🏠 HomeVestors DAO: Real Estate Tokenization with Real Governance

Developers Showcase
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Property is the world’s largest source of wealth — over $300 trillion globally. For decades, owning rental property was one of the most reliable ways for individuals to build financial security.

But today, many are being left behind. The percentage of homeowners in younger generations is falling, giving rise to the label “Generation Rent.” At the same time, the buy-to-let market — once dominated by small landlords — is changing fast:

:chart_decreasing: Small landlords are leaving under the weight of rising costs, regulation, and day-to-day stress.
:office_building: Institutions and REITs are stepping in, consolidating control over more of the rental market.
:warning: The result: fewer ordinary investors can access property wealth, and renters face a market where decisions made by a small group of institutional owners shape the living conditions of millions.

We’ve felt this firsthand as small landlords in the UK — dealing with compliance deadlines, repair calls, tenant arrears, and endless admin. The stress is real. That’s why we’re building HomeVestors DAO: to make property investment accessible without the burdens that drive so many out of the market.

Real Governance, Not Just Access

Real estate tokenization has begun to address one part of this problem — by fractionalizing properties into tokens so more people can invest. But most projects stop at access. Investors get exposure, while the platform or fund keeps all the decision-making power.

That’s where HomeVestors DAO comes in.

:ballot_box_with_ballot: Every Property as a DAO

HomeVestors DAO combines fractionalized access with binding on-chain governance.
Each property is structured as its own DAO, with 1,000 ICRC-7/37 NFTs enabling investors to participate in decision-making.

DAO control extends to the entire property state. Investors can create proposals, vote, and see outcomes executed automatically on-chain.

Examples of what DAO governance covers:
Invoices — all income, expenses, and distributions.
Financials — rental income and property-related data.
Operations — tenants, inspections, maintenance, renovations.
Administration — insurance, documents, and notes.

Nothing happens without DAO approval. Every decision is verifiable and transparent on-chain.

:movie_camera: Watch it in action

:bar_chart: What We’ve Built

Through the DFINITY Developer Grant, we’ve delivered a comprehensive property DAO platform — deployed to mainnet canisters and currently running with demo data:

:coin: NFT Canisters

  • One dedicated NFT canister per property.

  • ICRC-7/37 compliant, with 1,000 NFTs per property.

  • Full support for transfers, approvals, metadata, and transaction history.

:building_construction: Property Management Canister (Backend)

The core engine that manages all property-related state and logic.
Modules include:

  • Administrative data → documents, insurance, notes.

  • Operational data → tenants, inspections, maintenance, renovations.

  • Financials → rents, expenses, valuations (via certified HTTP outcalls).

  • Governance → proposals, voting, execution.

  • Invoices → draft, approval, recurring, DAO-controlled execution.

  • Notifications → alert investors of new proposals, invoices, and property changes.

  • Marketplace → listings, fixed-price sales, and auctions for property NFTs, integrated with ckUSDC.

:laptop: Frontend Canister

  • Lightweight HTML/JS/CSS frontend for accessibility and speed.

  • Key pages: Marketplace, Property Info, Investor Dashboard, Proposals, Balances, Property Launch.

  • Integrated with Internet Identity and KYC for secure onboarding.

  • Designed for clarity and ease of use, so governance and property management feel seamless.

This architecture makes HomeVestors DAO one of the most advanced RWA platforms on ICP: not just fractionalizing property, but embedding governance, valuations, compliance, rental flows, and marketplace logic into a fully on-chain system.

:globe_with_meridians: Why ICP?

ICP is the only blockchain that makes this model possible:

:white_check_mark: On-chain execution — proposals directly trigger canister actions, with no off-chain intermediaries.
:white_check_mark: Native timers — handle proposal deadlines, rental dispersals, and invoice due dates. On other chains this requires external bots or keepers, but on ICP it’s built in.
:white_check_mark: Certified HTTP outcalls — enable secure integration of real-world property data (e.g., documents, financial updates, property records) without relying on centralized oracles.
:white_check_mark: Gasless UX — seamless participation without constant wallet popups.

Where other chains deliver governance theater, ICP enables real DAOs that operate autonomously over time.

:rocket: What’s Next

Our immediate focus is to evolve HomeVestors DAO from a technical proof into a platform with a strong financial backbone. We’re working to ensure the system is economically sustainable and liquid before onboarding real properties. This means continuing to refine the DAO’s governance and financial modules, strengthening integrations, and building trust with the community.

By the time the first properties launch, the platform will already be robust, transparent, and investable — giving both investors and tenants confidence in a model built to last.

:speech_balloon: Join the Discussion

We’d love to hear feedback from the ICP community on how HomeVestors DAO can best showcase real-world assets on chain.
Which governance features excite you most?
What integrations would make this a flagship use case for ICP?

Watch the demo video: Youtube
Explore the Code: Check out our Github
Share your thoughts here on the forum — your input will help shape the next stage.

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This is a really compelling vision, especially the focus on real on-chain governance rather than just fractional ownership. Treating each property as its own DAO with binding execution feels like a genuine step forward for RWAs, and ICP seems like a natural fit given the need for autonomous operations, timers, and verifiable data flows. The emphasis on transparency and reducing the burden that drives small landlords out of the market is particularly relatable and timely.

A discussion from the same community that might be useful is this thread on real-world assets and on-chain execution on ICP, which explores similar challenges around governance and trust: https://forum.dfinity.org/t/pokefund-a-dao-that-collectively-owns-governs-a-pokemon-card-treasury/61290/read more

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This doesn’t sounds like a sensible approach to me. It’s not very agile. You need a working proof of concept first (involving a property). I’m not convinced by what you propose to deliver, given that you’ve not addressed how it would actually map onto the real world legal system regarding property ownership and management, which also differs around the world.

