A new type of housing investor has come to St. Louis—one that involves not just out-of-town owners, but ones operating under a structure that’s part Bitcoin and part 1960s commune. For the alderwoman who stumbled onto the scheme via a modest home purchased under that model in South City, it’s all been a huge headache.
Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer says the home has generated numerous complaints from neighbors. She says the ownership model “treats our housing stock like Pokémon cards.”
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Schweitzer, who represents a swath of South St. Louis including Holly Hills, is no stranger to wrangling with derelict property owners. But the house on Walsh Street in Bevo Mill was the first time she had to contend with a house owned by a decentralized autonomous organization, also known as a DAO.
A DAO is a relatively new concept that borrows many principles from Bitcoin. DAOs run on a blockchain, usually ethereum, the same as many popular cryptocurrencies. People can buy into a DAO by buying tokens, which function sort of like shares of stock, but also give their holders the right to vote in all of the DAO’s decisions, making a DAO’s structure highly horizontal. It all sounds futuristic.
For Schweitzer, it’s also been a pain in the ass.
“It’s an ownership structure of property that allows a property to basically be a Bitcoin. So you can buy pieces of an ownership of a property,” she told SLM late last month as complaints by neighbors of the house on Walsh Street racked up. “I have a vacant, squatter-filled, code-violating terrible property in my ward that’s owned by how many people in this crazy DAO structure?”
At that time, in August, the house in question was owned by the Lofty Holding 3933 Walsh Street DAO LLC, registered in Missouri in 2022, with the paperwork signed by Riley Park, who a 2024 Wired investigation suggests is not a real person but a fabricated persona devised by a Wyoming-based company called Registered Agents Inc. that helps businesses “register under a cloak of anonymity.” Riley Park has acted as agent or organizer for “at least” 1,463 companies incorporated by the company that created her.
Judging by the LLC’s name, the house on Walsh appears to be connected with Lofty, an AI-powered real estate platform that, using DAO ownership structures, allows users to invest as little as $50 in a fraction of a DAO that owns a piece of property. Users can then collect rent relative to how much of a DAO they own, as well vote in ownership decisions. Lofty has received funding from the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator, which has helped launch household names like Airbnb, Doordash, and Dropbox. A state records search for companies that start with “Lofty Holding” turns up 38 Missouri LLCs, with each having a different address following Lofty Holding, many of them in South City.
The alderwoman who has to deal with the fallout from their property management takes a dim view of the platform. Says Schweitzer: “I think people like that forget there’s a whole community on the other side.”
Reached by email, Lofty co-founder Max Ball stressed his company does not own any properties. “We operate as a marketplace between buyers and sellers. Lofty also does not manage any of the properties. The owners elect and hire their own property managers, which can be one of the owners directly or a third party company,” he wrote.
Ball said that city officials looking to contact a property manager can do so via Lofty. “This would take no more than a business day at most,” he said. “At this point, we have not received any inquiries digitally from any city officials regarding this property.”
But city officials have been hearing from neighbors about it. Just this year, the city of St. Louis Citizen Services Bureau got four requests to board up the property at Walsh. The city’s Building Division sent the property two notices to secure it, one for the garage and one for the main building.
A Walsh Street resident who asked to only be referred to by her first name, Stephanie, tells SLM that squatters had the run of the DAO-owned house. She saw them leave the house in the morning, wander around the neighborhood and return at night. At one point, the locks were changed but the squatters broke a window and got back in. She once looked inside an open window and saw Xboxes, go-karts and other signs people had been crashing there long term. “They full-on moved in.” The grass around the house got wildly overgrown. She said that there was an effort to complain to the house’s owner, but they could never reach him … or her … or it.
Schweitzer says that is exactly why she is so annoyed by the idea of a DAO owning property in her ward. She spends a couple hours every day trying to get absentee property owners to clean up the houses and buildings they own. The first step, obviously, is getting a hold of the owner.
“When you end up with an ownership structure that’s decentralized, that’s traded like a Bitcoin, it makes it much more difficult to figure out who’s responsible, who to talk to, who to hold accountable when there are these sorts of problems,” she says.
An LLC that obfuscates a property’s actual owner has its own slew of issues, she says. “And then you add in this really complicated and strange and new, frankly, ownership structure, and it just adds a whole new level of weird, a brand new can of worms for us to figure out.”
Schweitzer says she’s spent probably two weeks working on just this one house on Walsh Street. She never was able to get the owner’s contact information. Eventually, she was able to reach a property manager, but only via email. And that seemed to provide a chance she could make a case to someone with some sway with the DAO to clean up or perhaps even sell their property.
She said that her “incredibly neurotic mind” couldn’t help but wonder if the “property manager” was who he said he was. “I’m hopeful this isn’t just an elaborate ruse,” she said. (The Wired reporting would suggest her neuroticism might not have been misplaced, though she and the property manager later did connect over the phone.)
On September 17, Schweitzer got word through the property manager that the DAO had voted to sell.
City records indicate the house is still owned by the DAO, but both the property manager and Schweitzer feel the process of selling it is underway.
The story of 3933 Walsh Street seems to be a happy ending for neighbors, or at least is on its way to a happy ending. But, says Schweitzer, “I have time and energy to look into this. What about the people who don’t?”
