Blockchain Slumlords

For those of us who've lived in homes with sagging ceilings and absent landlords, this isn't just another crypto horror story.

It's déjà vu - only now, the neglect is tokenized.

RealT promised a financial revolution: slice Detroit homes into digital tokens, let overseas investors grab a piece for just $50, and watch the passive income roll in.

But what happens when thousands of distant token holders collectively shrug at black mold?

When no one shows up to fix the leaking roof because ownership has been fractured into untraceable blockchain addresses?

Tenants like Shirquera Ayers found out the hard way, living with crumbling ceilings and unpaid property taxes while RealT racked up over 1,000 blight violations.

Meanwhile, the company's glossy marketing materials kept promising "democratized ownership" and "community investment."

Who answers the desperate call of a single mother when her toilet overflows and her landlord is a smart contract?

Ray Bradbury nailed it many decades ago.

In "The Veldt," a family installs a nursery that creates immersive virtual worlds.

When the parents try to shut it down, the children program it to trap them in an African savanna where virtual lions devour them – a chilling parable about technology without responsibility.

Fast forward to 2025. RealT isn't revolutionizing real estate - they're just packaging slumlording into tokens.

Investors get fractional ownership and weekly dividends. Tenants get black mold and crickets when they report broken toilets.

The blockchain doesn't fix the pipes. It just obscures who's supposed to.

Public records paint a devastating picture: 1,200+ housing units across Detroit, with 300+ behind on taxes, 1,000+ blight violations, and around 200 facing foreclosure.

The company owes Detroit at least $2 million in unpaid taxes and tickets.

This isn't some small crypto experiment. It's gentrification by algorithm.

RealT has amassed a troubling track record in Detroit, while expanding its operations to Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis - consistently targeting historically redlined areas where houses come cheap and government subsidies flow steady.

Buy a crumbling $60k home. Slice it into hundred of tokens.

Sell to crypto bros who couldn't find Detroit on a map. Market the security of Section 8 housing where government payments flow directly to property owners.

Watch your dashboard turn green while tenants live with leaking ceilings.

Blockchain innovation at its finest.

They turned homes into spreadsheets, and tenants into footnotes.

Meanwhile, Americans themselves are barred from investing - according to RealT’s own site, only foreign investors should profit from Detroit's struggles.

When a company extracts wealth from American cities while explicitly preventing Americans from participating, is it still "democratizing" real estate - or just exporting our housing crisis for overseas profit?

New Paint, Same Problems

"We've transitioned to a new property manager" - a tale as old as time, with a blockchain twist.

Shirquera Ayers escaped homelessness in 2018. Her state-subsidized rental provided stability for her and her two children.

But stability doesn't mean livability.

Her shower hasn't worked for months - the knobs are broken.

Last year, her toilet overflowed and ruined the carpet. Black mold crawls up the walls like a silent invader.

Multiple work orders vanished into the ether.

"I've been complaining for years, but nobody has ever come out," she told local journalists. "As far as I can tell, they're slumlords."

In Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," George Hadley finds his wife's scarf in the nursery, bloodstained after the virtual lions had their feast.

In RealT's properties, the evidence is just as damning - but it's mold-stained ceilings and blight violation notices instead.

When tenants like Kimberly West received notice that a new management company, New Detroit PM LLC, was taking over, they thought help might finally arrive.

Plot twist: New Detroit PM is just RealT's in-house management company, formed in 2023 after their outsourced property managers allegedly "scammed them" by pocketing maintenance funds.

Meanwhile, tenants report unanswered calls, bounced emails, and uncertainty about where to send rent.

Many don't even have valid leases.

The Jacobson brothers promised not to "push the eviction button" and to work with tenants - then days later sent bright red "EVICTION NOTICE" letters to those same tenants.

Jean-Marc Jacobson defended these notices as "an effort to get tenants' attention and into new leases."

Like the virtual savanna masking real danger in Bradbury's tale, RealT has programmed something equally sinister - a system where profits flow freely while responsibility dissolves into thin air.

When your landlord is thousands of anonymous wallet addresses, who exactly do you call when the roof caves in?

Fractional Irresponsibility

"Decentralized" ownership sounds great until the toilet overflows.

In traditional real estate, the chain of accountability is clear: tenant calls landlord, landlord fixes problem (or doesn't and maybe gets sued).

With REITs, a professional management company handles maintenance while investors collect dividends.

RealT created something far worse than both - outsourcing accountability entirely while scaling neglect to a global investor base.

A Frankenstein's monster of property ownership where responsibility is shattered into fragments so tiny that no single piece bears the weight of obligation.

Like the Hadley parents who installed a nursery that eventually consumed them, RealT built a system that's devouring its own foundations.

