Jaeha LeeNew York

KASA, part 1 of 1

When real estate became more than buildings

My first look at the idea that ownership itself could be redesigned.

2022 – 2023Intern, trading screens, then the CEO's office

Context

During my gap year, alongside the tutoring business, I interned at KASA. KASA was building a blockchain-based exchange for fractional ownership of commercial real estate: individuals could own a fraction of a building and trade that stake the way they would trade shares.

I started as a software engineering intern on the trading-screen team, building the screens people used to trade.

One building split into Small units Many owners bought and sold Exchange price moves with demand and value fee on each trade The platform
Fig. 1 How fractional ownership works, in one picture. The colors stand for different owners.

The problem

The longer I built the screens, the more I wanted to know what was behind the numbers on them. Why did a price move? What made one building’s stake worth more than another’s? How did a new offering come together in the first place?

Those weren’t questions the trading-screen team needed me to answer. So I moved to the CEO’s office, where they were the job.

What I did

  • Property research. I wrote summaries and market reports on more than 50 commercial properties, and gathered due diligence data on potential acquisitions.
  • A property database. I built and maintained a database of the properties we were tracking.
  • Weekly analysis. I presented analysis to the team every week.
  • Marketing materials. I prepared investment marketing materials for offerings.
  • Fundraising materials. I worked on the company’s own equity fundraising materials. That meant researching how fractional and tokenized ownership worked, how a transaction-fee model makes money, where the industry was heading, who the competitors were, and what investors were interested in.

What I learned

Before KASA, I thought of real estate as buildings. At KASA I started to see it as a set of rights: who owns which share, who can sell it, how the price gets set, and who takes a fee along the way. And those rights can be redesigned. A building that used to need one owner with a lot of money could have hundreds of owners with a little.

I also learned that I enjoy seeing how a whole business works more than building one piece of it. That question is what took me toward finance at NYU, and later toward startups.