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WHAT IS A BRICKSTARTER?
Based in Valencia, Spain, Brickstarter is a platform for crowdsourcing real estate. Since its launch in 2017, the platform has contributed over 2 million to Spanish real estate projects.
WHAT KIND OF RETURNS ARE POSSIBLE ON BRICKTARTER?
Although the majority of properties listed on Brickstarter have a net rental yield of about 5.5% and an estimated gross capital gain of 15-20% in the event that the property is sold, the platform does not advertise an average return for investors. This translates to a three-year average return of about 11% on a property. It's good that you don't have to worry about your money sitting around in case the project takes longer to fund because you also get payments at a fixed rate of 5% until it is funded.
IS INVESTMENT ON BRICKSTARTER SAFE?
Brickstarter specializes in vacation rentals, so all rental payments are pre-collected from websites such as Airbnb or Booking.com. This ensures that you will never have renters who don't pay their rent while occupying the apartments.
On their deals, Brickstarter also employs mezzanine financing, a hybrid form of funding that combines debt and equity. Specifically, in the event of default, it grants the lender the authority to convert it into an equity interest in the business.
Additionally, they handle the entire process of buying and managing the properties internally, cutting out middlemen and giving them more control and lowering investor risk.
Additionally, you can invest as little as fifty euros in each assets, so even on a tight budget, you can make multiple property investments on the platform. And you ought to, since having a large portfolio of properties will even out your income and ensure that your yield is unaffected even if a few of your properties are vacant.
Given all of those details, purchasing a single apartment to rent to long-term tenants, for example, is not nearly as safe as building a portfolio on a website like Brickstarter.
CREATING A BRICKSARTER ACCOUNT
Investors can access Brickstarter from anywhere in the world, and creating an account is fairly easy. After logging in and transferring the funds (with Lemonway, an additional security measure for the investor), you can select an investment from the list of options and proceed with the transaction. It only takes a €50 minimum investment.
HOW CAN I USE BRICKTARTER TO BEGIN INVESTING?
Investing in Brickstarter is quite easy: You can deposit money using a credit card payment, which is very convenient, or you can use the bank details they provide to make a bank transfer to the platform after opening the account (which takes less than 5 minutes). You can use a credit card to deposit money, and it will be available right away.
The next step is to choose a rental property from the platform in order to begin building your portfolio. You can browse current projects by clicking on the Properties tab:
From there, all you have to do is click on the project you're interested in learning more about to obtain additional information. For instance, this Alicante project:
You will be given access to a thorough description of the property, the project's future plans, and all of the project's financial information for each project:
Lastly, all you have to do is click the Invest button after deciding how much you want to invest in the project. Each of those pages also has a button that will calculate your possible total returns on investment (capital gains + rental income) for the project.
It should be noted that although the auto-invest feature is not currently available, it should be added in the future if they are working on it.
IS IT WORTH TO INVEST IN BRICKSTARTER?
In general, Brickstarter is a good platform. Their unique approach to real estate crowdfunding involves concentrating on vacation rentals, which offers investors superior returns and increased security. Furthermore, it is commendable that Brickstarter leverages big data to optimize investor potential returns. Naturally, as more information from the platforms becomes available, we will need to update this review, but for now, we can categorically state that Brickstarter is a very promising platform that belongs in any real estate crowdfunding portfolio.
