143
With the past year’s explosion in remote work, a new ‘housing collective’ called Earth is offering furnished homes that are available to buy with crypto as part of a distributed network. Earth homebuyers are able to swap effortlessly between locations within the network for free as often as they like. Formed by a community of architects, artists, and technologists, Earth aims to open up new possibilities for remote work by eliminating the need to choose between homeownership and mobility. Within weeks of launching, Earth has oversubscribed its waitlist for homes in its first five cities after raising funding earlier this year from investors including OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, former COINBASE CTO and a16z Board Partner Balaji Srinivasan, Giphy founder Alex Chung, and Tumblr and Betaworks veteran Matt Hackett.
Earth’s designer homes come fully furnished and are currently available to buy with BTC or ETH in New York City, Los Angeles, Berlin, Lisbon, Upstate New York, and the Yucatan Coast of Mexico, with more locations on the way. Earth homes are neither timeshares nor rentals—members own the title on their home in the traditional way so they are free to sell however and whenever they like—and the housing collective is also working on partnerships to enable buyers to finance their home purchases by borrowing against their crypto holdings.
Earth’s founding members are all immigrants and had been living between multiple cities for years. When the pandemic prompted a shift to remote work around the world, they saw how their way of life could go mainstream and they combined their backgrounds in design, architecture, and blockchain to build a form of home ownership that wouldn’t tie you to one location.
“COVID has inflicted on the world a concentrated experiment in comparative governance, with the different responses of different jurisdictions producing starkly different outcomes,” explained Annika Kuhlmann, one of the founding members of Earth. “Combined with a permanently expanded population who can think flexibly about where they live, we believe something profound is going to happen at the scale of cities, nation states, and citizenship. Ultimately we think networks will replace nation states and we have a chance now to make more readily available something that was previously only really possible for the super rich—the ability to choose where you live and the laws you’re governed by.”
Earth is collaborating on design with OMA, the legendary architecture office founded by Rem Koolhaas, who received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000. “Earth is designed for an era in which the divisions between workspace and living space can be reconfigured,” explained architect Samir Bantal, director of OMA’s internal think tank AMO. “Earth’s housing collective raises new questions and new possibilities for the connections between housing, society, and citizenship.”
For over a decade, homeownership and mobility have ranked as two of the most important life priorities for millennials,1 but these have always been in conflict with each other. Earth resolves this contradiction without owning or renting any real estate itself. Instead, the housing collective partners with real estate developers to cleverly utilize vacant, new homes before they’re sold, transforming this inefficiency into a rare and valuable amenity: flexibility.
Andrew, an early member of Earth, had been considering buying a home for several years before joining the housing collective. “I knew that buying in New York would mean committing to settling down for the foreseeable future, and that had held me back. What appealed to me about Earth is that I can buy a home here and build equity, but I also have the flexibility to live in other places without throwing away a ton of money each month on rent.”
Alex Chung, one of Earth’s investors who sold his company Giphy to Facebook in 2020 for a reported $400 million, was attracted by the team’s software-based approach to homeownership. “Earth is the first form of long-term housing that functionally improves with scale, with more members and homes in more locations making the whole network more valuable for everyone. The potential is huge.”
The commercial real estate industry has scrambled as Covid-19 has redefined the future of work. Now, as work-from-home policies increasingly become work-from-anywhere policies, residential real estate too may undergo a radical transformation. Earth offers a glimpse of what that future could look like.
“By redesigning homeownership—what it means and how it works,” said Kuhlmann, “we can enable a transfer of wealth away from a renting economy and towards a model of collaborative ownership beyond borders.”
Image: Earth-LA2, Echo Park, Los Angeles (copyright: Earth)
