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Welcome to the fair-squares wiki!

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Why Fair Squares ?

Housing is becoming less and less affordable every year, a growing social economic problem. The gap between social housing and the free market is large and growing. Current markets are profit maximization driven, where affordable housing suffers (Binnenlands bestuur, 2020). A problem that citizens, institutions, governments, owners and investors can structurally solve with innovative and ecosystem-based experiments.

What is it?

The FS core is the implementation of rental agreements and social co-investment returns. The goal is to increase availability of affordable housing while investors make a decent return on their social investment. The innovation is the open platform nature where individuals through communities (crowds) can own, manage homes and newcomers can easily enter the market.

How ?

FS directly connects supply and demand of houses and renters and houses and investors. We remove the financial barrier because you invest in a home with several individuals until the target is met. In addition, it reduces transaction costs by replacing management and coordination of supply and demand within the FS platform. The hypothesis is that the rent of an average (free market) consumer home in the Netherlands of €1250 can be brought down to €850 with investors agreeing on social returns.

On one side there are the investors that bond their capital to the platform and are willing to invest in new homes in a specific region. The other side there are the people that have, bypassing the middle-men for financing results in cheaper transaction costs and an end result in more affordable housing.