 10,000 shares or bricks, and therefore one brick equals 0.01% of the value of the home, or the value of the home divided by 10,000. Now, you may ask, and a lot of you do, How do you establish the value of the home? If we purchase a home, let's say for $350,000 including all the closing costs and make-ready costs, then on that day in that month, the value of a brick is $35. Now over time, as home prices go up or go down, the value of that brick changes, right? The home price goes from $350,000 to $352,000. The value of a brick goes from $35 to $35.20. So how do we establish the value? Well, it's not us doing that. We use 3 independent valuation providers. These are all big companies that are being used by mortgage lenders and banks and investors around the country. Clear Capital, Cucoon, and HouseCanary. We take those 3 independent valuations, we get them once a month, and we create the average, and that really establishes the value of your home. So let's look at an example. Here's a home that a couple, one of our, a couple of our ownies had bought. In December of 2022. It's called the Baldwin. It's a really cute home in Raleigh, 3-bedroom, 3-bath. And we bought it for $355,000 in conjunction with our ownies on December 1st, 2022. So on that day when we closed, the value of a brick again was $355,000 divided by 10,000. So we started out with a brick value of $35.50. And then over the next 2 years until November 2024, which was the last valuation, the brick price kind of changed every month. Again, through this process of pulling 3 different valuations, we established the price. So it started at $35.50, then it went down for a couple of months. These months you see $34.99, $33.82, $34.20, and so on and so forth. It then came back up to $37. Kind of stayed there for a long time, right? And hovered around a little bit, maybe up and down a couple of cents. And the most recent one, again, you know, kind of went up to the $38,000 here a little bit. Now we're at $32,000, $37,002 in the most recent valuation. So that's kind of a visualization of how to think about the value of a brick, which is really the value of the home tracked over time. And now what the ONIs, that in the Baldwin, every month they made their monthly payment and they bought bricks. Now, how does that work? So the Baldwin, the monthly payment for the ownies living in this home is $2,932. So that's their fixed monthly payment that they're making for 5 years. And within that payment, as I mentioned earlier, some portion goes for rent that, that covers the rent on the fraction of the home that they haven't bought, and another portion goes towards equity. And that fraction varies over time. But over the last 2 years, the Owneys built an average of $498 in equity per month. So they started with $7,100, which was their 2% down payment, right? Again, $355,000, 2% of that is $7,100. That's what they put down. And then every month they bought more equity. And they made a fixed monthly payment, right? And within that, a portion went to equity and bought bricks at these prices that we just looked at, right? So again, every month they bought shares in the LLC, or bricks, at this valuation. And what that allowed them to do is build equity, again starting at $7,100 on day 1 back in December 2022, to about $18,551 in November of 2024. And you know, you see a couple of squiggles in the line here. In some months it went down, in some months it went up a little faster, and that's the cumulative effect of buying equity and the value of that equity, the value of the bricks changing over time. So I hope that made sense. I encourage you, if you have questions about Ownify, to schedule a concierge call and we can dig into this with one of our team members in more detail. Thank you.
