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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Zonal. Today's episode is another one of our

fintech conversations. This one is on rethinking the largest asset class in the United States,

owner-occupied real estate. Joining us to have this conversation, which is moderated by

A6 and Z deal and investing team partner Angela Strange is general partner Alex Rempell.

They cover all things FinTech and beyond.

We have Eddie Lim, CEO and co-founder of Point, which aims to address a system skewed by debt

financing by letting homeowners sell fractions of equity to unlock wealth in their home.

And finally, we have Atif Mion, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, who also co-authored with Amir Sufi, the book, House of Debt, how they and you caused a great recession and how we can prevent it from happening again.

In this episode, we cover everything from the evolution of the mortgage market and its relationship to the macroeconomy, from the mortgage crisis and beyond,

to the role of government as de facto subsidizer of certain home finance products.

But we begin with the difference between equity versus debt exposure and why that matters.

So right now, when you want to find a place to live, you've got two choices.

You can rent, which means you own 0% of your home, or you can buy,

which means you own 100%, usually with the help of a mortgage from a bank. But why couldn't you own

80% or 85%? Not only would this make owning way more affordable, it would also mean that you wouldn't

have like 300% of your net worth tied up in this asset, which is completely against all standards of diversification.

There's $18 trillion of equity locked up in U.S. residential real estate, and there's no solutions available to consumers except for debt, leverage on the home. If you think about 06,

07, that was a massive over-leveraging of our economy. With equity solutions like point,

we can actually take money out of homes, put it back to the economy through remodels,

through renovations, through small business investments, and help create that liquidity.

...