HomesOnChain: Digital Real Estate Transactions With Blockchain, Real Finds Podcast #9 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast series where we speak with key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be interviewing Mike Radel and Ian Hickey from HomesOnChain. HomesOnChain is a blockchain platform that seeks to provide a safe and secure way to simplify property transfers and management processes. On the podcast, we discuss blockchain fundamentals, tokenization, and the future of the real estate industry. It’s well worth a listen.
I’m here today with Mike and Ian, and they’re going to talk about blockchain and real estate and give us an interesting perspective on some of the evolutions happening on the digital side of the real estate world. Mike and Ian, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Mike Radel: You’re welcome. Thanks for having us, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: Could you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about you and your company?
Mike Radel: Sure. We’re with Enlyt. I started the business when I was in college at DePaul University, which is where I met Ian. I started out doing smart home systems, being in the field, getting on a ladder, running crews. I grew the business from there into a lot of commercial work. We’ve worked on projects with big brands like Meliá to deliver a smart hotel in Miami, and with Life Fitness to help them deliver their Internet of Fitness platform. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, and we’ve recently grown into a startup called HomesOnChain, where we’re exploring deploying homes on the blockchain, or the ability to put the digital assets of a home on the blockchain, to make the process of buying, selling, and managing real estate a lot easier.
Ian Hickey: Hey Gordon, thanks for having us. It’s a pleasure to be on your show. I went the safer route, the corporate route, right after college, when Mike went out and cut his teeth in the entrepreneurial space. After many years in marketing and publishing at Leo Burnett and the Condé Nasts of the world, I reconnected with Mike, because I thought what he was doing, pushing the envelope of home automation and integration into emerging technologies, was an opportunity to help scale and grow the business. The opportunity we landed on was the concept and value proposition for HomesOnChain, largely based on all the experiences and issues that came up with the parent company, Enlyt, over those 20 years. It’s really leveraging those findings to drive new and emerging technologies in the market.
What HomesOnChain Is
Gordon Lamphere: The name HomesOnChain suggests residential. Do you do both commercial and residential in terms of how your blockchain interacts with real estate?
Ian Hickey: HomesOnChain is primarily a residential product. Enlyt does not do blockchain technology; it delivers digital twin technologies, which are separate from blockchain. The value proposition for HomesOnChain is that we feel it, as a token on the Ethereum blockchain, will become the standard for buyers, sellers, and people who transfer and manage residential real estate when they sit down at that table. When we go into a store today, the merchant doesn’t question the validity of our Visa or Mastercard. It’s trusted. That’s what we want HomesOnChain to become for residential real estate: everything from title, deed, surveys, marketing assets, IoT devices, and maintenance records in one place that can be accessed in a trustless way on an immutable, fully transparent blockchain. We feel there’s a lot of value behind that.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve bought and sold cryptocurrency and have a general idea of how blockchain and tokenization work, but could you give a broad perspective for somebody tuning in who has no idea how cryptocurrency or the blockchain works, and how it helps facilitate real estate processes?
Ian Hickey: Think of the blockchain as an alternative to your traditional databases. It’s a place where you can store information in a transparent way. It’s not a black box controlled by a centralized entity. It’s open and out there, much like many residential documents and information about homes are public record. There’s obviously private information that can be gated for account holders’ eyes only, but at the end of the day, it’s a way to transfer data more seamlessly. If you’ve sold crypto on the blockchain, you know you don’t need to go to a banker’s office and sign documentation. You can transact with anybody, anywhere, anytime. We truly believe real estate will eventually be on the blockchain, and we want to prepare consumers to sit at that table with the trust and safety developed through the HomesOnChain token.
Mike Radel: The only thing I’d add is that on the Ethereum network, the idea of a smart contract is really what we’re developing, and that’s powerful in transactions. If both parties agree to a transaction, it gets executed regardless of any third party, and that transaction is on the blockchain forever. It’s transparent, it’s immutable, and it speeds up the transaction process. That’s really where HomesOnChain came from. I was downtown doing a transaction and spent the whole day at a title company, with someone running back and forth handing me paperwork, making sure I had the plat survey, the contract, the operating documents, everything. Driving back to the suburbs, I got on a call with our team and said, how do we solve this slow, archaic process? HomesOnChain was born out of that. We want to work with title companies and give them a product that speeds up the process, help lawyers go through the checklist, help brokers go through all the minutiae of transacting, and have it in one place everyone can use and upload to, saving everyone time and money. That’s where we find value, and we think the market is ready for disruption.
