Grant Cardone is the founder and CEO of Cardone Capital, a firm that manages about $5 billion in real estate. And he just introduced a new fund that invests property-generated cash flow into bitcoin (BTC).
“Nobody else has ever done this to scale. Nobody’s ever done this particular model,” Cardone told CoinDesk in an interview. “And the response from our investors is phenomenal.”
“There’s a buddy of mine who’s known me for 15 years. He’s never invested a penny with me. He’s also never bought any bitcoin. He told me bitcoin was too risky, and the real estate was too slow. When I showed him the fund, he put $15 million in the deal,” Cardone said.
How does it work?
For his pilot project, Cardone bought an apartment complex on the Space Coast in Melbourne, Florida, for $72 million, and ploughed an extra $15 million in bitcoin into the fund, for a total of $88 million. The cash flow generated by the property will be dollar-cost averaged into bitcoin every month for the next four years — or at least until the fund’s asset ratio, currently at 85% real estate and 15% bitcoin, shifts to 70% real estate and 30% bitcoin.
If the top cryptocurrency, now trading for $104,000, reaches the $158,000 mark within a year, the entire fund will grow by 25% in value. If it reaches $251,000 in two years, that number shoots up to 61%. Cardone’s projections assume that bitcoin will hit $1 million per coin within the next five years, and keep going up after that.
And his ambition is to roll out 10 other such projects before June, for a grand total investment of $1 billion. If bitcoin rises according to Cardone’s projections, Cardone Capital may end up with a bitcoin reserve potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars solely off the back of its real estate cash flow.
Cardone has been buying real estate for 30 years, and he’s famous for it, with over 4.8 million followers on Instagram, 2.7 million on YouTube, and 1.1 million on X. Cardone Capital manages 15,000 units — 6,000 of which belong to Cardone himself, and 9,000 of which have been crowdfunded across 18,400 investors, accredited or not. The firm distributes $80 million a year in dividends, and its last six deals were all paid in cash. “We don’t take institutional money,” Cardone said. “No sovereign funds, no Wall Street.”
“I am definitely a risk-taker, but I’m a real estate guy, so compared to the degenerates in the blockchain industry, I am so conservative, it’s unbelievable,” Cardone said. Despite studying bitcoin for seven years, he did not see a way to combine real estate and bitcoin until MicroStrategy (MSTR) co-founder Michael Saylor suggested the model to him. “This is really a version of what he’s doing at MicroStrategy,” Cardone said.
One of the advantages of the real estate-bitcoin fund is that it allows the firm to raise capital much faster. Not only are investors piling into the initiative, but Cardone plans on issuing corporate bonds to get some long-term, cheap money, and somewhat replicate Saylor’s convertible note formula.
He also wants to put up combined mortgages against the projects. Bitcoin mortgage products do not yet exist, he noted, but Cardone expects that to change after he’s done plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into these hybrid projects. “$700 million worth of real estate paid for with cash, $300 million worth of bitcoin, and no debt. Who wouldn’t give me a loan for $500 million against the combination?” he said. “I’m talking about very friendly long-term debt, no margin calls. Seven to 10 years.”
Not to mention the possibility of the firm going public, which Cardone says could occur in 2026.
Cardone plans to buy bitcoin in a price-agnostic way — meaning that he won’t be focused on buying dips, but will simply purchase bitcoin within 72 hours of the monthly distributions coming in. Nor will the firm take exposure to bitcoin through any spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs); the plan is to hold the cryptocurrency through an institutional custodian.
Does he ever plan on selling? Not in the immediate future. But he still has concerns about the growing frenzy surrounding cryptocurrencies.
“The place I’m at in my life, I can take this chance. I don’t need more cash flow,” Cardone said. “But if you’re 25 years old and you’re trying to get some cash flow for life, bitcoin is not a solution. It’s a bet, it’s a gamble, and you got to pay rent, you got to take care of your family, you got to feed your bills. And bitcoin just doesn’t do that.”
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