ReCoop
In research and design. We aren't leasing homes or selling anything yet.

Rent that adds up to something.

ReCoop is a rental model where the rent you pay builds a stake that follows you from home to home. We own our buildings outright, so we can price rent below market instead of chasing a leveraged return.

Follow the workRead the writing

Why

Today, rent builds the landlord's equity. Moving resets yours to zero.

A tenant who pays on time for a decade leaves with nothing to show for it, and a landlord carrying debt has every reason to push rent up. We think the incentives can point the other way: an owner who doesn't need to service a mortgage, and tenants whose loyalty accumulates into something they keep.

How it works

Below-market rent

ReCoop owns its buildings at 75–100% equity. Without a mortgage to service, it can commit to rent below the local market and still run soundly.

Rent earns points

Paying rent on time earns points on a personal Pass. The Pass belongs to the person, not the building: move, and your progress comes with you.

Long tenancy becomes something you keep

Over many years of renting, a Pass fills and graduates to Gold, which carries lasting housing discounts and can be passed on. The path is deliberately long: you earn it by renting, not by trading.

Independent landlords will be able to join the network under license. Parameters such as earning rates and the length of the path are still being calibrated.

Research

We test the rules before anyone's rent depends on them.

The mechanism is being studied in an agent-based simulation of tenants, landlords and an operator, including adversarial agents that try to game it, with rent levels calibrated to Census data. A working paper for the mechanism-design community is in preparation. We publish what we find, including results that cut against us.

Every figure below is quoted from a named closeout report in our simulation repository, recoop-sim — a private repository, so the words are quoted here rather than linked:

  • Phase 1 — the kernel The Phase 1 closeout report (recoop-sim, revision d99f867) records “51/51 PASS” for the Move kernel suite, “55/55 PASS” for the TypeScript emulator and “23/23 PASS” for localnet fidelity, with a TypeScript emulator matched to a local blockchain environment over 10,000 operations at seed 42.
  • Phase 2 — the long run, failures included The Phase 2 closeout report (recoop-sim) records “360 ticks × 500 agents, TSEmulator, 23.7 seconds wall clock, 497,068 metric events” — and “Assertions: 8 PASS, 4 FAIL (mechanism pathologies)”. The four failed assertions are the design's next work items, quoted as-is.
  • Phase 3 — adversarial pressure The Phase 3 closeout report (recoop-sim) records “Three adversarials trained-or-reported ({#1, #2a, #2b}), results in the metrics ledger”, “spec-keeper sweep PASS, 0 drifts”, and “Exit condition met.”

Writing

Contact

Researchers, cities, operators and prospective capital partners: write to hello@recooprentals.com.