A lot of governments are now listening to blockchain and want projects. One in particular is the California DMV, which is going to begin putting its DMV information on the blockchain, which is great, because everyone associates the DMV with a slow, archaic process. Here in Illinois, they passed a law, we believe around 2017, that makes it legally acceptable to do real estate transactions on the blockchain, and a handful of other states have done the same, Florida in particular. That’s what we’re developing with HomesOnChain.
Safeguards Against Theft
Gordon Lamphere: I understand the blockchain is advantageous for speed in what can be a Byzantine transaction. But there’s hesitation, not just from traditional forces that stand to benefit, but from people in commercial real estate and the legal world who see that Byzantine process as a way to protect an asset. What safeguards are in place to prevent an asset from being stolen in the transaction?
Mike Radel: Great question, and that’s our main focus, because we come from the real estate business. First, we need to verify that it’s your asset, that you’re the owner. We run public API calls, which is a fancy way of saying our platform looks at public deed records. We run a title search through a real title company and a lawyer to verify you own the asset, and we do that in a multi-layer authentication mode. We can send you an SMS and an email, but we also want you physically at the property so we can geolocate you and confirm you’re there and you own it. Then we go through KYC as a further security audit to make sure you own the asset and that you’re uploading the relevant information to it. During the actual transaction, both parties are verified.
When it comes to stealing a property or an asset, there are mechanisms we’ve developed to safeguard you. Now, in the blockchain world, if it’s not your keys and you’re not safeguarding your own crypto assets, that’s a gray area that falls on the user. There’s been a lot of bad press about FTX and how people’s funds were essentially stolen. Those were on an insecure exchange where people trusted that the exchange had one-to-one assets, and it didn’t. That’s part of the educational process about the blockchain. We’re going to educate our clients to make sure they have the right wallet set up and protocols in place to protect those assets. Ian?
Ian Hickey: Safety and security have to be the forefront topic when deploying a technology like this, and it needs to be thought of in two ways: the things we can control and the things we can’t. This is an emerging market and emerging technology, and it’s very early. Industry standards and protocols will develop, guided by policymakers. All we can do is lead from a best-practices perspective, imagine what those standards will be, and control the things Mike talked about that we can control as the company behind the product. There are risks in an early market, around the safety and security of your own wallet if you hold your own keys. If you don’t, and you keep your crypto on a centralized exchange, you’re banking on the safety and security of that non-FDIC-insured exchange. So we focus on what we can control: the validity, checks, and balances around the data we collect to provide our product.
Tokenization and Fractional Ownership
Gordon Lamphere: Moving to a newer topic: folks in finance, people looking to get into real estate, and those trying to create a more diverse and equitable real estate world look at tokenization as a way to broaden access to real estate investment for people who might not have a hundred thousand dollars for a down payment. Does your startup relate to the tokenization process?
Mike Radel: The initial answer is no. We are not doing fractional tokenization of real estate, whether a single-family home, a 140-unit condo complex, or an apartment building. However, we can provide the underlying token for that, meaning all of the assets are in one place: someone can look at the plat survey, the rent rolls, the maintenance records, even real-time energy data for the building. We’d look to work with those firms to make the base structure solid so they can run another smart contract on top of ours. That’s the beauty of the Ethereum network, and most people don’t understand that our particular token, the ERC-1155 smart contract, allows you to build on the underlying contract so you can do those kinds of transactions.
Ian Hickey: Somebody else will offer that. Let’s live in fantasy land for a second and stipulate that in the future, real estate will be on the blockchain. When that happens, everybody comes to the table with a different folder, we believe a different token. So it becomes a question of what the checks and balances are, what the value proposition is, and what values are behind the brand. Is it the Visa, Mastercard, or Discover in your wallet? That’s how we’re thinking about this. We see a world in which a large percentage of real estate is transacted through the blockchain, especially internationally, and everybody comes to the table asking, do you have a black card or a regular old credit card? We want to be the most trusted, friendliest, easiest-to-use protocol when people approach that table.
Mike Radel: And we believe our 20 years of experience developing real estate and working with developers, brokers, and lawyers gives us an understanding of the market, the customer, and how the process works. We’re not just some MIT guys with an idea. We’ve been in the field on projects from large developments in the West Loop to a hotel in Miami. We understand ownership, how the stack works in construction, how you deliver a building, from design to engineering. We’re putting all that experience into HomesOnChain, and that real-life experience will let us deliver a much better product than some of the others skirting around the idea of putting real estate on the blockchain.
