How to own a piece of an F-6 plot for one lakh rupees

What Xstate actually is

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing two guests he has been tracking for around four months — Asif and Altamash, the co-founders of Xstate — and admitting that he was initially skeptical of the product. He asks them to start with the simplest possible explanation.

Asif gives it. “Xstate is a fractional real estate investment platform,” he says. The premise is that every real estate investment in Pakistan today is tied to owning a whole property, and the platform lets people buy smaller, more affordable portions of land instead. Muzamil reaches for an example: a five-hundred-square-yard plot in F-6 Islamabad worth perhaps twenty crore. Could he buy half a square yard of it? “That’s how it is,” Asif confirms. The plot is bought whole by Xstate, then broken into a thousand parcels of one lakh each. A ten-crore property that used to be out of reach is suddenly in reach.

The reasoning behind the choice of asset is deliberate. Premium Islamabad sectors, Asif argues, have an established market, no encroachment risk, no default risk, and the most rapid appreciation in value of any property class in the country. They are, in his phrase, “the gold standards.” The Xstate tagline lands on the same idea: “Land will belong to everyone.”

From a premium agency to fractional ownership

Altamash walks Muzamil through how the company arrived at fractional ownership, because the original Xstate was a completely different business. When they started in January 2021, it was a premium real estate agency aimed at Pakistani expatriates — proper photography, drone footage, end-to-end due diligence so an overseas buyer flying in for fifteen days did not have to waste the trip chasing dealers. Zameen.com existed, but the listings were noisy and often fake. “There could be just like a dozen of them, maybe less,” Altamash says of any hundred properties listed for sale on the bigger portals.

The agency model ran into a trust problem. As a new company without agents on the books, Xstate had to onboard sellers directly, and expatriates were reluctant to commit large sums to an unproven brand. While solving that, the founders found a more interesting problem underneath it. Most expatriates did not actually want a house — they wanted exposure to Pakistani real estate as an investment vehicle, and the act of flying home to buy one was friction they hated.

The tokenization idea had been on Altamash’s mind for a while, blocked by uncertainty about the legal side. He pitched it to Muneeb Maayr, the CEO of Bykea, who pointed him at the SECP sandbox where two companies were already working on similar concepts. By August, Asif and Altamash had met, surveyed the market, and pivoted. Eighty-five percent of the people they polled were investing in real estate purely as a savings vehicle. Ninety-five percent had a budget under twenty-five lakh — which, in an Islamabad market where the cheapest serious plot starts at fifty lakh, meant they were locked out.

Why the holding is the problem, not the prices

Muzamil shares his own version of the same wall. He recently called about a plot in B-17, expecting it to still be a cheaper market, and was quoted one crore twenty lakh for a five-marla plot, with the house to be built on top. “I did not have that opportunity,” he says, “because the market is just completely nuts right now.”

Asif extends the math. On a salary of one lakh a month, with fifty thousand saved, it takes eight and a half years to accumulate fifty lakh — and by the time you have it, that same plot is no longer a fifty-lakh plot. Banks do not help: most carry interest that is religiously off-limits, and even the secular logic is weak, with KIBOR at seven and a half percent and bank returns at six and a half percent, structurally below inflation. Stocks have their own barrier to entry. Crypto, despite Pakistan reportedly ranking second globally in blockchain investment adoption, is a science most people lose money learning. Asif mentions a first cousin who lost thirty lakh in three months.

Later in the discussion, Asif sharpens the analytical point that anchors the whole pitch. The problem with Pakistani real estate is not the prices. It is the holding. An average canal house in Islamabad worth ten crore yields perhaps three lakh a month in rent — a 3.6 percent annual return that he calls “nothing.” Converted into human terms, that ten crore is “fifty people’s ten years of salary parked uselessly.” The genetics, he concedes, are not going to change. Pakistanis love land. The question is whether you can let them hold it more liquidly.

The legal grey area and the Bahria precedent

The conversation turns to the regulator. Muzamil presses on the legal status of what Xstate is doing. Altamash explains that SECP has already issued sandbox licenses to two companies working in a similar space and that the team is willing to enter the next sandbox cohort. Before going live they consulted senior legal experts, including people who write regulations for the SECP, and were given a green signal. The activity is in a grey area, not an illegal one.

Asif adds the framing that matters legally. “Xstate is bringing equity-based crowdfunding,” he says. The asset listed on the platform is legally one hundred percent owned by Xstate before it is tokenized. There is no fictional pitch, no idea-stage fundraising, no Kickstarter-shaped risk where investors might fund something that never materializes. The State Bank has categorically banned donation-based and charity-based crowdfunding in Pakistan; equity-based crowdfunding is the lane Xstate sits in, which is precisely why it is defensible.

The legal precedent for selling fractional claims on a property without transferring the title is, Asif points out, decades old. Bahria Town buys land from RDA or LDA, breaks it into five-, ten-, and twenty-marla parcels, and issues allotment letters — printed certificates with the registrar’s signature, legally enforceable in court. “We are doing the same thing but with technology,” he says. Muzamil’s line lands the comparison: “We have gone from marla to square feet.”

