How it started… How it’s going

The alternative investment industry is rapidly evolving, and, to that end, much has happened at our growing company since we completed our seed round in December.

First, we are now Realto and no longer RealX Trading, as in February we refreshed our name to avoid confusion with a similarly named company. However, the change didn’t alter our mission: to serve asset managers, institutions and individuals by building and operating a truly transparent marketplace for the secondary trading of traditionally illiquid real estate and alternative securities.

The new name  – think “Re – for real estate” and “Alt – for alternatives” – works well as its homophone, rialto, is defined as an exchange or marketplace. We think it’s a perfect fit.

As we quickly transitioned to Realto, we continued to strengthen the most critical part of the company – our team. Our core group of accomplished financial market veterans now includes the duo leading our technology build – CTO Rigo Neri and senior software engineer Brandon Lile – as well as Kevin McCormack-Lane, our do-it-all head of operations.

We’re a small, efficient group and we’ve been busy, already completing phase one of our technology and making progress across the board. In fact, as we move towards our planned launch in September, we’re already in the process of building out phase two of the business – private investments and securities. We expect to be good to go on that front by year end.

While the technical work continues, we’re also checking critical operational and corporate boxes. We were pleased to receive SEC approval of our transfer agent application last week, slightly ahead of schedule, and continue to expect our broker-dealer and ATS (Alternative Trading System) application to be approved in the August-September timeframe.

It’s important to see progress in these key milestones and, overall, we remain pleased with how things are advancing as we move closer to our first trade. There’s much work to do, of course, but it’s been a great ride and we’re just getting started.