Mike’s Development Background
Gordon Lamphere: Mike, we’ll get back to HomesOnChain, but I know from a cursory knowledge of your activity in the Chicagoland market that you’ve been busy in real estate over your career. Could you tell us about some of the transactions and developments you’ve been involved with?
Mike Radel: Sure. As I mentioned, I started my business in college at DePaul. I was lucky to work with Belgravia Group, Jeff Ruttenberg’s business, whose father is Buzz Ruttenberg. They’re a really well-respected real estate development firm. I was minoring in computer science and had the idea to put networking in houses in Lincoln Park. I asked around, and a friend, Mike Gold, was working for Belgravia. My first project was 2645 North Racine. They gave me a set of floor plans and said, give me a bid, Michael. I said, sure, walked out, and called my dad: Dad, what’s a bid? He said, that’s a construction term for a budget. So I worked up the wire lengths, the time I’d put into the job, what I’d pay myself, materials, overhead, insurance, all the small things a small entrepreneur needs. I worked on a bunch of residential projects with Belgravia, and as they grew, I worked on their commercial projects, scaling the business with crews, architects, and planning all the way to punch list and delivery. Then we’d work with the homeowner or commercial owner on technology upgrades: TV systems, video conferencing, audio, video, security. The entire development process, from building out of the ground to a finished space, and then maintaining those systems over time.
In that process, I was exposed to great real estate opportunities I was able to buy into when I was younger. I was working for these developers, watching them succeed, and they opened the door to projects in the West Loop where I could invest as a capital partner and help develop the property. One in particular is 106 North Aberdeen, right next to Harpo Studios at Aberdeen and Washington, a beautiful heavy-timber loft building of about a hundred thousand square feet that we gutted. It was DX-12 zoned, so the first and second floors were commercial office that I built out for myself and my team, and the rest were condos. We experienced the growth of the West Loop firsthand. I got into the financing, the design process, working with the architect and the general contractor, leasing the properties up, and then selling them to my tenants. As you sell, you roll into other projects, so we did a couple more in the West Loop, and I’ve done single-family development on the North Shore, building homes, leasing them, and eventually selling them. I’ve had a lot of experience in how to buy and sell real estate and all the minutiae in between, working with the general contractor and all the subs. That’s a unique skill set that lends itself to the technology we’re developing, because I know the pitfalls and want to curtail them so it’s a more seamless process.
I think a lot of construction will eventually be put on the blockchain, whether inventory tracking or where products go, and all of that requires a base smart contract for that piece of real estate. That’s what HomesOnChain is. It’s a residential product, but it’s on our roadmap to make it more commercial friendly, a concierge blockchain development. We’re talking to a couple of property owners now about the commercial space, which lends itself to leasing and selling and integrating future blockchain projects. We want to make the platform future-proof, like all the projects I’ve worked on.
Building Data, Digital Twins, and Management
Gordon Lamphere: Moving toward longer-term strategy and away from down-and-dirty deal making: one thing that came up when I researched you is building energy use and the day-to-day of management. How does your product work there, and how do you see blockchain going in terms of management information? For folks on the development side, it’s easy to see why blockchain works transactionally, but the information technology side is more in depth and, at least for our property management company, more fascinating.
Ian Hickey: We think of buildings as having a health span and a lifespan. We almost look at them as humans. As a property owner or manager, you want your building to be as efficient as possible. From our homes to our workplaces, the devices plugged in are continually beaming signals, whether energy usage, operational or maintenance signals, or an alert that something is broken. So many things can be connected to better prepare building engineers and owners to do their jobs. Instead of having eyes at every property because you physically need someone there, imagine a future where one engineer covers a regional area of four or five buildings because everything is aggregated into one dashboard: water pressure, lighting, security access, any of the hundred things I could rattle off from being in the field for 20 years. It’s pointing arrows at all those areas of minutiae and putting eyes on them in unique ways, with a camera or some other device, so the data can be aggregated, normalized, analyzed, and displayed for the end user.
Mike Radel: I’d add the concept of a digital twin, which we’re exploring with some potential clients. Are you familiar with that, Gordon?
Gordon Lamphere: I am, but I’m not sure all our listeners are. Can you go more in depth?
Mike Radel: A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-life asset, whether a piece of real estate, a car, or a coffee maker, that you can manipulate to your advantage. What we want to develop with potential clients is a scanned digital twin: you scan the actual asset with LiDAR, radar, and photos, upload it into a BIM or architectural format, and link all the digital signals Ian was talking about into it. Use cases are easier to understand than the concept.
