If you’ve spent any time house hunting lately, you’ve likely had an easy time finding a place to live… but a harder time actually making the math work.
Miami-based fintech Milo has spent the past several years tackling that problem for a particular group: people who may have significant wealth in Bitcoin and other digital assets, but whose financial lives don’t fit neatly into a traditional mortgage application.
Now, founder and CEO Josip Rupena is looking for more ways to bridge that gap.
“We’re finding that people that are coming in wanting to buy primary homes, they have Bitcoin, but then they also have, ‘Can I get a lower rate?’” Rupena [pictured above] told Refresh Miami.
Milo has spent much of this year working on ways to expand how customers can qualify for mortgages, while exploring partnerships with larger financial companies that could offer Milo’s products to their own customers. The company is also examining how it can bring down borrowing costs as the gap between renting and owning remains stubbornly wide.
Consumer interest, Rupena said, has remained roughly flat year over year. The bigger challenge has been turning that interest into actual home purchases.
Milo entered the year expecting interest rates to fall and hoping home prices would soften. Neither has happened to the extent many buyers hoped, Rupena said. In Miami, high-end home prices in particular have remained strong.
“It’s still cheaper right now in a lot of geos to actually rent versus buy, but people are interested,” he said.
For Milo’s crypto-heavy customer base, rising digital asset values could change the equation. Rupena said stronger Bitcoin prices can give prospective buyers the confidence to accept a higher monthly housing cost in exchange for putting down roots, especially if they believe they can refinance later.
Meanwhile, Milo is considering expanding the assets it uses to help underwrite borrowers. One area the team is watching is tokenized equities, although Rupena stressed that the company has nothing to announce yet. Milo expects to have more meaningful product developments around affordability and asset expansion over the next two quarters.
AI is changing another part of the mortgage process: how borrowers find Milo in the first place.
Rupena said prospective customers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools which mortgage providers can work with their financial profiles. Milo often appears in those answers because of years of online coverage of its crypto mortgage products.
That shift comes with a catch. Mortgage rates and products change quickly, while AI tools can surface old information from previously published sources.
Still, Rupena sees a much bigger change ahead. Instead of borrowers searching through lender websites and comparing products themselves, AI agents could eventually sift through financial products based on a person’s specific finances.
“Everyone just assumes you can get a mortgage until you try to go get a mortgage, and then you realize everybody’s profile and financial situation is very, very unique,” Rupena said.
If AI can make sense of those differences, the mortgage application of the future may look very different from today’s stack of forms, websites, and phone calls.
For Milo, that future starts with a fairly old-fashioned goal: helping more people turn the wealth they already have into a place to call home.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Propy and Milo team up so diamond-handed buyers can skip the cash-out
- Milo tops $100 million in crypto mortgages as it doubles down on Bitcoin-backed home loans
- Miami’s newest real estate amenity: turning crypto into keys
- MoonPay’s latest $100M buy signals Miami wants to own the rails of crypto
- Can Bitcoin solve the broken homebuying math? Milo thinks it can – October 6, 2026
- Emma Harris’ second act is off the wall – October 5, 2026
- doxx.net raises $38M to put AI agents on a shorter leash – October 1, 2026
