CrowdEstate Review

First of all, I would like everyone to know that this is a 100% impartial and unbiased review of CrowdEstate.

What Is CrowdEstate?

CrowdEstate is a crowdfunding platform that provides investors with access to real estate and business financing opportunities. The platform was launched in January 2014 and the first project was made public in May of the same year so we are talking about a seasoned and well-established platform. CrowdEstate is based in Tallinn, Estonia but it also has offices in Latvia and Italy as well. The minimum investment in a single loan is €100 and all loans are listed in EUR.

Loans

You can invest in both real estate and corporate loan financing. The period of the loans start from just 6 months and can be as loan as 6 years. As you can see on the screenshot below, they provide plenty of information about the company. They even perform a SWOT analysis on the project and also have a Q&A section that a CrowdEstate representative answers investors questions.

Rates

CrowdEstate says that the average return on their platform is 19% and while that could be true in the past a more realistic expectation would be around 15-16%. Not bad if you take into account the platforms excellent track record.

Loan Liquidity

CrowdEstate regularly adds large projects and will notify you with an email before they do but they are funded pretty quickly so you will need to transfer funds to your account before the project goes live or else you will miss it. They are adding approximately 7-8 new projects per month.

Buyback Guarantee

CrowdEstate does not offer any form of a BuyBack guarantee as all of their loans are backed with real estate or company’s assets as well as a personal guarantee from the company’s shareholders.

Auto-Invest

CrowdEstate offers the possibility of auto-investing and you can configure it any way you want since it has many different parameters as displayed in the screenshot below.

Risks

Since CrowdEstate doesn’t have a BuyBack Guarantee there is always the risk of the loan’s default. So far, they don’t have any defaulted projects but there are 2 loans that are delinquent. To get a better understanding you can see all info of the projects page here and here. They update with news regarding the recovery process pretty regularly. Although it’s interesting how the platform will handle the situation with these two loans the fact that they have published 145 projects and only these two are past due it’s pretty impressive. That is because only about 5% of the investment opportunities survive their due diligence process according to them.

Secondary Market

CrowdEstate features a secondary market, they just call it “Marketplace”. The Marketplace offers the opportunity to exit early from a project and adds extra liquidity to your investments. Also, since the platforms projects are funded pretty quickly, you have the opportunity to sell your loans through the Marketplace at a hefty premium.

Fees

CrowdEstate membership is free and there are no direct fees investors should pay to the platform.

CrowdEstate Sign Up Process

The sign-up process is pretty standard. You can click here and go through the steps as they are on the screenshots below. You can also sign up using Facebook or your Gmail account. On the final step, you will need to verify your phone number with a verification text and your identity by taking a picture of your ID card, front and back. The entire shouldn’t take you more than 8-10 minutes.

CrowdEstate’s Competitors

CrowdEstate’s main competitor is EstateGuru as they are very similar in terms of their loan offerings with the added advanced of a secondary market on CrowdEstate’s platform. Some other competitors are BulkEstate, Envestio, Crowdestor and also Grupeer. You can click here to check platform reviews and here to see the bonuses that some of them provide.