Alternative investment platform Realto changed its name to LODAS (Liquidity On Demand As a Service), then promptly inked two new deals that open up REIT trading on the platform for Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust and Starwood Real Estate Income Trust.
Brian King, LODAS CEO
“Some of the largest funds in the world are going to be using our platform to help meet immediate liquidity on demand needs,” LODAS CEO Brian King told bizblip, adding in a release “In both BREIT and Starwood REIT, we’re attracting institutional buyers that have designated millions of dollars to these funds. It’s a significant opportunity for liquidity for investors who don’t want to wait another month to test their luck in redemption queues.”
LODAS is a platform to broker the sale of things that are otherwise difficult to sell, loosely called ‘alternative investments’ – essentially any asset class EXCEPT stocks, bonds and cash. T
What’s an REIT?
A real estate investment trust is a company that owns, and in most cases operates, income-producing real estate. REITs own many types of commercial real estate, including office and apartment buildings, warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and commercial forests. Some REITs engage in financing real estate. King says fundraising for non-traded REITs and BDCs reached $57 billion in 2022, which is more than triple the 2020 amount.
“The first trade of Class D BREIT shares was executed in the LODAS marketplace at $14.42, which is equal to January’s NAV and just below February’s NAV of $14.47,” King said in a release. “This is big news for investors as BREIT capped redemptions for the fourth straight month in February, redeeming just $1.4 billion despite receiving $3.9 billion in total requests.”
Like any two-sided marketplace getting its start, King has had to juggle both supply and demand.
“We have a tremendous amount of institutional buy-side interest right now. I would say right now, it’s close to a billion dollars that we have on buy-side interest in our marketplace,” King told bizblip. “That’s a lot that. Now it’s being able to match the other side of the trade and it’s being able to let people who are shareholders in these assets know that there is a liquidity opportunity on the other side, so it’s matching those sellers with the buyer. That’s where we are right now. We have started to see a good bit of traction over the last, especially, you know, two months, three months, where we’ve started to see a quite an increase there.”
King says a previously announced $4.5M seed round from May of last year actually topped $5M when all was said and done. That round was led by Firebrand Ventures with KC Rise Fund participating. In 2020 the startup closed a $3.5M pre-seed round from Gary Fish and Dunn Construction. The startup launched in June, 2020, is headquartered in Overland Park, KS and has 10 full time employees.
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