Steve Cinelli: Entrepreneur Meister

Interview with Steve Cinelli, founder of Primarq, the world’s first online marketplace for the investing and trading of residential real estate equity.

Entrepreneur Meister is a column that focuses on the lives and ventures of entrepreneurs. We take a close look at the entrepreneurs behind the vision, strategy, passion and action in ventures across all sectors.

Written by Damir Perge, edited by Jana Arnold, Entrepreneurdex

Just as in nature, when there’s chaos, there’s opportunity. A real estate revolution is brewing; and ironically, it’s not on Wall Street. In a land where real estate value has always been king, Silicon Valley is emerging as the melting point for the transformation of one of the biggest sectors on the planet: residential real estate.

The meltdown of the subprime real estate market is one of the key contributing factors that has brought America to its knees and provided ample opportunity for the world to blame America for everyone’s financial woes. The financing of the subprime market, at least from a mathematical standpoint, was flawed – and that’s not even counting the greed factor. Real estate has experienced declines that haven’t been seen in over a hundred years. What used to be a safe investment for Main Street has turned into Foreclosure Street.

Steve Cinelli, founder of Primarq, is the visionary behind the real estate revolution in Silicon Valley. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Prize in economics for their pioneering work in microfinance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve Cinelli won the Nobel Prize for introducing the Primarq way of financing the residential real estate sector. Primarq plans to be the world’s first digital marketplace for investing in and trading owner-occupied residential real estate equity.

“Real estate is the largest single asset class, yet the residential equity component has never been monetized or liquefied,” Steve explained to me in a recent phone interview. We’re all quite aware that the U.S. housing finance market was built on excessive mortgage debt. “We believe there is a need to change the approach for the health and sustainability of the homebuyer and owner,” said Steve, “as well as the financial system at large. So, we are creating a new investable asset class and market system for it – it’s never been approached like this.”

Think of Primarq as the NASDAQ of real estate. Similar to other asset classes, like equities and bonds, which all provide for shared ownership, Primarq enables a shared ownership approach to owner occupied residential real estate. The timing for the Primarq marketplace, as the U.S. deals with the bottoming out of the housing market and the restructuring of the mortgage market, could prove to be the right idea at the right time, solving the right problem with the right solution.

As I listened to Steve, Michael Milken came to mind. Whether you like Milken or not, in what he’s done for corporate finance, he is a financial genius. Milken introduced a new financial instrument, high yield or “junk” bonds to the corporate world, and influenced, in multiple ways, how young companies finance themselves with debt beyond the bank market. It was revolutionary. Using the Milken analogy, Steve is creating a revolution in the real estate market by turning it into a new asset class in the alternative asset category. This asset class is larger than the U.S. stock market. continued

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