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Comment by xchaotic | Hacker News Reader

I would pay $10k for a share in an honest, low fee property investment. I can't afford losing liquidity to buy another whole property, but I'd like to invest a proportion of my savings against rental/commercial properties, as directly as possible, with as few intermediares and with many safeguards for bad times.

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If you're an accredited investor and willing to make it $25k instead of $10k, this is totally available right now on CrowdStreet and similar sites (although CS is the clear front-runner in quality and quantity of offerings).

Sponsors looking to raise equity to purchase a property pay a fee to list their projects on the site, CS does some amount of due diligence on both sponsor and project, and when you invest you're buying an equity stake in the entity that will actually purchase the property.

If you want "safeguards for bad times" you'll have to do your due diligence and dial your risk tolerances appropriately.

Yeah, I want to do this as well. When Tesla announced the gigafactory in Reno, I really wanted to pool together with others to buy an apartment complex or something.

something similar could also work when Amazon announces HQ2

Did the property prices spike up as expected?

I'd say not really. The graph doesn't seem to be linkable, but if you add "Las Vegas" as a comparator, both Fernley and Vegas moved in lockstep. Vegas is way too far away to have its prices affected by the Gigafactory, so I'd say that there was no discernible effect. Or, at least, a very modest effect.

https://www.zillow.com/fernley-nv/home-values/

I'd say it's still too early? I mean, Tesla's factory is only a fraction built and at a fraction of capacity.

You should check out fundrise and similar sites. It allows you to invest on real state without buying a whole property.

Have you considered REITs?

I have looked at a few, the fees and the opaque structure scared me away. I would like the control, of being able to sell my share on the open market at any point (at close to face value, obviously) and being able to benefit from a proportion of rental income where ROI < 20 years.

How are REITs opaque? You can find out exactly what they own and there is no easier way to get get in and out of a property investment than through a REIT, especially larger ones.

Avoid the private REITs and buy one that's publicly traded. Also avoid mortgage REITs, those lend money (vs owning buildings).

Here's a simple screen for office REITs with a market cap over $300m on the NYSE (note that there are other types residential/retail/medical/etc under the "industry" filter):

https://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=111&f=cap_smallover,exch_...

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