CityDAO Land Marketplace - Baby Parcel next steps

Overview

The CityDAO Land Marketplace will be a network of land and property available for instant leases and synthetic ownership (via long-term leases) via NFTs. The program will start by offering 20 NFT leases for the Baby Parcel in Blanca, CO but will ideally expand to encompass more properties.

Implementation

  • Parcel Leasing Portal: The dev guild will lead development of the a Zillow-style portal on land.citydao.io where eligible Citizens can view land available for lease, see the ENS of the current parcel leaseholders, and purchase an NFT lease for a subparcel. The UX can be similar to the Parcel 0 portal at parcel-0.citydao.io.
  • NFT Leases: For each of 20 subparcels, we will offer an NFT lease that grants exclusivity over use of the land for camping and visitation.
    • Price: $250 USDC / year lease for each 1/2 acre subparcel.
    • Lease Length: 6 month minimum - 10 years maximum
    • Revenue: The lease revenue will go to the parcel owners (CityDAO in the case of the Baby Parcel) and have a small tax used to fund public goods.
    • Tax: CityDAO shall collect a 1% tax on all land transactions that goes into the treasury
    • Commission: We are disrupting an old-school real-estate industry that currently operates on 5%+ commissions for brokers. To incentivize people to put land in the system, we will give a 1% commission to whoever refers the land to the CityDAO system or refers someone to buy CityDAO land. Example: Sam tells Sarah to list her Parcel for lease on the CityDAO Land Marketplace. Sarah earns a 1% commission for the first year of leases.
    • Rights: Visiting, camping, ability to apply to build something with approval of CityDAO and Costilla County
    • Smart Contract: We will develop and publish a modified ERC-721 lease implementation standard that implements an interface with mandatory lease parameters so that subsequent parcels can be whitelisted and added by the community. Lease parameters include: parcel lat and lon bounding box, lease amount, lease term, name and Ethereum address of the leaseholder, and usage rights.
    • Whitelist: The Baby Parcel team will maintain a whitelist of people who are eligible for NFT leases. We may need to do some KYC like name and email and prioritize people interested in building or using the parcels.
  • Parcel Distribution: 20 subparcels. We acquired 2 deeded parcels, each about 5 acres. Each parcel will be will be subdivided into 10 sub-parcels**, for a total of 20 parcels**, each about a half acre.
    • 5 parcels will be reserved for distribution to notable Citizens like Vitalik, Balaji, and Brian Armstrong.
    • 1 parcel will be reserved for the CityDAO commons.
    • 16 Parcels will be offered to CityDAO Citizens who express interest in using / building on the parcels or at least visiting the parcel.
  • Open standard: The leasing portal should be able to support adding parcels to the land marketplace if CityDAO acquires new parcels or if we open up the Land Marketplace
  • Land Maintenance Fund: The first $10k in Revenue and Taxes will be set aside to pay for property taxes and other fees for 10 years.

Project Team

To enable agility and efficiency, Scott will serve as benevolent leader of the Land Marketplace program and team and will host regular check in calls. Josh will run all things real estate. Tuncay will lead Dev. Casey will lead design. The team will make some bounties available to the DAO for participation.

Incentives and Comp

Dev team will be paid out of the Dev guild budget, determined by dev facilitator.

To incentivize a growth flywheel and get more land into the system, we will implement a 1% referrer commission for whoever referred the parcel to the CityDAO Land Marketplace. Parcels owned by CityDAO like Baby Parcel will not have a commission.

Tentative Roadmap

Sept 30th: Finalize acquisition of parcels in Blanca, CO

October 30th: Build parcel viewer and launch the first 15 Parcels

November 30th: Open up the parcel leasing portal and put out a call for people to add their properties and for other people and DAOs to buy NFT leases.

Future vision: Collaborate with other DAOs and city-building projects to list their property on the CityDAO land registry. Experiment with auctions, Harberger Taxes, and other mechanisms for land allocation. Host a contest to build a monument or landmark on the CityDAO Community Parcel.

Funding

The DAO allocated $10k to Baby Parcel and some Planning Funds have been directed to the project. Upon successful launch, a new CIP may be written to request an additional budget to procure parcels of land, fund development of the parcel viewer, and incentivize the first Residents.

Disclaimer: this working document is a draft and may be modified.

Feedback

Please comment on this post if you have feedback you would like to suggest for incorporation into the plan and roadmap.

11 Likes

Does the “approval of CityDAO” mean that applications to build must be passed by DAO-wide vote, or by a select committee?

Also, how much will the lease revenue be? If taxes are 1% and the first $10k will go into a fund, then after that, 1% continues to go to CityDAO. Where does any other revenue go?

Good questions @Da3vid.

