While the number of real estate crowdfunding sites keeps growing, most marketplaces still require you to be an accredited investor with high income and/or net worth requirements. However, options for non-accredited investors should improve shortly due to the expanded Regulation A+ per the JOBS Act, which allows the general public to invest in private companies under certain circumstances.

RealtyMogul.com just announced their offering called the MogulREIT I. Instead of being able to buy part of a specific shopping center or providing a loan against a specific apartment complex, these REITs take your money and the sponsors get to pick out a diversified pool of commercial estate. The investor has much less control, but easier diversification. Instead of putting $2,500 into one building, you can spread $2,500 across 20 or 30 properties. Here are more details from their website:

• Fund intends to be diversified across property types, investment types, and geographies.
• The Fund expects to pay quarterly distributions starting the second full quarter of operation.
• The Fund will provide certain redemption opportunities, quarterly.
• MogulREIT I is audited by Cohn Reznick and administered by Opus Fund Services.
• $2,500 Minimum Investment.

Here’s what they have to say regarding expenses:

Investors in MogulREIT I will not be charged any sales commissions and the organization and offering expenses are anticipated to be approximately 3% of the target total raise of amount. Traditional non-traded REITs typically charge an average sales commission of 7% and organization and offering expenses of up to 15%**.

There are more details in the full SEC offering circular. Please do your own due diligence.

As I’ve said before, I would tell my family to invest in a low-cost, diversified, publicly-traded REIT fund before investing in any of these non-traded REITs with limited liquidity. For example, buying shares of the Vanguard REIT Index ETF (VNQ) will give you commercial real estate exposure with rock-bottom expenses and daily liquidity. VNQ and its mutual fund equivalents are where the vast majority of my commercial real estate exposure remains.

That said, I find this area of investing to be interesting. I like the idea of focused real estate but don’t enjoy being a landlord. I have invested $2,000 of “experimental money” into the similar Fundrise Income eREIT, as I prefer high-interest loans backed by real estate as collateral. Fundrise also has a Growth REIT which focuses more on real estate equity. The MogulREIT I is supposed to target both income and growth. I currently have no plans to invest in either the Fundrise Growth REIT or the MogulREIT.

Professer Robert Shiller has a new NY Times article entitled Why Land and Homes Actually Tend to Be Disappointing Investments. He computes the historical, long-term inflation-adjusted returns for both farmland and housing:

Over the century from 1915 to 2015, though, the real value of American farmland (deflated by the Consumer Price Index) increased only 3.1 times, according to the Department of Agriculture. That comes to an average increase of only 1.1 percent a year — and with a growing population, that’s barely enough to keep per capita real land value unchanged.

According to my own data (relying on the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, which I helped create), real home prices rose even more slowly over the same period — a total increase of 1.8 times, which comes to an average of only 0.6 percent a year.

Over the same time period (1915 to 2015), the total inflation-adjsuted return of the S&P 500 index including dividends is roughly 6.7% annualized. Here is a recent version of his famous Home Price chart:

Shiller is a smart guy and so I’m sure he knows this, but he always seems to leave out the fact that most people don’t just buy a chunk of land and let it sit there idle until they are ready to sell it again.

• People use farmland to grow stuff. You know, things like apples and corn and cows. Or you could charge rent to farmers.
• People either charge rent to others or avoid paying rent themselves on residential housing.

These are all additional sources of investment return beyond just price. Therefore, even if you assume your home’s price will only rise between 0% and 1% above inflation over time, you are still getting more “return” from it in the form of either rent or imputed rent.

Rent will rise roughly with inflation. Indeed, the biggest portion of the Consumer Price Index is housing as shown in the graphic below (source). The great majority of the Housing component is “rent of primary residence” and “Owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence”.

From FRED, here’s the rent part of CPI divided by overall CPI for as far back as the data series goes (1947). Sometimes rent grows faster than CPI, sometimes rent grows more slowly than CPI. Mostly, it evens out, as one might expect.

For most of the last 20 years, rent has increased faster than CPI inflation:

Estimating your “rental dividend” return. If you have a house that costs $200,000 that would otherwise be rented for $1,000 a month, that is a price-to-annual-rent ratio of 16.7. The inverse of that number is a rough idea of the annual “rental dividend” you could get from the house. That is, $12,000 divided by $200,000 is 6%. Now, a proper real estate investor would take out things like property taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance. Let’s continue to be very rough and call that 3%. Now, if you assume both rent and expenses will rise roughly in step with inflation, that is an additional 3% real return.

