Blockchain Meets Real Estate: Transforming Land Ownership with Aaron Bumgarner

Blockchain technology is completely reshaping what we thought possible with land ownership and investment. Aaron Bumgarner, CEO and founder of Outside Global Incorporated, joins us to unpack how his company is pioneering the tokenization of land—transforming physical property into liquid, tradable digital assets that anyone can buy, sell, or trade on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Aaron walks us through the revolutionary concept that's disrupting centuries-old property ownership models. By converting land deeds into fungible tokens that represent ownership stakes, landowners can now sell fractional interests of their property through platforms like Coinbase. Imagine selling just 5% of your home while retaining ownership of the rest—it's now possible. This creates unprecedented liquidity for traditionally illiquid real estate assets, democratizing access to property investment while generating new revenue streams for landowners.

The story behind Outside Global is fascinating—born from Aaron's frustration trying to efficiently monetize land in Virginia and North Carolina. After seeing companies sell virtual "pretend land" in the metaverse for hundreds of millions, he applied similar principles to real property. Now focused on the Yakin-PD River Basin, where they own 1,000 acres including critical headwaters, the company partners with notable names like Hunt Broyhill of Broyhill Furniture and Eric Church's Whiskey brand. They're leveraging these properties for diverse revenue opportunities from carbon credits to conservation initiatives, all while building a technology platform enhanced with artificial intelligence to modernize the antiquated land investment industry.

Ready to learn more about this groundbreaking intersection of blockchain and real estate? Conn

King & Columbus is a full-service marketing and advertising agency based in South Carolina that helps brands grow through a mix of creative storytelling and data-driven strategy. They offer everything from branding and content creation to media planning, digital advertising, and PR—focused on delivering measurable results across digital, social, and traditional channels. https://kingandcolumbus.com

Transcript

Podcast Introduction

Speaker 1 0:43

Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, brought to you by the Charleston AMA and broadcasting from our friends at Charleston Media Solutions Studios. Thanks to our awesome sponsors at CMS, we get to chat with the cool folks making waves in Charleston, from business and art to hospitality and tech. These movers and shakers choose to call the Lowcountry home. They live here, work here and make a difference here. So what's their story? Let's find out together.

Meet Aaron Baumgartner

Speaker 2 1:12

Hey folks, Mike Compton here with Charleston Marketing Podcast. We're live streaming here at Dig. South. We're interviewing all the who's who here at Dig South today and Stephanie say hello to Stephanie.

Speaker 1 1:26

Hey guys, she's been here all day with me. I have been here all day as well, so we're having a good time.

Speaker 2 1:30

Stephanie owns what.

Speaker 1 1:31

Stephanie Barrow Consulting, a digital marketing strategy agency here in Charleston, that's right, I've been involved with AMA for what? Six years. So we're having a good time.

Speaker 2 1:39

Ex-president of AMA, and then I'm actually current president, you said next Next president. She wants to do it again.

Speaker 1 1:48

We've been going hard all day in the best way possible, having a great time meeting cool people like you.

Speaker 2 1:52

Aaron Baumgartner. Did I say that right, Aaron?

Speaker 3 1:55

You did Look at that.

Speaker 1 1:57

What are you doing here, you?

Speaker 3 2:03

have a very snazzy shirt on. By the way, I was speaking today I did a fireside chat with Stanfield Great.

Speaker 2 2:12

He's terrible, by the way.

Speaker 1 2:14

What a bummer of a guy, that guy.

Speaker 2 2:16

Does anybody even like him?

Speaker 1 2:18

I do. I like him. I mean, I'm kidding right, I'm being facetious, the dude is awesome.

Speaker 2 2:21

He is awesome.

Speaker 1 2:23

He's a who. You know that right.

Speaker 3 2:24

He's a who he is a who, and so I am a native of North Carolina. Okay, and so I grew up in Granite Falls, north Carolina.

Speaker 2 2:32

All right.

Speaker 3 2:32

About an hour and a half northwest of Charlotte.

Speaker 2 2:34

Okay.

Speaker 3 2:35

And so I split my time between Richmond, virginia, atlantic, beach, north Carolina, and Bowling Rock, north Carolina.

Speaker 1 2:41

Wow, it's a beautiful country. You got there Beautiful. You're from Virginia, I am. I'm from Williamsburg, okay, yeah.

Speaker 3 2:45

Okay.

