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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

So your hypothesis is that accredited investors will throw around $10,000 with a a few mouse clicks? From what I've seen though, getting people who know what they're doing to invest in properties is a relationship business. There's a lot of trust that an investor has to put in a developer to execute right and with integrity when they invest with them and a flashy website might not be enough to get people to invest serious money.

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We are building close relationships with our investors until we prove ourselves and earn trust, such that they will feel comfortable investing in the future with a click. There is also a significant amount of information available on each property for investors to do their diligence.

How do you handle basic agency issues?

In a lot of larger deals developers expense what are arguably personal expenses. A lot of the work that institutional asset managers do who manager real estate is based on dealing with those agency issues.

Further, how do you compete with a large real estate asset manager. I'm not talking about REITs, I'm talking about managers for pension funds and accredited investors?

Thanks for the questions, a big part of our role is to handle exactly what you describe above. Making sure that the operating partner/developer is acting as they should! We have provisions in our documents to remove them if they're not behaving.

As far as competing with larger RE fund managers, our focus initially is on deals that require $2MM-$10MM of equity, below where the big institutions will look (>$10MM typically), but beyond where most operators can raise on their own.

You know, the funny thing about commercial real estate is that there's no one right way to do it and the right way to do it is often a matter of gut marketing feel. Sure there's a triple-net lease McDonalds but everything else is pretty subjective.

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