In our project with Life Fitness, we built an innovation lab for them, about an 8,000-square-foot gym with all their equipment, and we scanned it. We could track who was in the building and where they were. You’d walk up to a treadmill, and when you got on, the treadmill knew who you were, because your phone was on a Wi-Fi network and we’d triangulated you within the space down to that asset. With a real-time digital twin, you give tools to the user of the space. We tracked your data on the treadmill, what you lifted and how. Then you get into the back of the house: why are these machines used more than the ones across the way? We used that to make analytical decisions about rotating machines to extend their lifespan. If three treadmills over here are used more than the three on the other side, in three months we swap them so the belts and gears don’t fail. Then further into the back of the house: if you’re having a bad workout, maybe you didn’t sleep well, and your bed told you that, so when you walk in the door we suggest a green smoothie, you accept, and that ties into the gym’s POS system, which knows you like an extra shot of energy boost and extra banana, because those green smoothies can be nasty.
When you digitize real estate in any space, you have a plethora of tools to normalize data, make good decisions, and serve up suggestions. Everyone knows AI is coming, and ChatGPT is here. We think those things will be useful in making suggestions, whether about how you sleep or how you work out. In the hotel space, it’s geared more toward guest-centric information. But in the back of the house, if an air conditioner is running hot, the engineer can pull up the digital twin on his phone, identify the asset, and order the part immediately, because the HVAC unit tells you what’s failing, versus going up to the fifth floor and keying through three doors with three different keys. You automate the process of doing things in a physical space. That’s what digital twins and the blockchain allow, because you have great data sets on a platform, normalized, and the IT manager can make decisions from them.
Ian Hickey: Quickly, on Mike’s Life Fitness use case: for those who don’t know, Life Fitness is the world’s largest manufacturer of home and gym workout equipment, supplying roughly 60% to 70% of gyms. They have great relationships with gyms, but they don’t own them, and gyms were tightening budgets and not buying as much equipment. Life Fitness was a great manufacturer that hadn’t digitally transformed yet, while companies like Mirror and Peloton were entering the market and chipping away share by delivering alternative experiences built on digital networks. They wanted to integrate with partners to figure out how digital twin and signaling technology could be built into first-generation hardware and how the membership experience could be elevated. That was Life Fitness’s problem, but we see every company facing this point of digital transformation. At one point, digital transformation just meant, do you have a website? It’s taking on a whole new meaning, where the lifespan and health span of the places we dwell in daily, from our homes to our workplaces, are optimized in ways that really benefit human activity.
Mike Radel: I’d add in closing, and this comes from real-life experience, that we want to make it agnostic. We can work with any partner, anyone can look at our software development kit and API, and vice versa. To do these integrations, we had to vet a lot of vendors and make sure their house was in order so we could deploy these exciting technologies. That’s what blockchain helps you do in creating an agnostic platform anyone can interact with. Proprietary closed systems gate people, and that’s not what we think the future is. We think it’s open protocol and open software that people can innovate on top of.
Ian Hickey: Safely and securely.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: Let’s start our Final Four, the questions we ask everybody. The first, for both of you: where do you see the real estate business going? It can be blockchain-centric or purely real estate.
Mike Radel: I believe it will transform quickly, because it’s such an archaic business, not in a bad sense, but there are a lot of technologies that exist that are fragmented and not put together in a platform. I see it becoming a more tech-centric business, whether on the management end, the cash flow and finance end, or during the build process. Digital twins are an important thing that’s going to happen, backed by blockchain because it’s secure and immutable, with information that’s shareable and viewable. That will make buildings more efficient and more centric to the user. You’ll see the ebbs and flows of people, how they interact with the building, how the outside environment impacts it, and buildings will become more energy efficient and better spaces to be in. As someone who’s developed real estate and worked with architects and designers, you have to look at it, like Ian said, as a living, breathing thing. When you implement technologies that make it a better environment, you have better products: more efficient, easier to lease, more valuable.
Ian Hickey: The condensed version: I see the commercial industry leading headfirst into technology because end users are going to want that access, and it’s going to be driven within a framework of policy, standards, and procedures. I’ve worked on FDA business before. When those come, people sitting on the sidelines will say, okay, now I’m going to get in, and they’re going to get in with the people who were acting that way from day one, leading as if those standards and protocols were already in place.
