Photo: Fundrise
US-based real estate crowdfunding platform Fundrise has announced today that it is branching out into Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
“Since we launched Fundrise more than three years ago, we’ve received thousands of requests from international investors, looking for ways to diversify into U.S. real estate,” said Fundrise’s co-founder Dan Miller, in a statement.
“This is the first step in our effort to expand more broadly.”
Fundrise acts as an online marketplace where investors can buy shares for a stake in new residential and commercial developments. Investments through the platform have been as low as $100, and thousands of investors have used Fundrise, according to the company.
Brothers Dan and Ben Miller founded Fundrise in 2012 to bring real estate investment to the masses. Although Fundrise has opened up the market to individual players for whom investment would have been unaffordable in the past, some of the projects have been anything but small-scale.
Silverstein Properties’ 80-storey 3 World Trade Center development in New York is among the properties Fundrise is currently involved with, and Maketto, a 6,000-square-foot marketplace in Washington, DC, which opened in April, is one of its recent projects.
Prior to entering three new international markets, Fundrise helped finance projects in Brooklyn, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Seattle.
Although crowdfunding is not unheard of in Canadian real estate, this will be the first time Canadian residents will be able to crowdfund real estate across 25 US markets.
“Adding international investors increases the depth of our capital base, which in turn increases the volume, consistency, and quality of investments that we are able to produce,” explained co-founder Ben Miller, who BuzzBuzzHome recently spoke to, in the statement.