Speaker 2 2:47

So what are you speaking on today, bud?

Speaker 3 2:54

So I am a CEO and founder of Outside Global Incorporated, based in Lenore, North Carolina, and we also have another company called Yakkin Inc. Which I'm chairman and founder of that company. What do these companies? Do and so what we do is we tokenize land on blockchain agriculture, land and forest land to build land into a liquid and tradable digital asset. That's what we do. Okay, go ahead. You're going to have to break it down now. I think you went right over my head.

Speaker 1 3:17

Here we go.

Speaker 3 3:18

So think about it this way we can take a track of land and tokenize it into a digital asset with a certain number, a specific number of digital tokens for example, one million and we can take those one million tokens that represent ownership of that land and bring, essentially, launch them into decentralized and decentralized exchanges. For example, coinbase is one that we're working very closely with and we can take those million tokens and put them on Coinbase and create a way for anybody in the world to buy and sell and trade those tokens and own that land.

Speaker 1 3:59

Do you know? Coinbase, yeah. Bitcoin, yeah, yeah, that sounds familiar.

Speaker 3 4:02

So, in other words, we can set up a way for the land to be traded using Bitcoin USDC or Ethereum USDC.

Speaker 2 4:12

Yep USDC.

Speaker 1 4:13

Similar to Bitcoin.

Speaker 2 4:14

Okay, so we're not. You don't want to buy like. This is a different way of buying land.

Speaker 3 4:21

It's a different way of building liquidity into land that has never existed without blockchain. It's a different way to buy land. It's a different way to sell land. It's a different way to conserve and monetize land as well.

Speaker 2 4:36

You can add value to the land, you can add value to the land.

Speaker 3 4:39

This is what we're talking about. That's correct. That's correct so.

How Land Tokenization Works

Speaker 2 4:41

So let's say I have my house and I do I have a house right house right, yeah, so I got the mortgage, whatever. Now then I add these Bitcoins to my property, so we'll use your house, for example, you own a house and you have the real estate that the house lies on, right?

Speaker 3 4:56

Yeah, there's a deed and title to your house. Yep, correct. So we can take that deed and title, build it into a fungible, tradable token, wrap it with Bitcoin and we can say okay, here's your one million tokens that represent ownership of your house, and then we can build a liquidity pool for that house to trade on an exchange or multiple exchanges.

Speaker 1 5:19

Can you swap houses with different coins?

Speaker 3 5:21

You could.

Speaker 2 5:24

That might be another podcast. Okay, that's another podcast. I've tried, I've tried. Good idea, good idea, I like it, I like it.

Speaker 3 5:31

But essentially, we can say okay, here's your 1 million tokens for your house, and you can then say you know what? I'm going to sell 5% of my house. So I'm going to sell 5% of those tokens right 50,000 tokens and you're going to sell them into the exchange, into the global market on blockchain, and you're going to receive Bitcoin in return, and so essentially, that's a very simplistic way of looking at it.

Speaker 2 6:01

Well, that's how I am. I'm simple, I'm a simple guy. I knew that. I knew that simple way.

Speaker 3 6:05

You have to. In our case, what we do is we use land in this model because we can drive revenue from the land to give that token holder something of value, yeah, and so essentially that value is we can either pay them, pay the token holders revenue from that land, or we can, for example, take the revenues that are derived from that land, reinvest them back into the land to add value to that equity. Token holder.

Speaker 2 6:35

Different way of getting money out of your house. Different, yeah.

Speaker 1 6:37

That is neat, that is pretty cool. How long has this been a thing in the economy?

Speaker 3 6:41

So I started the company in January 2019. We started as a traditional land investment company and we pivoted to blockchain in 2021. We started learning about it in late 2020.

Speaker 2 6:55

Okay, how did you come up with this idea? Who's coming up with this idea? So?

Speaker 3 6:58

I came up with the idea.

Speaker 2 6:59

All right, man, there you go.

Speaker 3 7:01

We were trying to monetize a track of land that we own in Virginia.

Speaker 3 7:05

Trying to monetize a track of land that we own in Virginia, and what we wanted to do was to figure out how to drive revenue from that land in a much more efficient and quicker way than what the traditional models offer, whether it's from monetizing the biodiversity, credit opportunity on the land, carbon credits, conservation niche, renewable energy, tiny home rentals, whatever it may be.

