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A six-story building in Harlem has quietly become the first office property to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The team behind the listing, Lex, has already put a 600-space parking garage in Portland, Maine on the exchange but this is the first commercial office property available for investment. The feat was created thanks to a partnership between Lex and Nasdaq. Dean Sterrett, co-founder, COO, and Head of Product for LEX told Propmodo in a previous interview, “By leveraging Nasdaq’s technology we will be able to offer equity in these buildings to anyone that uses a stock trading platform like E-Trade or Charles Schwab.”

The liquidity that comes from being able to instantly accept investment from anyone with an E-Trade account is an obvious win for any building that goes public. But there are limitations. Selling a share of a publicly traded building is only possible if there is a market for the investment. A small building in Harlem might not get the exposure needed to create enough trading volume to take advantage of the increased liquidity. Also, the asset’s value being pegged to the market rate for the stock could expose it to volatile price fluctuations. Currently, the building is trading at just under its IPO price of $250 per share, which valued the property at just around $11 million.

No matter what the outcome is for this one building, the opportunities created from fractional ownership are clear. The traditional method of offering a piece of commercial real estate creates a lot of legal and admins fees associated with taking on new investors. Not to mention the fact that many retail investors do not qualify as accredited investors for commercial property, a distinction that might become even harder with a proposed rule change. A way for property owners to easily fractionalize and sell ownership of their buildings could eventually change the way that buildings are bought and sold as well as open up commercial real estate to a much larger investment pool.