Gordon Lamphere: I don’t think anyone on this podcast or among our listeners would argue that the real estate business has some antiquated and Byzantine aspects. That’s one of the reasons this podcast exists, to bring to light areas that need improvement. The next question goes further from real estate and toward general self-improvement. Looking back in time at your high school senior or college senior self, what would you tell yourself? One little tidbit of life advice.
Mike Radel: Not to be fearful. It’s a great quote: when it feels like you’re scared, that’s the moment you step in. That leads to failing, and I’ve failed on so many projects, or not failed exactly, but chased a project and lost it. That’s where you gain life experience so you can become a better businessperson.
Ian Hickey: Good answer, Mike. I’d say, and it’s something I still struggle with today, keep perspective. We get so busy in our day-to-days. We have more going on than ever. It’s always nice to step back and take a minute to think about the things going on in your life instead of just being busy doing them. That self-reflection leads to improved behavior and actions down the road.
Gordon Lamphere: Both great answers. We’re always looking to learn on this podcast. I’m a huge reader, and behind me is a tiny bit of what I read. I’m curious what others in and around the industry are reading. Could each of you give me a book that changed your perspective on business or real estate?
Mike Radel: Ian, you go first. I have a really different answer.
Ian Hickey: I’ll go with the book I’m currently reading with my son at night before bed, Thunder Below! by Captain Eugene Fluckey. He was the first to put a rocket launcher on the deck of a US Navy submarine, and he came out of Annapolis leading a school of thought that submarines shouldn’t always be silent and only attack when they know they can. He believed they should be on top of the water more often than not, because underwater your field of view through the periscope is very shallow, while on the surface with the periscope up you can see for miles and miles. That continues to give me inspiration to lead with an alternative set of eyes whenever possible and to look at problems and situations in unique ways for solutions.
Gordon Lamphere: Very interesting book.
Mike Radel: I’ll have to check that out, Ian. My quintessential one from a long time ago was Rich Dad Poor Dad, which most people know. My enlightened answer is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that shaped how I look at business and myself. It’s the yin to the yang. In how I interact with people and with my business, you have to keep things balanced but ultimately provide quality. That’s what the book is about: what is quality, and how do you provide it, whether in a relationship or in a business environment? You do it by being rational and solving problems from a rational standpoint. I’ve read it numerous times and always get something different out of it. And I see you have a Jordan jersey in the back.
Gordon Lamphere: Phil Jackson is quite the Zen master, so any Chicagoan who was alive in the nineties probably gets that.
Mike Radel: I heard he made anyone who joined the team read that book. Is that true, or a rumor?
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve heard that too. We’ll have to have somebody fact-check us. But having a Zen, stoic, or at least moderated and somewhat agnostic view of how you interact with the real estate or business world is essential. Anybody making emotional decisions in real estate or business tends to get burned somewhere down the line, and it’s true in sports as well. I’m not going to throw shade at a book about Zen or keeping a calm mind.
Toward keeping a calm mind, the ultimate point of this podcast is to find folks like you who are changing the industry with a calm, collected approach and trying to improve a real estate world that has a lot to improve. Is there anybody we should bring on the podcast who has that collected, in-depth view of the real estate world that folks don’t know about yet?
Ian Hickey: I’ll defer to Mike. He’s the real estate guy.
Mike Radel: I’d say Peter Maris of Maris Construction. Pete and I have worked on numerous projects and developed real estate together. The construction process is controlled chaos. You’ve got twenty different people working on a project who all have to coordinate, and he really understands that, which lets him deliver great projects for investors and owners. Pete is really knowledgeable. He’s done development and construction, he owns a couple of other businesses in that environment, and he’s a wealth of knowledge. He knows finance, he knows the construction process, and he knows how to deliver a five-million-dollar home to a really particular client.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s an art.
Mike Radel: All those little pieces of blue tape around the house. I’ve walked those projects with him, and that’s a unique skill set your listeners could learn a lot from.
Gordon Lamphere: Construction is a combination of soft skills and traditional hard skills. I couldn’t do it, so I won’t throw shade at any GCs out there. Mike and Ian, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today. I’m sure our listeners will enjoy it. Don’t be strangers, and reach out, because we’re happy to have you on again.
Mike Radel: Great. Thanks for having us, Gordon.
Ian Hickey: Bye everyone.
Gordon Lamphere: Thank you very much. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions matter for the podcast algorithm and help us continue to get the guests our viewers want to listen to and learn from. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.