Speaker 3 7:31

And so I read an article about the metaverse in late 2020, and the company called the Sandbox, I think. They're based out of the UK and they had sold hundreds of millions of dollars of virtual land in the metaverse in late 2020. And we were trying to raise $13 million for 8,000 acres of real land in Virginia and North Carolina. And I said this just makes no sense to me. And so you know, this company is selling virtual land, what I call pretend land, and we're trying to monetize real land. So I figured out how to take a lot of what the metaverse had created and that demand and how they did that, and we brought real land into the equation. Essentially is what we did and we really 2021, 22, 23 is when we really so you're doing this primarily in Virginia.

Speaker 3 8:22

So we actually own land in North Carolina and Virginia. We're working on some opportunities outside of Virginia South Carolina, arkansas, alabama, mississippi and some stuff outside of the United States as well. Nice.

Speaker 1 8:33

So are people finding you online, or how are people coming to you?

Speaker 3 8:36

People find us primarily online, through social media platforms, through networking.

Speaker 2 8:40

What are those?

Speaker 3 8:41

Podcasts, twitter, linkedin, facebook. What's your handle?

Speaker 2 8:46

though TikTok. Oh gosh, I can't. What's your handle though?

Speaker 3 8:48

TikTok. Oh gosh, I can't remember.

Speaker 2 8:49

So the name of the business again was Outside Global and Yakin Inc.

Speaker 3 8:55

Y-a-k-i-n. So we actually own a thousand acres right outside of Bowen Rock, north Carolina, which is the headwaters of the Yakin River. We own the land where the headwaters form, which turns into the Pee Dee River that flows all the way down to Georgetown, south Carolina.

Speaker 1 9:09

Oh, okay. So, that's what brought you here. That's what brought us here. Yep, awesome, we're going to really focus on the Yadkin PD River Basin.

Business Partnerships and Future Goals

Speaker 3 9:20

We had the opportunity to work with Hunt Broyhill Broyhill Furniture in North Carolina, where I'm from, to acquire that land and do a stock swap with him, so he's now second largest shareholder in the company. So, we're working together to really drive a story around that land. We're working with Eric Church Whiskey, gypsy Brand, on the Yakin.

Speaker 2 9:39

Okay, cool. So yeah, how can we help you? What do you need from our audience? Help get the word out.

Speaker 3 9:44

So good question. So I'm looking for potential partners here that can really help us build out the platform, the technology platform, okay, to help us work with land, find other landowners to help them build their land and tokenize it into a digital asset? Yeah, we are, and in the same platform, we're working on ways to utilize artificial intelligence, ai, and to identify those landowners, identify the revenue opportunities, et cetera. We really want to implement a lot of artificial intelligence into it. Sure, we're working in a very antiquated industry, which is land investing globally, but it's a huge industry, and so we are seeking to connect with other landowners, particularly in this region and the Yadkin PD River Basin and beyond, that understand what we're doing and have an interest in it and want to learn about it and talk about opportunities to work together. We're not raising capital, but we're always looking for investors that are very strategic to have a conversation with, amazing, and so you know the right strategic investor we could be open to raising capital.

Speaker 2 10:55

Yeah, all right, I love it. Yeah, so you hear that listeners. Yeah, if you know anybody, or you yourself, get a hold of Erin. What a great mission, erin. Thanks for sharing your story, man.

Speaker 1 11:06

Thank you so much. This is awesome.

Speaker 2 11:07

Thank you.

Speaker 1 11:07

We'll hopefully see you some more at Dick South today. That's right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 11:10

That's right. That's right. So thank you to our sponsors. Charleston Media Group.

Speaker 1 11:16

Charleston American Marketing Association, dick South.

Speaker 2 11:21

Dick.

Speaker 1 11:21

South Cousin, Larry yeah.

Speaker 2 11:23

Larry, I'm just going to keep his last name out of it Monteith Monteith. We're excited to be here.

Speaker 1 11:30

We're going to take a short break.

Speaker 2 11:31

We've got a queue here, so we've got a half hour left.

Speaker 1 11:34

We've been going live since 10.

Speaker 2 11:37

We have to go to 10-minute interviews here in a minute.

Speaker 1 11:39

All right. Well, this was a lot to cover, so thank you for being here. Thank you, very Super interesting, super interesting, erin. Thank you. Good luck to you both. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.