On your permission to build question:
It’s mainly the legal compliance aspects we are worried about by promising everyone the right to build, considering each building needs a permit and the county might not approve 10 developments on a single parcel. If CityDAO’s compliance folks approve and the county approves, building is allowed.

On your where does the revenue question:
Let’s say the all 20 parcels lease out for 1 year. That’s 250 * 20 = $5,000. So basically the first 2 years of leases would be used for the maintenance tax fund. After the $10k milesotne, all funds can go into the CityDAO treasury. The 1% tax is separate, I think that should just go into the treasury from the beginning to make it easier for the dev team.

3 Likes

Overall I love this, I love the experimentation and pushing some innovation forward. The goal has always been to utilize blockchain tech, this really gets to that.

Very clear answers. Thanks. I support this initiative.

Just so I understand, you are talking about creating a zillow-like system that could ALSO list parcels that are not owned by CityDAO? Like someone could list their property in Manhattan?

Love the progress on this. I think it probably makes sense for CityDAO to retain governance control over this (as opposed to giving governance / treasury rights to holders of Baby Parcel NFT Leases). Just curious if there was any thought about whether having a Baby Parcel NFT provides any special governance rights.

2 Likes

This is great, the only clarification needed from my perspective is to confirm use of tax and revenue:

  1. The only difference for the 1% is that its dedicated towards public goods, correct? If yes, whats the definition of that?
  2. The rest of the revenue just goes straight into CityDAO treasury to be used by CityDAO through CIPs, and so hypothetically could be used for the above use but just isn’t dedicated to that. Is that correct?

Great proposal, looking forward to the ongoing progress for Baby Parcel.

We’ll start with just the Baby Parcel subparcels, and then the goal will be to open it up to allow other people to list land for lease with NFTs.

1 Like

I’m still thinking this through too. I think it makes sense for the Baby Parcel rent revenue to go back into the CityDAO treasury because CityDAO owns those parcels. If someone else listed parcels they owned, they would get the revenue. It’s basically just rent.

As it’s written, the tax would always go to the treasury, but I’m open to a model where it funds public goods or goes back into the land marketplace to buy more properties, etc

1 Like

Makes sense, it seems like your intent might be served by having the 1% go into a fund to ongoing fund development and maintenance of the tools outlined in this proposal, while the rest would go straight to CityDAO treasury.

2 Likes

We shouldn’t call this a “tax”. This is technically a “commission” on a transaction and has no ongoing revenue. Even calling it a transaction fee would be better than tax.

So “first one wins”? Or is it that multiple people can put the land into the system and we track whichever one someone uses to purchase? I think the latter is preferable, but it does mean that if someone doesn’t use their link, they don’t get credit (similar problems with attribution in affiliate marketing).

Maybe limit this to the minimum lease? Don’t think we should just give away a 10 year lease to someone who may or may not care about it.

this wasn’t how I understand the new guild structure to work. My understanding is that each big project would have a budget. This isn’t a small project for the dev guild, so to limit it by whatever is already in the Dev Guild budget seems counterproductive.

This is unlikely as you’re basically asking for a pretty major dev project to be completed in a month.

2 Likes

Right, for big projects, dev budget should be included in the proposal.
I think at the beginning Baby parcel was planned just as a copy of the current parcel viewer, but with those additional features, even the unused dev budget is not enough to fund the development.
Additional budget transferred from the planning guilds unused budget and some of it will be used to support the development as I know.

We should update this date with a more realistic one or leave it blank until the requirement analysis is completed.

I have an idea here that might help, easiest to chat about it either in a voice chan or DMs for now until it’s more flushed out

What a great read! Really blown away by the work accomplished so far.
Made my way here from the Proof of Humanity & UBI DAO, so I looking forward to familiarising with this one :blush:

Genuinely interesting ideas on tax distribution and the overall interest in innovation also! Seems I have a lot to read, brainstorm, and perhaps help out with!

2 Likes

Here is my reply to this action item from last weeks call:

Tuncay: to find out how much dev guild budget can be used

As dev guild we can provide max 1/3 of current reserve since we have 3 more months without new funding in Q4. (Luckly we had spent just a small amount of it past quarter)

  • $6383 (1/3 of current USDC reserve, we also have 1.6 ETH but I prefer to keep it.)
  • 4 Citizen NFTs
  • Frontend development support (8hrs per week, which 40% of my guild facilitator hours)
  • Contract deployment costs.

I think you need to create a CIP to get additional budget.
If we keep the project simpler I hope an additional $10k would be enough. ($10k BC CIPS requests <$10k are easier to pass)

There is also a UI/UX design cost, but not sure if the design guild can fund all of it. @Casey ?

What do you think? @scottfits#9589 @mdnatx#8887

We can allocate 10k to the development from the 40k planning funds.