Hey fintech friends! Dez here.

If you’ve followed my writing for awhile you’ll know that a recurring theme I write about is homeownership here in the US. Homeownership, in my eyes, is a foundational element of the American Dream and increasingly, it’s getting out of reach. Over the past 30 years the median home value in the US has increased nearly 259% while wages have increased a mere 21%. Go back 40 years and the median home value has increased an astonishing 557%. It’s easier to buy a Rolex in this country than it is to buy a starter home (just ask your average investment banker) and I think that shows us that something is incredibly warped in our society.

Today I am excited to share my conversation with Niles Lichtenstein the CEO & Co-Founder of Nestment. We go deep on a bunch of things, but principally we talk about his vision for bringing the idea of co ownership to the masses, and what he’s doing to address the home affordability crisis, today. This is an interview I’m super psyched to share with all of you, and it’s on a topic that I think is critically under-discussed. I hope you all enjoy. Let’s dive right in!

Niles, great to have you on. Could you tell us a little bit about your background and Nestment?

Sure thing Dez! Nestment helps millennial and Gen Z consumers essentially hack the housing system by leveraging co-buy models to purchase their first home or their first investment property. We focus on three segments of buyers. The first segment we call our “shift buyers”– those buying a second home for the first time. These folks maybe live in an expensive place and  want to invest in real estate in a meaningful way. So they buy a short-term rental, maybe one that they can go to but also Airbnb out, or they buy a long-term rental. Examples of this are, say, Selena and Wade– older millennials who've lived in Brooklyn for over 15 years, have made good money their whole career but still can't quite afford the place they would want in Brooklyn, so they teamed up as friends to buy a place in Hudson Valley. Now they psychologically feel like homeowners, but they also are able to rent it out to pay for expenses.

Our second major group is our “primary multifamily group”. These are folks who are trading in their rent and buying a two- to four-unit building, are living in one of the units, or maybe in multiple units– we sometimes have as many as three couples living in a single property– and doing that because multifamily units are always less per square foot, so they get more space for the money. Additionally, they can later turn it into an investment property.

The last segment is  the “parent-child” model. We work with multigenerational households and families to understand the options they have at their disposal for gifting, co-ownership, and co-living opportunities.

What is your story? How did you come to start a co-buying platform?

That's a great question. So my story for Nestment really starts when I was 13. My father had passed away and my mother was an immigrant who had two boys. She didn't have a job at the time so we didn't have too much available, but one thing we were privileged to have was a home in the Bay Area– a place that had appreciated. So from an early age, I learned how to help refinance our home to take out some capital that we could live off of. We also rented out the rooms, so I guess we're the early house hackers to UC Berkeley grad students. Despite having to share bathrooms and maybe sleep in the living room every once in a while, we had a pretty fun upbringing with people from all over the world: Nigerian math PhDs, Swedish physicists, Taiwanese architects, whatever it might be.

In terms of my own background, I went to Harvard for undergrad, came back to the Bay Area, and was fortunate enough to have some success in the tech industry. The first startup I was a part of got acquired and then went public, so I was able to take some chips off the table from that. At the time, I saw that a lot of my family couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area, so in a lot of ways I started Nestment just to solve my own problem. I co-bought a triplex in Oakland first as a “tenant in common” model, then as a cash-generating LLC, and then we refinanced it and gave everyone a really solid check after nine years. Now that capital is recycling and for the past decade or so I’ve been co-buying all across the Bay Area. I own a building in Nob Hill where I live on one floor, rent out the unit, and own the whole building with another family.