This is a fascinating interview with John Andrew Entwistle, the founder of vacation rental company Wander. The way to understand Wander is that it is a vertically integrated travel company. So unlike Airbnb, for example, Wander owns all of their real estate (vacation homes in top destinations), they property manage, they asset manage, and they are building out the technology required to connect all of this stuff.

They have also created what they are calling the first ever vacation rental REIT, which means that you can buy a piece of their real estate portfolio (currently 13 properties). In addition to being a source of cash, this creates an interesting flywheel effect where maybe you stay in a Wander and then decide to become an investor in their REIT, or vice versa.

Eventually though, Wander hopes to be just as asset light as Airbnb (which again, doesn't own any real estate; they're a booking platform). The idea is that REIT unit holders will ultimately own the real estate and they will be the asset manager / technology platform that sits on top. But that they will still control the entire travel experience.

John also gets into some of the specifics of how they run their business. For example, in each destination, they hire local cleaning crews and handy people (who are not Wander employees). They typically spend about 7% of the value of a property to furnish it (which is typically around $80-150k per property right now). And their average order size is around $4.5k, which suggests that people are willing to pay a premium for this vertically integrated travel experience.

If you can't see the video above, click here.

One of the ways that you can turn a traditional real estate company into more of a web3 company is talk about how you're going to tokenize the ownership of real assets. But what does that even mean and how would it work?

Here is one example that I recently discovered (but of course there are countless others and I'm not suggesting that you should use their product). Bricknest is a startup that is focused on buying vacation apartments in popular tourist destinations. They then split the ownership into 365 non-fungible tokens that live on the Solana blockchain.

Each token is intended to correspond to a day. And so if you own 1 token, you own 1/365 of the asset and you get 1 day. You can choose to either use it yourself on this day, or rent it out and get the rental income sent directly to your crypto wallet. If you own all 365 tokens, then it would be similar to you just owning 100% of the asset.

The obvious question is how is this different from, say, fractional ownership, which can be similarly found in high-demand vacation spots? And the dumb answer is that, well, tokens exist on a blockchain and fractional ownership shares do not. So I guess the real question is whether or not tokens will make this ownership model any different.

There is a long history of trying to democratize the ownership of real estate. In fact, this was the general idea behind REITs when they were created in the 1960s. So again, we are back to the question of whether tokenization will be any different from what we already have.

I was out for dinner this week with a group of real estate developers. And as you might expect, we spent the majority of the time talking about real estate and complaining about how long things take. But a good chunk of time was also spent pontificating about the world of crypto. That's what happens these days. In fact, one of my friends joked that my/this blog used to be a real estate and cities blog, but now it's a crypto blog. It's a joke, but I guess it's becoming partially true.

For as long as I can remember, I have always been interested in what's new and what's next. And I think this is next. So I'm reading, playing, thinking, and writing about it. And the more I do these things, the more my conviction grows. But what really did it for me was the hands-on playing around part. I'm not interested in owning a crypto ETF (the US is about to get its first bitcoin ETF based on futures contracts). I want to own the cryptocurrencies directly so I can see what they can do and how everything works. (Though I will say that this space is still not very user friendly.)

One of the things that comes to mind as I continue to play is the future interrelationship between our offline and online worlds. Because already we are living in a world where people now buy and collect rent on virtual real estate in places like