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And that property should actually exist. That is also important.

Otherwise, you may find yourself pivoting, from a non-existent apartment to a booking service that does not even run on the internet computer. Not saying this is you, just saying the community has a bad taste in their mouth from your predecessors who made similar promises.

That being said:

Ok so what you’re saying is rather than investing in a REET. someone can buy your NFT for a fractional ownership of a specific property.

That seems like a very risky proposition from an investment standpoint. The whole point of traditional REET is so that fractionalized investor can have some share, without being exposed to massive risk of problem with one property. But this model, the NFT buyer is exposed to all of that risk, rather than being dispersed across a broader portfolio. Or do I misunderstand your model?

Forgetting about the property, how do you plan to convince NFT buyers that this is better than investing in a REET?

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Thanks — I appreciate that, and you’ve understood the intent exactly.

The comparison you made to something like a Pokémon DAO is actually quite close to the mental model: the focus isn’t on fractional ownership, but on turning a real-world asset category into something that can be governed, budgeted, expanded and managed collectively over a long time horizon.

Where this differs is that ICP lets you bind governance directly to execution — so the property isn’t just “represented” on-chain, it actually runs on-chain as a long-lived system rather than relying on off-chain operators to honour votes.

A lot of the real-world mechanics were intentionally out of scope for that post, but since then we’ve been pushing forward on acquisition and are now actively progressing toward onboarding our first property, which should make the model much more tangible.

Thanks for taking the time to engage with it.

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That’s a fair challenge, and I agree that without a real property this would all be academic.

The sequencing here was deliberate. Rather than starting by tokenising a REIT-like structure or wrapping an existing property and working backwards, we chose to do the hard, non-copyable work first: establishing a design that’s legally defensible, genuinely non-custodial, and preserves long-term investor incentives without relying on off-chain trust.

On ICP in particular, the bigger long-term risk isn’t whether you can add real-world assets later — it’s accidentally baking in centralised control, custodianship, or incentive mismatches that become impossible to unwind once real assets and users are involved.

So the early focus was on making sure that if a property is onboarded, it actually becomes a self-governing on-chain system rather than something that quietly depends on trusted operators behind the scenes.

Since that post, we’ve moved into the acquisition phase and are now actively progressing toward our first property, which should ground the remaining discussion in something concrete rather than theoretical.

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I appreciate the thought you put into that response. Thank you ChatGPT.

I completely disagree. I think this is something an LLM would say as an excuse. What follows from that statement doesn’t really make much sense and reads as AI fluff (to me at least).

Thanks, I look forward to this.

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Appreciate the thoughtful question — it’s a very natural comparison to make.

I think it helps to separate risk type from how diversification is achieved. A REIT is a pooled, equity-like exposure where diversification is automatic, but investors are passive: they have no influence over asset selection, budgets, leverage or ongoing decisions.

What we’re building is closer to a set of isolated, on-chain SPVs where governance, liabilities and leverage are local to each property rather than pooled across a fund. Diversification still exists — but it’s user-chosen rather than forced. Participants can hold governance NFTs across multiple properties they actively select, instead of being exposed to a broad pool of assets they have no control over.

The intent isn’t to replace REITs, but to offer something closer to direct property economics — without ownership, without custody, and with optional, on-chain leverage against NAV without forced sale.

Once the first few properties are live, that distinction should be much easier to evaluate in practice rather than theory.

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But how is the DAO’s intent executed in the real world? Just as importantly, how is the DAO legally held to account for their actions in the real world?

Please have a go at writing this answer yourself (the previous two weren’t - I haven’t checked any others). LLM produced responses very clearly read as such, and it’s difficult to separate real sentiment for AI fluff, noise and/or hallucinations.

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That’s fair — let me put it more plainly.

We didn’t rush to buy Property 1 because if you get the legal structure wrong at the start — particularly around securities law — you either lock yourself into something that’s massively expensive to run, or into something that simply can’t legally scale. Either way, that’s basically death for the project.

Speaking as a landlord, the hard part was never buying a house. The hard part is designing a structure that gives users real economic exposure and control without creating ownership or income rights that automatically trigger securities regulation in every jurisdiction you touch.

We wanted to be confident that when a property is onboarded, it actually behaves the way it claims to — non-custodial, governance-driven, and legally defensible — rather than discovering too late that we’d built something that isn’t viable once it meets the real world.

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:person_facepalming: ← click

Then you should be at the stage where answers to these questions are readily available →

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That’s a fair question, and it’s one we’ve spent a lot of time on.

The short version is that the DAO’s intent isn’t symbolic or controllable. Each property sits inside a normal UK legal structure, and the people operating that structure are legally bound to act within the decisions the DAO makes.

In practice, that means day-to-day execution is still done by ordinary, regulated actors — directors, agents, contractors — but they don’t have discretion to ignore or override DAO decisions and are legally bound to them. If the DAO approves a budget, a repair, or a refinancing, that’s what gets executed. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t happen.

There will be cases where an action has to legally be undertaken, but even here, the dao will be presented a range of viable options and the most voted for one gets enacted.

From a legal standpoint, accountability doesn’t disappear just because governance is on-chain. The underlying entity remains fully subject to UK law like any other property-owning company. If something goes wrong, there is a clear legal counterparty, just as there would be with any landlord.

The DAO changes how decisions are made and enforced, not whether real-world responsibility exists.

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Could you point me to the case law that deals with DAO representation by a legally accountable proxy (bound to DAO executed orders)?

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Could you also clarify why you keep getting an LLM to write all of your responses?

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