Piper Moretti is the Founder and CEO of The Crypto Realty Group, a Los Angeles-based firm specializing in cryptocurrency real estate transactions, and the only REALTOR® in California who has completed 5 bitcoin transactions to date.
Piper works at eXp Realty as a licensed international luxury REALTOR® and a Certified International Property Specialist, the only international designation recognized by the National Association of REALTORS®. She is a member of the National Association of Realtors’ Cryptocurrency Presidential Advisory Group and the Los Angeles Chair of the International Blockchain Real Estate Association.
Piper teaches Crypto x Real Estate to brokerages and real estate professionals and was named eXp’s 2021 Excel Series Instructor of the Year. Inman Connect New York 2018, 2019, and 2022, IBM Blockchain Bash, National Settlement Services Summit, Realtor.com’s Results Summit, BlockShow, Blockchain Expo North Americas, International Blockchain Real Estate Association’s 2nd Annual Conference, and UCLA Cyber Days are among her speaking engagements.
Piper has appeared in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Realtor.com, Mansion Global, Luxury Real Estate Magazine, Commercial Observer, Business Insider, Bitcoin Magazine, and Cointelegraph, and was named one of the “8 Influential Women Making Headlines in Blockchain” by Entrepreneur Magazine.
Episode Highlights Here:
Piper Moretti:
You need to be educated and be able to walk them through what’s best for them
Brett Swarts:
I love that you said listening and being open. So, now let’s apply that to the number one secret to buying real estate with cryptocurrency. So what’s the number one secret when it comes to mine? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about maybe the first transaction and how this has all kind of come about?
Piper Moretti:
Well, listening to your client, I mean, when this person found me I thought, this guy is either insane, he’s trying to pull it over or he’s serious and the more I talked to him, you get to know who your clients are. He was dead serious, I better get to work here. At that time, there weren’t a lot of options for purchasing. Since then, there’s collateralized loan options, there are a lot more banks that are willing to count it as an asset. So, it goes back to listening, when I have clients call me, or potential clients call me every week, not really knowing what their options are. So you need to be educated and be able to walk them through what’s best for them.
Brett Swarts:
That is amazing. I think when you are telling the story, you’re saying like, this guy is either brilliant and amazing and totally talking about. He actually has this wealth and the ability to pull this off or he’s crazy and being scammed. But you’re open enough to explore that. So walk through that process, step by step, and some of the hurdles that you had to overcome along the way to make this thing actually go.
Piper Moretti:
The first hurdle, I think, was getting the seller agents on board, I mean, he was just dead set against it from the get-go. But they really wanted to sell this house, it had been sitting for a while, and my guys, they stepped up, and then we’re gonna pay cash for it at the end of the day. He didn’t really have a lot of other options. So he was kind of stuck with us there for a little bit and but from the get-go, he just thought we were trying to pull one over on him. Every day, he was coming up with some kind of excuse not to do business with us, just trying to poke holes in everything. That made the process that much more difficult. The other hurdle that we had to jump over it was the transfer of funds, we didn’t have an escrow company at that point that was set up with a payment processor that could actually do the conversion. So we literally had a roundtable with everybody that was involved in escrow, the buyer’s agents and seller’s agents, buyer and seller. We finally came to the conclusion that it would be best for the seller to open up a bid pay account, and that’s the payment processor that we’ve been using. Then just transfer the funds directly. That escrow will take care of the rest. What happened was, that it was all going great, contingencies were met, and smooth sailing for a little bit. But then seven days were before were supposed to close their attorneys got a hold of everything and said they heard the word Bitcoin. They were like, Nope, you’re out of here. We don’t want to have anything to do with this transaction. We don’t want to go to jail, whatever. So they kicked us out of escrow. We had to find an escrow company to close this in seven days. We did and the rest is history, we’re able to pull it off. Those were the major hurdles.
Brett Swarts:
I think of the perseverance of pushing up a big boulder over top of a mountain and you’re gonna have all of these little pebbles coming your way and things that are challenging. But you kept persevering through this, you found a Bitpay account as one workaround, or is one way to get the funds moving. Then you found an escrow that’ll actually do it and do the deal. You did the first one and all of a sudden it’s like you broke the four-minute mile if you’ve heard that story of the gentleman out of Oxford, England. For the longest time, they said that the four-minute mile cannot be broken and the humanly impossible the heart would explode, the lungs would explode. Like no one can do it and no one did it until one guy did it at three minutes and 39 seconds and then within about, I think the next 10 or 11 months another 30 or 40 people did it as well as it broke it.
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About Piper Moretti
Piper Moretti is the Founder and CEO of The Crypto Realty Group, a Los Angeles-based firm specializing in cryptocurrency real estate transactions, and the only REALTOR® in California who has completed 5 bitcoin transactions to date.
Piper works at eXp Realty as a licensed international luxury REALTOR® and a Certified International Property Specialist, the only international designation recognized by the National Association of REALTORS®. She is a member of the National Association of Realtors’ Cryptocurrency Presidential Advisory Group and the Los Angeles Chair of the International Blockchain Real Estate Association.
Piper teaches Crypto x Real Estate to brokerages and real estate professionals and was named eXp’s 2021 Excel Series Instructor of the Year. Inman Connect New York 2018, 2019, and 2022, IBM Blockchain Bash, National Settlement Services Summit, Realtor.com’s Results Summit, BlockShow, Blockchain Expo North Americas, International Blockchain Real Estate Association’s 2nd Annual Conference, and UCLA Cyber Days are among her speaking engagements.
Piper has appeared in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Realtor.com, Mansion Global, Luxury Real Estate Magazine, Commercial Observer, Business Insider, Bitcoin Magazine, and Cointelegraph, and was named one of the “8 Influential Women Making Headlines in Blockchain” by Entrepreneur Magazine.
