Richard Feynman was a brilliant American physicist and popularizer of physics (a lepton is a fundamental particle in physics). He once gave a lecture titled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in which he described an idea of developing 1/4 scale manipulator hands that could be used by an operator to build 1/4 scale machine tools that might be found in any machine shop.
Then the 1/4 scale hands could use the 1/4 scale tools to build ten 1/16 scale tools and hands. And then those 1/16 scale hands and tools could be used to build 1/64 scale tools and hands, and so forth until a billion extremally tiny machine shops could be built and produce billions of tiny objects (like transistors for computer chips).
What does this have to do with real estate?
Well, Leptonic, Inc. and the micro-real estate marketplace were built out of inspiration from this lecture by Feynman. Commercial real estate is typically a large building that is either wholly owned and used by a single company. Or it is split up into office or warehouse space for multiple companies. However, there is a lot of non-revenue generating space in a commercial property.
That space may not be useful for much, but with some thought, that space could be divided up into useful space that a machine could be placed on to serve consumers and generate revenue. The machines could be electric vehicle chargers, vending machines, solar panels and arrays, shipping container farms, digital out of home (DOOH) advertising, 5G nodes, ATMs (including Crypto), helium hotspots, and last but not least, parking spots.
So, if you’re wondering if there’s commercial property near you that is affordable, all you need to do is talk a an existing commercial property owner and pitch them one of the micro real estate machines to add an amenity to their property and generate some truly passive income for themselves.
Maybe micro real estate is more correctly called micro commercial real estate (micro CRE), but no matter the name, the concept is the same – divide up a large space into a smaller space that can be put to work through the use of a machine.
There can even be machines on top of machines, for example, a vending machine could reside next to a shipping container farm and be stocked with fresh veggies from the shipping container farm.
To be clear, micro flipping and micro real estate sound similar to a real estate investor, but they are different things – the “micro” in micro flipping refers to the short time to flip a property, while the “micro” in micro real estate refers to the small physical space of the property.
We are Lepton Nerds
Obviously, with a name like Leptonic, Inc., the founders are fans of physics and physicists. If you don’t know, an electron is a type of lepton in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. So, a lepton is a general name for a group of fundamental particles including electrons, muons, taus, and the different neutrinos. This is very, very nerdy, but electrons permeate our societal interactions through the use of computers and phones. Not wanting to be irrelevant in a couple hundred years when humans have muon computers, we thought “Leptonic, Inc.” would cover all the bases. Cheers to the future!