Investing in Manifest

Over the past 50 years, investing in U.S. residential real estate has proven to be one of the most reliable strategies for preserving and building wealth. Despite market corrections, such as the 2008 financial crisis, US residential real estate has demonstrated resilience, recovering in value and continuing its steady upward trajectory. It remains a cornerstone of successful portfolios, particularly for foreigners who want exposure to American growth. In cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco you often see entire condo towers sitting empty as foreign investors snap up condos to access a stable, appreciating asset less volatile than investments in their home countries, particularly those with political instability & high inflation. 

Due to global interest in US real estate, it has long been considered a marquee asset to bring on chain. For as long as we’ve been in the industry, there have been attempts at making real estate an investable on chain asset. Harbor, a blockchain-based real estate tokenization platform, tokenized its first building in 2019, and captured a lot of headlines but failed to capture investor interest. In 2020-2021, several applications sought to bring real estate on chain by tokenizing single-family homes in tier 2 markets like Detroit. We’ve long been interested in this opportunity. Still, It wasn’t until we came across Manifest (post a couple of name changes) that we discovered a scalable way to access the $35 trillion U.S. home equity market a product known as a Home Equity Investment (HEI).

HEIs have been around for several decades but gained traction in the 2010s as alternative real estate financing solutions emerged. HEIs offer homeowners access to liquidity without monthly payments or interest which you’d frequently find in HELOCs. In an HEI, an investor provides cash to a homeowner in exchange for a percentage of the home’s future value. When the homeowner sells or refinances, the investor receives their initial investment plus a share of the home’s appreciation (or a loss if the home decreases in value). As of 2024, the estimated investment volume from key players in the HEI market has reached upwards of $4 billion and is expected to increase rapidly as homeowners look to tap into the $35T in home equity. 

Inspired by stablecoins tapping into the unlimited supply of U.S. Treasuries, Manifest scales similarly by unlocking the massive U.S. home equity market – without operational overhead. With Manifest, investors from all over the world can now invest in high-quality US real estate via a single drop dead simple token $USH, and diversify their crypto holdings into one of the most durable assets in the world. We believe this will unlock massive inflows into a well recognized and trusted asset class and for the first time give crypto investors an easy way to do it. 

At Lattice, we look for strong founder-to-market fit and Manifest is representative of that mission with founder Nathaniel Sokoll-Ward previously co-founding Roostify, real estate prop-tech company that raised $65M and processed $50B in loans monthly before being acquired in 2023.

We are thrilled to be backing Manifest as they unlock US residential real estate and eventually more made in the USA assets. If you are interested in partnering with Manifest, please reach out.