Greeting Real Estate Investors!
There has been a ton of buzz in the media over the last few years about crowdfunding and you have no doubt heard of Kickstarter.com as a place where thousands of new products and companies have gotten their start. But did you know that there are sites that offer crowd funding of real estate? Or a site that offers special calculators and search feature specifically tailored for residential investment properties? We found them and want to tell you a bit about them as well as rank them in terms of value.
#3 Fundrise.com
This is one of the main real estate crowd funding sites and they offer investors the ability to invest in Real Estate Investment Trust funds as little as $1,000. They currently have two types of funds that you can invest in…a Growth Fund with a small number of properties and an Income Fund with a large number of properties. The differences between the two are stated in the name as the first is a long term play and the second is more for getting nice returns quickly. The only down side to this site is that they have entire funds as opposed to individual properties like the ones that RealtShares.com has and that is why we ranked RealtyShares.com higher for the individual residential real estate investor. Of course they also offer financing utilizing their investors so if you are looking to work on a major project this is a nice alternative to a bank loan although interest is definitely higher.
#2 RealtyShares.com
This site tries to fill the need for those who are interested in investing in individual projects as opposed to an entire fund. They also allow you to choose which type of investment you want to make whether it is debt, equity or preferred equity which give you a lot of options. They also start investments at $1000 but the one thing we did not like about their website was that you must sign up and give them your phone number before you can see their offerings, so you probably don’t want to contact them if you are just curious. But that fact that you can invest in a specific property will probably be much more interesting to those who have experience and know what they are looking for in an income property.
#1 Investability.com
So even though the crowdfunding site are a cool concept we are still much more interested in investing in actual properties directly as you have so much more control and can make sure the best decisions are being made which leads to the fattest bottom line. To that end this is one of the best sites we have seen for finding and comparing residential investment properties. They have a search engine that enables to you find all of the income properties in an area that you use a Google map search to find. They give you the CAP Rate (click to see our previous article on CAP Rates) as well as expected annual income so you can get a snapshot of what you will be receiving. They also give you other important ratios such as Cash on Cash and Gross Yield. You can also save your search and sort it by all of the important numbers.
Investability.com is by far the best website we have found for savvy real estate investors who know what they want and have the funds to back it up. But the other two sites are also good for investors who are looking to just get their feet wet in real estate investing.
Thanks for reading and check back next week for more news in the amazing world of Real Estate Investment!
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