When next AMA will be?
On Thursday, September 6, Žiga Silič, CEO and Co-founder of Elements Estates, was answering community questions at the AMA session on the official Telegram group. A few days later we posted the first part of the ‘’The 7 top questions + answers from the Ask Me Anything Telegram session’’. Today, the Elements Estates team has compiled the second 7 top questions and questions from the previous AMA. In this part, Mr. Silič is answering questions about the current crypto market, property acquisitions & development and why blockchain technology is needed.
Regarding crypto wild west with prices this year and volatility, will Elements Estates run ICO no matter what will happen on market? How much is softcap and hardcap and what, is scenario if softcap would not be reached?
Yes, we are still determined to run the ICO this year. This volatility may even “run water on our mill” as crypto community is more and more in search of projects that can be more resistant to such general volatility.
In accordance with our whitepaper, we set the soft cap at 2.5 million USD and hard cap at 50 million USD. As we have already announced at the beginning, and this was our today’s’ big announcement, we already reached softcap within private period which is still not closed as we are running more discussions with interested parties.
Could someone explain point of Property acquisitions & development in SEE region?
There are two major points of acquiring real estate in SEE region. First one is that there is a lot of non-performing loans (NPLs) sitting in banks in this region. Banks have to get rid of them, clean their portfolios and focus on their core business of lending money. Moreover, this region is very interesting from a touristic point of view and also from business side as it is developing more and more to catch up with the rest of EU.
The other point is that our team has a lot of experience in this region and knows very well how to operate in SEE.
What real estate will you be able to rent let’s say for touristic purposes? Will this be Elements Estates real estate or from outsourced providers? I would think that Elements Estates at the moment does not have any real estate to offer for rent so…?
At the moment, we do not have any properties to offer. However, we are already bidding on some projects and when approved and contract signed, you will be the first to know ☺. Before finishing the crowd sale, or even before starting one, we will have some properties to offer and exchange ELES tokens after crowd sale for an ownership of real estate. Moreover, we have many properties, including hotels or campsites on the table and they already operate. If we can acquire, reorganize and upgrade them, we could offer them for rent through our platform. You can use our token in the future for these touristic purposes, mainly located at the seaside, Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas, which are one of most beautiful in the world.
When real estate on Moon? Will your first real estate project be in Slovenia?
We don’t want to speculate around the (crypto) “Moon thing”. We trust we have a good project with development plan we tend to follow. So, in our opinion, you will be able to witness the gradual growth of the token value over a longer period of time.
Slovenia is one of the countries in the SEE region we will acquire properties in. Only time will tell if our first real estate project will be in Slovenia, it might be as well from Croatia or Greece. As we are in a bidding process currently, we cannot give any more information.
Can you tell us a little more about Peter and yourself? Why blockchain?Well, we both have extensive experience, knowledge and know-how in finance and real estate industry, me personally mostly in the banking industry, restructuring and development of real estate and Peter mostly in financial and distressed assets. But feel free to check also our team listed in our whitepaper and also check our LinkedIn profiles.
With blockchain we can deploy smart contracts and make processes much more transparent and efficient. We want to play this game with open cards, for all of us to be able to benefit from it. This also reflects towards the ease-of-use regarding participating in real estate projects for our non-EU community members. Blockchain makes it possible to participate in our real estate projects, even when you are from a non-EU country.
From who will you actually buy it? From banks? Or from owners? Or Both?
We will buy it mainly from the banks and Financial institutions.
What are similar projects to yours? Are you following them? Where you differ from them?
Of course we follow other projects from our industry, like Propy, or others, and whole crypto/blockchain community as such. I would say that we differ mainly on how we will spend the raised funds and on the source of the real estate we plan to acquire. In our case, only smaller amount will go for development of the platform, majority goes for acquiring real estate projects behind, so our token will have for underlying assets different real estate, which means an intrinsic value. Because our main objective is also to buy from Financial Institutions NPL/distressed assets, we can come into position and acquire this projects with great discounts, and through restructuring much increasing the value of project as such, and portfolio on the whole.