Adding the two parts together, and you’re getting a very rough 3% to 4% real (inflation-adjusted) return. Now, most people acknowledge that housing is local and your specific return can vary widely. Your housing price return if you bought a house in Detroit in 1985 and a house in Mountain View, California is quite different. At the same time, your current housing rental dividend return is going to be a lot higher in Detroit than in Mountain View, California.

(I’m not nearly as familiar with farmland, but I do know people who rent out their property to farmers and ranchers. They seem satisfied with the arrangement. I’m also not including all the psychic rewards of owning your home like being able to remodel and customize things as you wish, nor am I including the costs of doing that remodel.)

If you look at various broad estimates of future stock and bond returns, they are not forecasting much more than 3% to 4% real returns on a diversified and balanced 60/40 stock/bond portfolio. Do housing prices only go up? No. Is every house a good investment? No. However, I also don’t agree with the broad statement that land and homes are disappointing investments.

I’ve explored my own situation and income tax effects more in the previous post Mortgages, Imputed Rent, and Early Retirement.

Updated with Q2 2016 performance results. My second real estate crowdfunding investment is $2,000 into the Fundrise Income eREIT. (REIT = Real Estate Investment Trust.) Their investment claim is being the “first ever low-fee, diversified commercial real estate investment available directly online to anyone in the United States, no matter their net worth.”

Fundrise is one of the first real estate companies taking advantage of the recent JOBS Act that allow certain crowdfunding investments to be offered to everyone, as previously it was limited only to accredited investors. You must be a US resident and your investment cannot exceed the greater of 10% of your gross annual income or net worth.

Here’s a quick overview of the features:

• Low investment minimum ($1,000)
• Quarterly cash distributions
• Quarterly liquidity (you can request to sell shares quarterly, but liquidity is not always guaranteed)
• Low Fees (claimed to be roughly 1/10th the fees of similar non-traded REITs). Until Dec 31, 2017, you pay $0 in asset management fees unless you earn a 15% annualized return.
• Transparency (you get to see exactly what properties are held)

Essentially, instead of investing in a single condo building, I am now putting my money into a pot of money that will invest in a basket of different commercial real estate properties.

Why not just invest in the Vanguard REIT index fund? Well, I happen to think most everyone should invest in VNQ if they want commercial real estate exposure. I own a lot more of VNQ than this Fundrise investment. VNQ invests in publicly-traded REITs, huge companies worth up to tens of billions of dollars. VNQ offers wide diversification and you have daily liquidity. But as publicly-traded REITs have grown in popularity (and price), their income yields have gone down.

As with other crowdfunding sites, Fundrise deals with specific, smaller deals with (hopefully) higher risk-adjusted returns. This eREIT diversifies your money across multiple properties, but we’re still talking examples like a $2 million townhouse complex, or a $2 million boutique hotel. An analogy might be made with “micro-cap” investing. From their FAQ:

Specifically, we believe the market for smaller real estate transactions (“small balance commercial market or SBC”) is underserved by conventional capital sources and that lending in the market is fragmented, reducing the availability and overall efficiency for real estate owners raising funds. This inefficiency and fragmentation of the SBC market has resulted in a relatively favorable pricing dynamic which the eREIT intends to capitalize on using efficiencies created through our technology platform.

A positive feature is the ability to request liquidity on a quarterly basis, but it is not guaranteed that you can withdraw all that you request (similar to some hedge funds). Here’s a comparison chart taken from the Fundrise site:

Why Fundrise? It can be hard to differentiate between the various crowdfunding websites. One way that I feel that Fundrise differs is they are more picky about the deals they choose to fund. Talk about higher standards is one thing, but I’ve been tracking them for a while and Fundrise really does offer far fewer deals than the other competitor sites I have signed up with. For about a year now, every deal that I’d been interested in filled up within 24 hours. Even this eREIT had a waitlist. Will this selectivity last? I don’t know, I hope so. Will their selectivity produce higher, safer returns? I don’t know, I hope so.

Dividend income updates.

• 1st Quarter 2016. 4.5% annualized dividend was announced. This is the first complete quarter of activity, so the dividend size is expected to increase once funds are fully invested. The portfolio included 13 commercial real estate assets from 8 different metropolitan areas, with approximately $31.5 million committed as of March 31, 2016.
• 2nd Quarter 2016. 10% annualized dividend announced, to be paid mid-July. Portfolio now includes 15 assets totaling roughly $47.25M in committed capital.

