On 1 July 2026, the Bank of Israel changed the arithmetic of buying a home.

Circular 06-2840, amending Directive 329, rewrote how banks calculate the payment-to-income ceiling. Every repayment secured against the same property, for the same borrower, now counts under one roof — instead of each loan being weighed against whatever disposable income was left over. Households that would have been approved in June started getting turned down in July. Not because anything changed about them. Because the formula did.

Which is a strange moment for a man to launch a company whose entire premise is that you shouldn’t need that much of a mortgage in the first place.

Jonathan Hababou Solomon didn’t build EquityLiving because of that rule. He’d been building it for months before the circular took effect, and when I asked him about the regulatory environment he didn’t mention it once. But the calendar handed him something, and it’s worth naming up front: as of this summer, the thing Israeli banks have made harder is exactly the thing his structure is designed to route around.

Here’s his version of how he got there, and it has nothing to do with housing policy:

“From my background in trading and systems development, I built a habit of hunting for structural inefficiencies across markets.”

That’s the whole company in one sentence.

What We Can and Can’t Tell You

Sherman’s rules don’t move, so let’s be straight about this one before we go further, because it’s unusual.

EquityLiving has no press coverage. Not in Calcalist, not in Globes, not in TheMarker, not in Geektime, not anywhere in English. No Crunchbase profile. No Dealroom entry. No funding round to react to. One employee.

It also has no independently verified closed transaction. Solomon says the legal work is complete and the first live deals are being structured. So: everything in this piece about deal mechanics, pipeline and traction is his account, on the record, unverified. It’s labeled that way throughout, and there’s an honest ledger at the bottom.

We’re publishing anyway, for the reason Sherman usually publishes: the interesting thing here isn’t the company’s traction. It’s the legal and regulatory problem the company is standing on top of — a set of questions about Israeli land law and purchase tax that nobody in the Israeli ecosystem has had to answer yet, because nobody has tried this here.

Also, one thing he said in passing describes a second business that no one has written about at all. We’ll get to it.

The Spread

Solomon studied at the Université du Québec à Montréal, 2003–2007. Roughly fifteen years in financial markets after that — sell-side equity trading, institutional, then into crypto liquidity at Enigma Securities, the regulated trading arm of Makor Group. Along the way he co-founded A.R.I.A., a crypto ratings agency that launched publicly in May 2024 with ambitions to be a Moody’s for digital assets, and Strateline, a systematic trading-signal service built on an algorithm from his trading years.¹

None of which is a housing career. That’s the point.

The insight came, by his account, from advising on real-estate tokenization projects — a category built entirely for people who want exposure to property without living in it:

“Every crowdfunding and tokenization project out there focuses entirely on the investment side. The actual bottleneck is on the other side, the Resident. Investors want ROI, residents want a home and a lifestyle, and those are genuinely different objectives. I realized that if you match the two properly, you can maximize both sides at once instead of forcing one to subsidize the other. That’s EquityLiving.”

Read that as a trade. Two counterparties want different things from the same asset. Everyone else built products that serve one of them and treat the other as a yield-generation mechanism. His move is to price them separately and match them.

Israeli proptech usually arrives from the tech side — better search, better listings, better property management, you name it. This one arrives from a trading desk, and every downstream decision looks like it. The 50/50 split. The 25/75 appreciation waterfall. The deliberate refusal to hold a single property on the company’s own balance sheet.

On focus, since he’s got three ventures on his LinkedIn: “EquityLiving is my primary focus, full stop.” ARIA he describes in the past tense, as his first venture and first real experience of entrepreneurship. Strateline he calls live but fully automated, taking no active time.²

The Deal

Here’s the structure, per Solomon, in the plainest form he gave it:

“Resident and Backer co-own 50/50. The Resident exclusively lives there and pays a usage fee, well below market rent.”

Notice what the Resident actually buys. A materially lower monthly outflow, half of an appreciating asset, and access to an apartment they couldn’t have financed alone. What they give up is three-quarters of the appreciation on the Backer’s half, and the compounding that comes with owning the whole thing.

In a Tel Aviv market where average apartment prices hit roughly ₪4.56M in Q1 2026, up 10.3% year over year, that’s a defensible trade for someone otherwise locked out entirely. In a flat market, it’s a Resident who paid a usage fee for nine years, carried a mortgage on half a home, and owns 25% of not very much.

That’s not a gotcha. It’s the shape of every shared-equity instrument ever built, and it’s the question the model has to survive.

