Earlier this month Property Investor Today looked at how Smartlands became the first company to tokenize property in the UK. And now the company has announced additions to the pipeline of its potential investment offerings, including the possibility of a £500 million residential high-rise property in the UK.

Smartlands, which calls itself the first regulated blockchain-based crowdfunding company in the UK, and was responsible for the tokenization of a £12 million student housing block in Nottingham, is now seeking to grow its portfolio of tokenised assets to up to $100 million (£80.3 million) by 2020, before passing the $1 billion (£803.6 million) mark by the end of 2023.

To achieve this, the team is currently considering tokenising 15 assets around the globe, valued at more than €100 million (£80.3 million) in total. Among the frontrunners are the aforementioned £500 million high-rise residential property in the UK, as well as a smart city in Brazil and a vineyard in the US. There are also plans to tokenize private shares of a pre-IPO billion-dollar company in the States.

The timeline and details for the respective offering are set to be announced at a later date as the firm aims to build a ‘global investment ecosystem’.

Other plans in the offing for Smartlands include the introduction of a banking product and contactless payment card, as well as securing a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) license in order to launch its own decentralised securities exchange.

The banking products and contactless payment card, with a scheduled release date of Q4 2019, will aim to enable Smartlands customers ‘not only to invest and earn, but reliably hold, exchange, and spend their fiat and crypto’.

Another part of Smartlands’ overall strategy is a switch to mobile to turn a ‘ponderous stationary process into a one-click operation that enables investors to track offers and manage portfolios’ direct from their mobile device.

“Our goal for the next five years is to become a fully automated AI-powered decentralised global investment ecosystem that can handle the needs of small retail investors as well as global institutional wealth managers,” Arnoldas Nauseda, Smartlands chief executive, said.

The Smartlands Platform, which is an Appointed Representative and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, leverages blockchain technology to ‘introduce the concept of fractional ownership through the use of security tokens’. This crowdfunding model significantly reduces the buy-in threshold, opening up access to higher-yield investment opportunities and creating efficient ways for asset owners to ‘raise capital and trade fractional ownership on secondary markets’.

Projects in the pipeline have been designed in a way to accommodate interest from both individual and institutional investors, enabling Smartlands and its partners to tokenize sizeable projects ‘and reach institutional-level liquidity’.

Founded in 2017 and based in London, Smartlands announced its first Security Token Offering (STO) in May 2018, a public sale of shares in a student accommodation complex in Nottingham.

It’s estimated that investors will secure a forecasted average dividend yield of approximately 5.74% per year, as well as a forecasted return of 15.72% per year including capital growth.

Constructed in the third quarter of 2018, the purpose-built student block contains 124 apartments and is fully occupied for the current academic year 2018/19.

The full Smartlands roadmap 2019-2024 is available here.