They're behind on tax payments on hundreds of properties across multiple cities.

Each token technically represents ownership in an LLC that owns the property - but what happens when that LLC gets foreclosed on?

Ask the investors in Toledo's 1907 Ottawa property with its $16,703 in tax arrears. Or Chicago's properties facing daily $10,000 non-compliance fines. Or the Cleveland portfolio with taxes unpaid since 2021.

Check Delaware records on RealT's corporate entities and you'll find a pattern that would make traditional slumlords blush: "AR delinquent" status, unpaid taxes, and a paper trail of LLCs transferring properties between themselves faster than city officials can track violations.

The Jacobson brothers deflect blame.

They say their model isn’t the problem - claiming instead that former property managers scammed them by pocketing funds meant for maintenance and taxes. They declined to name the company, citing pending litigation.

As the psychologist in Bradbury's story warned: technology that replaces human responsibility can't simply be switched off once the damage begins.

Similarly, RealT's model spirals beyond their control, with no clear way to restore accountability.

RealT created a model that similarly disintermediates responsibility, but can't turn it off even as it spirals out of control.

One tenant reported putting in several work orders, but nothing ever got fixed.

What happens to the tenant when accountability is nowhere, but rent is still due every month?

The company promised democratized access to real estate returns.

What they didn't mention is that they also democratized neglect.

Traditional slumlords can only own so many properties before the weight of their negligence catches up with them.

RealT's innovation? Scaling slumlording by distributing the blame.

In a system where everyone owns 0.0002% of your leaking roof, who exactly is responsible when the ceiling finally caves in?

Tokenized Slums

The crypto-ification of slumlording feels like the final boss of neglect.

Detroit was just the beta test. As RealT expanded its footprint into Cleveland, Chicago, Akron, and St. Louis, it exported the same playbook - digital tokens for distant investors, outsourced property management, and the promise of effortless yield.

Meanwhile, the neighborhoods chosen all match a familiar profile: majority-Black, historically redlined, and still reeling from decades of disinvestment.

In other words: the perfect laboratory for crypto-colonialism.

Regulators can't keep up. City inspectors are overwhelmed.

And tenants - the ones footing the real bill - find themselves trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare where their landlord is simultaneously everywhere (on the blockchain) and nowhere (when the heat stops working).

Remember the Hadley children in Bradbury's story? They programmed the nursery to trap their parents inside, where virtual lions devoured them.

Across the American Midwest, RealT’s digital veldt plays out - where the algorithms stalk and the tenants suffer.

The technology changes, but the playbook remains: profit first, people last.

The company boasts of having sold tokens to investors in more than 150 countries - none of whom will ever walk past the crumbling porches their "investment" is supposed to maintain.

When a property worth $60,000 sells all its tokens in "about 10 seconds," as co-founder Remy Jacobson bragged, what incentive is there to worry about leaky pipes?

America’s corporate landlords already treat housing like an investment portfolio - packing on junk fees, cutting corners on repairs, and ignoring tenant complaints as they scale up across cities.

The more properties they control, the fewer get cared for.

RealT doesn’t disrupt this model - it tokenizes it.

Now add another layer: a new class of middlemen using tokenized real estate not to house people, but to extract liquidity from them.

Homes become high-yield assets. Tenants become line items on a dashboard. And when things fall apart, there’s no one left to call.

In a final bitter irony that even Bradbury couldn't imagine, the Jacobson brothers continue listing new properties even as their empire crumbles.

Meanwhile, real people face eviction, toxic mold, and the sinking realization that their homes have become nothing more than cells in someone else's blockchain spreadsheet.

As Bradbury warned us decades ago, technology without humanity creates monsters.

From the foreclosure crisis to the crypto frontier, it's the same story just with new wrapping paper: profit above people.

Only now, the grift runs on Ethereum.

When we replace the landlord-tenant relationship with smart contracts and wallet addresses, are we innovating housing or just finding novel ways to extract value from society's most vulnerable?

REKT serves as a public platform for anonymous authors, we take no responsibility for the views or content hosted on REKT.

donate (ETH / ERC20): 0x3C5c2F4bCeC51a36494682f91Dbc6cA7c63B514C

disclaimer:

REKT is not responsible or liable in any manner for any Content posted on our Website or in connection with our Services, whether posted or caused by ANON Author of our Website, or by REKT. Although we provide rules for Anon Author conduct and postings, we do not control and are not responsible for what Anon Author post, transmit or share on our Website or Services, and are not responsible for any offensive, inappropriate, obscene, unlawful or otherwise objectionable content you may encounter on our Website or Services. REKT is not responsible for the conduct, whether online or offline, of any user of our Website or Services.