The Business Nobody Is Covering

Buried in his answer about who the Backers are is a second product that appears in no public material anywhere:

“Second, existing property owners who want to sell 50% of what they already own to a Resident, take some cash out to keep or reinvest, and keep a usage-fee income plus 75% of the profit at sale.”

That is not the same business as matching an investor to a first-time buyer. It’s a liquidity-release product for people who already own property — the asset-rich, cash-poor problem that Israeli homeowners currently have almost no way to solve short of selling the whole apartment or borrowing against it. And the Bank of Israel just made the borrowing route harder, which is the second time that circular quietly works in his favor.

Structurally it’s a cousin of the French démembrement de propriété — separating ownership from use — which a francophone founder would know in his bones. Commercially it maps onto the American equity-release players: Point, Unison, Hometap, Unlock. Those companies are worth hundreds of millions of dollars collectively and none of them operate here.

It also solves his hardest operational problem in one move. Product one requires him to find a Resident, find a Backer, and match them on a specific apartment. Product two arrives with the apartment and the capital already attached — the seller is the Backer, and the property is already theirs.

The Category Has a Body Count

Solomon was asked what he makes of the fact that this category has killed better-funded companies than his. It was his sharpest answer of the thirteen:

“That model concentrates real estate risk on one balance sheet and creates a misalignment, the platform makes money whether or not the resident actually ends up owning anything.”

“We don’t hold property. The resident and the investor are on title together from day one, both have skin in the actual asset, not a rent-to-own option on it.”

The record supports the diagnosis, and it’s brutal.

Divvy Homes raised more than $400M in equity and roughly $1B in debt, hit a $2B valuation, and was on track to pass $100M in revenue by 2022. Then rates rose, the spread between its financing costs and local rent levels inverted, and the monthly payments it needed from new customers stopped making sense. Three rounds of layoffs by late 2023. In 2025 it was acquired by Maymont Homes, a Brookfield division — a deal one outlet described as sold for parts, and another summarized as a bloodbath for investors and employee equity.

Home Partners of America, bought by Blackstone for roughly $6B in 2021, is winding down. ZeroDown’s rent-to-own program has been on hold since April 2023 and the company pivoted to home search. Landis survives across about ten US states, propped up by a partnership with a single-family-rental landlord.

Every one of those companies owned the houses. That’s the common thread, and Solomon has correctly identified it.

Here’s the counterweight he didn’t offer, and the article owes you: not holding property protects the company, not the Backer. Divvy’s investors lost money through a diversified fund. An EquityLiving Backer loses money on one apartment, in one neighborhood, with no diversification whatsoever. That’s a real difference in who carries the risk. It is not a difference in whether the risk exists.

The Comparison That Actually Matters

Everyone reaching for a comparable here reaches for Wayhome, the UK gradual-homeownership company backed by pension money — £500M+ in institutional commitments and an £8M Series A led by Allianz X and Augmentum Fintech. It’s the wrong one.

The right one is French, and it’s uncanny.

Virgil, founded in Paris in 2018 by two former onefinestay operators, co-invests equity alongside first-time buyers on their principal residence. French coverage describes Virgil’s position with a phrase that should stop you: propriétaire dormant — sleeping co-owner. Which is, near enough word for word, Solomon’s silent Backer.

Same customer. Same framing — Virgil’s founders coined plafond de pierre, the stone ceiling, for exactly the affordability wall Solomon is describing in Tel Aviv. The decisive difference is the bottom row. Virgil put €7M of its Series A directly into apartments, which means Virgil is exposed to French property. EquityLiving isn’t exposed to anything.

That’s a cleaner articulation of his own Divvy argument than the one he gave.

Asked why he isn’t chasing institutional money like Wayhome, he gave a market-structure answer rather than a strategic one:

*“The Israeli residential market has historically been owned mainly by individual investors, and that return profile has been remarkably resilient over the past 20 years."*³

Fit the market as it exists rather than reshape it. It’s consistent with everything else about how he’s built this.

Section 37

Now the part that will decide whether any of this works, and that no coverage of this company will contain because there is no coverage of this company.

Section 37(a) of Israel’s Land Law, 1969: every co-owner of jointly held real estate is entitled, at any time, to demand dissolution of the co-ownership. Not for cause. Not after a dispute. At any time. Israeli lawyers call it pirouk shituf, and the courts treat it as a starting principle — the legislature’s view being that forced partnership is a recipe for endless conflict.