Screenshot from my account:

I think the Fundrise Income eREIT is an interesting concept. There may be a waitlist to join, but they do work through it. I am simply sharing my own results, not making an investment recommendation as I don’t know your situation. This is a higher-risk, speculative investment.

• Open up a Fundrise Account

Here are details of my 3rd real estate crowdfunding investment, a $2,000 loan for a 6-unit apartment complex in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This follows my $5,000 Patch of Land loan in a single-family house in California, and a $2,000 Fundrise Income eREIT investment into their diversified basket of commercial properties. Here are the quick stats:

• Site: RealtyShares
• Property: 6-unit, 6,490 sf multifamily in Milwaukee, WI.
• Interest rate: 9% APR, paid monthly.
• Amount invested: $2,000.
• Term: 12 months, with 6-month extension option.
• Total loan amount is $168,000. Purchase price is $220,000 (LTC 76%). Estimated after-repair value is $260,000. Broker Opinion of Value is $238,000.
• Loan is secured by the property, in the first position. Also have personal guarantee from borrower.
• Stated goal is to rehab, stabilize, and then either sell or refinance.

Property details. I chose this property because it is different from my other past “experiments”. I have never lived in or visited Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Where I live, parking spaces have sold for more than this apartment complex. As a result, I have never invested in an apartment complex. Also, reading through the other properties in the developer’s portfolio, I suspect the goal is to eventually refinance and then keep these as cashflow rentals. All units are 2 bed/1 bath, currently fully rented for ~$600 a month each. I don’t know the net operating income numbers, but this place earns roughly $43,000 in gross annual rents with a purchase price of $220,000. Annual property taxes are $3,000 a year. Even if half of the rent is spent on expenses, that is still a cap rate of 10%.

Experience so far. At least for this investment, it was not “pre-funded” by RealtyShares before the “crowd-funding” takes over. That means you have to wait until they secure enough committed money before the deal can go forward.

My timeline… I committed to this loan in December 2015 and $2,000 was debited from my Ally bank account on 12/29/15. However, the funding goal was not reached until 1/13, during which I earned no interest during this two-week period. I was then told the following:

We are writing to inform you that we have received all investor funds as of today, January 13, 2016, for the 135 E Keefe Avenue investment. You should expect to receive your first monthly payment by February 15th and this will cover the period from 1/13/16 to 2/10/16.

My first monthly interest payment did not arrive until another two weeks later on 3/3. My subsequent interest payments were posted on schedule on 3/17, 4/18, and 5/15. Due to the fact that there was no pre-funding to get the ball started early, there was essentially 3 month period between the time where they first took my money and I received my first interest check. Other than the interest payments, I have received no property updates since January, although I don’t necessarily expect any at this point.

As I’ve said before, this is an experiment, not necessarily a recommendation. I am learning that although I do like loans backed by hard assets, you do need a lot of patience with these sort of investments.

Some account screenshots:

My first investment into real estate crowdfunding has completed. In April 2015, I invested $5,000 into a fix-and-flip loan at the site Patch of Land. There are more details in my initial update, but here’s a quick recap of the loan details:

• Single-family home in West Sacramento, California
• Loan secured by property, in the first position. Backed by personal guarantee from borrower.
• 6-month expected term (roughly April 15th to October 15th). Fix-and-flip.
• Loan-to-value is 75% per independent 3rd-party appraisal.
• 11% APR interest, paid monthly.
• $5,000 invested.

Here are the initial and final numbers on the property itself:

• Developer Purchase Price: $155,000
• Estimated Remodel Costs: $55,000

• Developer Contribution $31,000 + closing costs + origination fee
• Developer Loan Request: $179,000

• Independent 3rd-party After-Repair-Value: $238,000
• LTV based on Independent ARV: 75%

• Developer estimated selling price: $275,000 to $300,000
• Actual selling price: $300,000

Here are the final numbers for my partial investment:

• 4/20/15 – $5,000 invested.
• Proceeded to collect $45.83 of interest on the 15th of every month (pro-rated on partial months).
• 9/23/15. Loan extension granted.
• Kept collecting $45.83 of interest on the 15th of every month (pro-rated on partial months).
• 3/15/16. Notified that house in under contract for $300,000.
• 3/30/16. Loan was paid in full.