Blockchain is on the roadmap, not in the product

Muzamil asks the obvious follow-up. If the team is technical, why not put the tokens on a blockchain so the ownership ledger is genuinely tamper-proof? Altamash is direct about the trade-off. The team would be glad to. But asking a typical Pakistani investor to install MetaMask, understand browser extensions, and manage a wallet would kill adoption immediately. “Pakistan is actually not ready for that,” he says. Blockchain is on the roadmap for the following year, contingent on the user experience becoming friendly enough for an ordinary buyer to use without thinking about it.

The real innovation: a property exchange

The middle of the conversation contains the most ambitious idea in the episode. Muzamil walks through what happens after the initial fractionalization — once a thousand people own a piece of a plot, what makes their money not stuck for years? Asif takes the question. Fractional ownership exists in many markets, he concedes. The problem all of them share is liquidity. Real estate, by definition, is not a liquid asset class. Even in the United States, flipping a house is a slow, cumbersome process.

The real innovation Xstate is preparing — and hopes to launch within a week or two of the recording — is a property exchange. “The world’s first real estate exchange,” Asif calls it, “in which basically your shares in the property are traded just like a stock exchange.” Premium properties listed instead of companies. A current market value visible at all times. A buyer for your share findable on demand. The business model is correspondingly simple: a two percent commission on every transaction, no cut of investor profits. The profits flow entirely to the people who own the asset.

To make pricing honest, the platform displays two figures side by side: the Xstate price, which is whatever the most recent trade settled at, and a market price calculated by an in-house AI engine that crawls Graana and Zameen.com, weighted by feedback from retail realtors, to produce a benchmark per-square-foot value for the locality. If a seller wants to dump their share at four thousand when the market price is five thousand, the platform does not stop them — and the next buyer pockets the discount.

Productivity, casino dynamics, and what construction would change

Muzamil pushes on a harder critique. If Xstate succeeds at bringing the remaining ninety-five percent of the population into the real estate pool, demand goes up against a fixed supply, and prices climb further out of reach for anyone trying to actually live somewhere. The investors win. The society does not necessarily. He layers a second concern on top: parking money in dead land is closer to a casino than to wealth creation. There is no productivity being generated.

Asif accepts the framing and answers it in two parts. First, on the holding problem — Xstate is not just tokenizing, it is also liquidating. Anyone who already owns a property can transfer the title to Xstate, retain ninety percent ownership, and sell ten percent on the exchange to free cash without losing the asset. That is the same trick the wealthy already pull through bank collateral, made available to everyone else.

Second, on productivity, the company will not stay land-only forever. The roadmap includes partnering with construction firms and minting new tokens — with existing investor consent — to fund builds on properties already owned by the platform. Construction is where the bulk of real estate profits actually sit. Islamabad land appreciates around twenty-five percent annually on its own; adding construction can deliver a forty percent appreciation on top within a year, plus rental income, plus jobs. “Xstate is a technology company, and it will stay technology forever,” Asif says. The construction will sit with partners.

The first IPO and the overseas pull

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks what has actually happened so far. The first listing was an eight-marla plot in Faisal Town, directly facing the 18 on Kashmir Highway, priced at eighty-six lakh. It sold out in roughly two weeks; Altamash held the close for an additional month for due diligence. Across forty-five days the platform has sold property worth three and a half crore. A second listing in D-12 Islamabad, priced at nine and a half crore for twenty-four marlas, is now live, with properties in DHA Phase 3, DHA City Karachi, and DHA Phase 9 Lahore in the pipeline.

The more surprising number is the geographic spread of the buyers. Investments came in from fifteen countries. Xstate accepts only electronic bank transfers — no cash — and overseas Pakistanis have been funding their accounts through the Roshan Digital Account program. “Now think about an overseas Pakistani. He wants to invest a thousand dollars,” Asif says. The ticket home would cost more than the investment. Sitting on a sofa abroad and putting that thousand dollars into a Pakistani plot is exactly what the Roshan Digital infrastructure was supposed to enable, and Xstate is one of the early platforms making the unlock concrete. The foreign exchange implications, he argues, are large enough that government patronage from SECP and the State Bank should be obvious.

Closing: a flat world, and what Pakistan does next

Muzamil closes with the question he tends to ask every guest — how they see Pakistan in 2050. Asif answers first. The world is getting flatter. For a software engineer in Pakistan, the opportunities available are no longer materially different from the opportunities available in the United States; the skill is what matters. He pushes back on the claim that Pakistan lacks talent, citing his prior company Hire Ninja, which placed Pakistan-based engineers on work for Deloitte, Luminary, and other Fortune 500 firms — several of whom were eventually hired away outright. The country has talent. It needs more direction-setting infrastructure: code academy-style retraining programs for the large pool of mechanical and electrical engineers who graduate without a clear path. An IT industry currently around two billion dollars, he believes, can credibly reach a hundred billion within five or six years.

Altamash closes on human capital. Population is not a burden if it is trained properly. He describes seeing jackets made in Sialkot being sold from homes in Malaysia, and credits Pakistanis worldwide with entrepreneurship, skill, and the willingness to build wherever they land. The geographical excuse no longer holds. The next thirty years, he suggests, could be the best period in the country’s history if the IT industry is properly backed and the human capital is properly catalyzed.

Muzamil thanks both founders and signs off — confident that whatever happens to Xstate specifically, the model and the vision behind it are not a matter of if but of when.