You can restrict it by agreement. But Section 37(b) limits the restriction: where a co-ownership agreement bars or limits the right to demand partition for a period exceeding three years, the court may, after three years, order partition regardless of the agreement, if it considers that just in the circumstances.

Now go back and look at the deal table. Nine-year term. Free exit at year six.

The entire economic logic of an EquityLiving deal depends on both parties staying in place well past the three-year mark at which an Israeli court acquires discretion to unwind the arrangement anyway. Courts do sometimes uphold long-standing co-ownership agreements under 37(b) — there’s case law both ways, and it turns on justice in the circumstances rather than on a bright line. But “a judge might side with us” is a different quality of assurance than “the structure is airtight.”

Solomon’s position:

“We built the model to fit inside existing Israeli legal frameworks rather than trying to move the walls.”

“At this point the legal side is done, we’re now structuring the first live deals.”

He named no law firm. He named no bank. He named no non-bank lender. And when asked why nobody else in Israel has built this, he was disarmingly straight about it:

“Honestly, I’ve been asked that question before and I don’t have a clean answer.”

Then:

“The legal side has genuinely been a challenge, untangling a structure like this inside existing frameworks. But that’s exactly the kind of problem I’ve spent my career on.”

We believe he’s done the work. We can’t confirm who did it or what it produced. Those are different sentences and the piece is honest about which one it’s making.

The Tax Arithmetic

Israeli purchase tax is assessed per owner, on that owner’s own housing status — which makes a two-owner structure a two-tax-position problem.

There’s a well-known threshold in Israeli land taxation: holding up to one-third of a residential apartment doesn’t count as owning an apartment. At 50/50, the Backer sails past it. A Backer who already owns property in Israel pays the additional-apartment rate — 8% up to roughly ₪6.06M of value, 10% above — on their half. That’s a real cost baked into every single transaction, and it doesn’t appear anywhere in the monthly-payment comparisons on Solomon’s LinkedIn.

To his credit, he didn’t dodge it:

“We account for that when we model returns for that specific investor, it’s not a flat return number that applies to everyone regardless of their existing tax position.”

Correct, and checkable. But note what it implies: the model could have been drawn at one-third / two-thirds to keep the Backer under the threshold entirely. It wasn’t. Fifty-fifty is a deliberate choice carrying a deliberate tax cost, and nobody has asked him why.

The Resident’s side is cleaner. Half an apartment, if it’s all they own, qualifies for single-apartment rates. And there’s one group for whom the arithmetic gets genuinely attractive: olim. Under Regulation 12A, a new immigrant pays zero purchase tax on value up to roughly ₪1.98M and 0.5% from there to about ₪6.06M — usable from a year before aliyah to seven years after.

Which is why this line, from his answer about what success looks like in twelve months, is the one to sit with:

“Residents who become owners because of this who otherwise couldn’t have. New immigrants who get access to property in Israel they wouldn’t have had access to.”

An oleh holding 50% of a Tel Aviv apartment, taxed under 12A on their share, financed by a stranger’s capital on the other half, is the single best-fitted use case this product has.

What the State Studied and Never Built

One more thing, because it reframes the whole story.

The Knesset Research and Information Center — parliament’s own research arm — has published comparative work on affordable-housing models in developed countries. It documents UK-style shared ownership: co-ownership and shared equity, income-capped, with rental-and-option-to-buy arrangements under co-ownership terms. The model is described, examined, filed.

Israeli housing policy then spent a decade on the price side instead. Mechir LaMishtaken and its successors work by selling developers discounted land and capping the resale price — the flagship route offers roughly 20% off, capped at ₪300,000, allocated by lottery. Rental subsidy programs do similar work from the other end. All of it attacks what a home costs. None of it touches how ownership is structured.

So the state looked at restructuring ownership, wrote it up, and moved on. A solo founder with no capital, no co-founder, no named lawyer and no closed deal is now attempting it privately.

That’s either the most Israeli sentence in this article or the most damning one, depending on how the next twelve months go.

Honest Math

EquityLiving is self-funded, pre-revenue as far as anyone outside can verify, and a Seed raise is planned but not started. The structural read is more interesting than the financial one. EquityLiving has two entirely separate capital needs and they should never be conflated: operating capital for the company, which is what the Seed is for, and deal capital for the co-ownership positions, which comes from Backers and never touches the balance sheet. That separation is the company’s core bet and its answer to Divvy. It’s also its ceiling — growth is gated by Backer supply, one relationship at a time, which is a slower path than any balance-sheet model and depends entirely on one person’s ability to source both sides of every trade.

