Real estate and fintech have been integrating in exciting new ways in recent years.
Real estate online investment or crowdfunding has been a sector that has attracted significant interest in the U.S. over the last several years, with more than 100 portals launched to serve rapidly growing developer and investor interest. In fact, industry research hub crowdsourcing.org estimates that the industry will be worth more than $300 billion USD by 2025.
Why would developers consider an online and alternative financing route? A big reason, beyond the capital, is the significant marketing benefits that campaigns can generate, including community building.
To investigate where the Canadian market for real estate crowdfunding is going in the next 12 months, we interviewed the two leading portals in Canada, online investment platform NexusCrowd and private equity firm R2(though R2 notes that they position themselves as an online marketplace or fintech in commercial real estate, not as “crowdfunders”).
Amar Nijar, CEO of R2 Capital & Investments and Hitesh Rathod, CEO of NexusCrowd Inc., gave some interesting insights in the growth of their portals; the full conversation can be found on ITbusiness.ca here.