The loan term was supposed to be for 6-months (one of the main reasons I chose it) but the process took longer than expected and the total loan period ended up being nearly 12 months. My total interest payments were $517.91. I also received an additional $75 fee for the loan extension. I thus received a total of $5592.91 over 346 days, for an annualized return of 12.5%. Without the extra $75 penalty fee, my interest payments would be right at the promised 11% APR.

Takeaways from the process:

• Be patient but decisive when selecting your investment. You should be comfortable with the local market situation as well as the numbers like loan-to-value ratio. You should know what you want, ignore anything that doesn’t fit your criteria, and act quickly when you see something that does. This is really the only part of the process where you have control, so use it wisely.
• Understand the contract. Just because there is a “6-month expected term” doesn’t mean you’ll get your money back in 6 months. You should read the terms carefully to see what options are available to the borrower if they can’t make that date. Is an extension automatically granted? Is there an increased interest rate? How long does the extension last?
• Liquidity and more patience. One of the defining features of this type of investment is that it is highly illiquid. If I buy a mutual fund, I can sell the entire thing and get fair market value as cash in my bank account in a few business days. With an investment like this, the borrower could pay it back early, take their sweet time, or even default entirely and they’d have to liquidate the home before I get my principal back. That could take another several months. You should not need this money any time soon.
• Low-maintenance. The good part of having no control is that you don’t have to do anything. I just sat back and had the interest automatically swept to my bank account each month. I received a simply 1099-INT for the interest earned through this loan, and it was quite easy to deal with at tax time.
• Updates. I did not receive constant updates on this loan, but I think the updates were adequate. I was given a couple of photos on the remodel progress and updates on loan extension, house listing, house listing changes, and house being under contract. You do not have any two-way contact with the developer.

I will admit that I was nervous for a little bit on this house. I could track the house listing on real estate sites like Zillow and I questioned some of the cosmetic choices that the developer made, including painting the house an gunmetal-grey stucco. I also questioned the high listing price of $325,000, which I thought they’d never get and would scare off potential buyers. It all ended well as the house was repainted into a neutral beige and the developer agreed to sell at a good price.

Will I invest again? Well, I can’t help but be satisfied with my 12%+ annualized return, but things could also have dragged out a lot longer. I will probably invest again, but at a different real estate site, if only to see how they might handle things differently. I’m in it to make money, but I’m also in it to learn as this is my “experimental money” fund (even Burton Malkiel and Jack Bogle have such accounts).

Account screenshot:

Here’s an update on one of my real estate crowdfunding experiments. In mid-April 2015, I invested $5,000 into a loan for a single family fix-and-flip in West Sacramento, California. The loan was supposed to be for 6-months (one of the main reasons I chose it). (More details in my initial update.) Well, the short version is that the fix part happened, but it has now been 10 months and the house is still on the market. The borrower took the option of a month-to-month extension. The loan is still current. Here’s a screenshot and some more thoughts:

Interest received in a timely manner. So far, I’ve been receiving my $45.83 every month ($550 annualized) on my $5,000 initial investment (11% APR). I enabled the option of having my interest automatically swept to my bank account each month. So far, this investment has required zero maintenance.

Read your contract. Just because there is a “6-month expected term” doesn’t mean you’ll get your money back in 6 months. You should read the terms carefully to see what options are available to the borrower if they can’t make that date. Is an extension automatically granted? Is there an increased interest rate? How long does the extension last?

Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. One of the defining features of this type of investment is that it is highly illiquid. If I buy a mutual fund, I can sell the entire thing and get fair market value as cash in my bank account in a few business days. With an investment like this, the borrower could pay it back early, take their sweet time, or even default entirely and they’d have to liquidate the home before I get my principal back. You must be prepared for all scenarios.

Be happy with your loan-to-value ratio. I personally believe the house is listed for too high a price, but that part is not under my control. What was under my control was choosing to invest only in a loan where I was comfortable with the collateral. For example, they may be asking ~$320,000 but the loan amount was only for $179,000. As I am (one of the folks) in first position lien on the property, the house would need to sell for under $179,000 in net proceeds for me to lose principal.

In other words, have an adequate cushion so that you don’t lose sleep about it at night. It also helps that I’ve already earned 8.6% of my initial investment back over the last 10 months, cash in hand. Finally, I will repeat that this is a speculative investment using “experimental money” that makes up a very small portion of total assets. (Even Burton Malkiel and Jack Bogle have such “funny money” accounts.)

Tax documents. I received a 1099-INT for the interest earned through this loan. The 2015 form was made available in a timely manner on January 27, 2016. As such, it should be rather easy to add this in at tax time.