Which is where this lands on the wall Sherman keeps running into. Ziv Mizrahi building a game engine alone. Jordan Winston as the host and the salesman and the face. Rachel Fiegler with the operating knowledge living in two people’s heads. David Popovich fighting the Bar Association with a LinkedIn account and no lawyer. Every one of them stuck at the same place: the thing that makes you good is the thing you can’t hand off.

Solomon’s version is sharper than most, because what he can’t hand off isn’t taste or nerve. It’s a bespoke legal and tax structure, negotiated per transaction, in a jurisdiction where any co-owner can walk into court after three years and ask a judge to unwind it.

He says it for five years and beyond:

“I’ve built and tested other things before, this one is different, I genuinely believe in it, I like the returns we’re already seeing, and I also care about the social impact of it.”

That phrase — the returns we’re already seeing — is the one we’d most like a number attached to. Until there is one, this is a very good structure with a very good regulatory tailwind, built by someone whose instincts are visibly right, and zero confirmed apartments with anyone living in them.

Both of those things are true at once. We’ll be watching which one moves first. 💜

Fast facts: EquityLiving

What is EquityLiving? An Israeli co-ownership platform. A Resident and a passive investor (a “Backer”) buy an apartment 50/50, both registered on the Tabu. The Resident lives there and pays a below-market usage fee plus a mortgage on their own half. At exit, each side recovers capital at par and appreciation splits 25/75 in the Backer’s favor. Nine-year term, free exit from year six.

Who founded it? Jonathan Hababou Solomon. UQAM Montreal 2003–2007, roughly 15 years in financial markets, previously Enigma Securities, co-founder of ARIA and Strateline. Sole employee, Tel Aviv District. Founded 2026.

Who are the Backers? Two types, per Solomon: HNWIs, family offices and funds deploying fresh capital against their own criteria; and existing property owners selling 50% of what they already hold, releasing cash while keeping a usage-fee income and 75% of the upside.

Has anything closed? No transaction has been independently verified. Solomon says the legal work is complete and first deals are being structured.

What did it raise? Nothing. Self-funded. A Seed round is planned but not started. Note that deal capital comes from Backers, not from the company — the two are separate.

Who else does this? Virgil (France) is the closest analogue. Wayhome (UK) runs an institutional version. Divvy Homes, Home Partners of America and ZeroDown are the cautionary tales. No direct Israeli competitor was identified in English or Hebrew search.

What’s verified and what isn’t? Israeli land law, purchase tax brackets, oleh benefits, the Bank of Israel circular and all competitor histories are verified. Deal mechanics, pipeline, traction, revenue and the completeness of the legal structuring are Solomon’s account only.

Contact: equity-living.com · Jonathan Hababou Solomon on LinkedIn. Tell him Sherman sent you.

Notes on the numbers

We publish what we can verify and label what we can’t. Here’s the honest ledger for this piece:

1. Career details — Enigma Securities, ARIA, Strateline, UQAM — come from Solomon’s own statements and public data-broker profiles. Not independently audited.
2. Solomon describes ARIA in the past tense. The aria-crypto.com team page still lists him as Co-Founder & Co-CEO. Founders frequently remain on team pages after stepping back, so read the discrepancy as unresolved rather than as a contradiction.
3. The claim about twenty years of resilient returns for Israeli individual property investors is Solomon’s, offered without a source. Sherman has not verified it.
4. The illustrative buyers who appear in Solomon’s public marketing — Eitan, Maya, Elad — are not customers. He confirmed directly that they are illustrative personas built on real market numbers, not individual clients with closed deals. Any coverage presenting them as customers is wrong.
5. No closed transaction, no resident count, no pipeline figures, no revenue have been disclosed or independently verified.
6. Section 37 of the Land Law, purchase tax brackets, Regulation 12A oleh benefits and Bank of Israel Circular 06-2840 are all independently verified against primary sources and Israeli legal-practice analysis. Their application to EquityLiving’s specific structure is Sherman’s analysis, not a legal opinion, and no lawyer for the company was made available to comment.
7. Divvy, Home Partners, ZeroDown, Landis, Wayhome and Virgil figures come from published reporting and company disclosures. Virgil’s current operating status could not be confirmed; its last reported raise was November 2022.

This piece is based on a written Q&A with Jonathan Hababou Solomon conducted by Sherman in August 2026, on the record, alongside the public sources cited above.