BulkEstate review : interesting real-estate crowdfunding opportunities
GLOBAL RATING
Loans duration
Loans kind
Minimal investment
Buyback
Secondary market
Auto-invest
Pros
- Opportunity to diversify your portfolio by investing in real-estate
Cons
- Limited amoount of projects
- Low interest rates compared to competitors
Interests rate
Loans liquidity
Reporting
Buyback guarantee
Platform ergonomics
The interest rates are interesting for investors who don’t want to invest in the more speculative projects offered by the competitors.
There are few loans available, with large amounts
Reporting is very basic
No buyback is available for now
Readability and translations could be improved
Funding methods
Languages
English, Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, German
See also
Overview of BulkEstate
BulkEstate is a company from Latvia, specialized in real estate and property crowdfunding. They also handle real estate group buying but that’s not my purpose.
Unsecured loans
Interest rate is usually around 14-15% for a duration of one year or less. There are usually only a few investment opportunities at the same time, with a large amount to invest in.
It’s more or less the same situation as with Grupeer loans; you don’t have to check BulkEstate website everyday !
One important difference with P2P lending sites is that both principal and accrued interests are repaid at the loan repayment date, there’s no monthly interest repayment.
The minimum investment is 50€, which is higher than for personal loans for example but rather common in real-estate financing.
The website provides a basic description provided for each project; compared to CrowdEstate, BulkEstate could provide further details. The SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Threat/Opportunities) matrix, repayment schedule, company rating and risk profile comparison found at CrowdEstate would be welcome additions !
Initially, investors didn’t have the opportunity to fund their account; money had to be wired at time of investment. This could cause troubles if the transfer took too long, and was overall bothersome. Fortunately, an upgrade introduced the opportunity to send funds ahead of time, like most competitors allow.
Auto-invest feature
Opportunity to use auto-invest was added in April 2018. It’s really easy to configure it; the required inputs are maximum investment amount, minimum return and maximum term. Note that thanks to the small number of available projects, it’s still very easy to invest manually.
Buyback
The loans are not guaranteed. However, the value of the properties the loan is invested in helps mitigate the risks.
Secondary market
There’s currently no secondary market. BulkEstate is supposedly working on it, but didn’t provide any timeline.
Website ergonomics
I was initially not very satisfied with the usability of the website. However, things have improved and it’s much more pleasant to use now.
Reporting
The investments list is extremely basic, providing very little details. The expected revenues are displayed, but there’s no graph for the planned cash-flow.
On the other hand, the low number of loans and basic repayment structure partially compensate this lack of details.
Actual performance
As I just started investing, you’ll have to come back in October 2018 to see how well my investments performed 🙂
Conclusion : my opinion about BulkEstate
BulkEstate is a nice complement to real-estate crowdfunding leader CrowdEstate. The featured projects offer a good risk/reward ratio for investors who don’t want to invest in the more speculative real-estate projects offered by other competitors such as Envestio.
Hello,
I find it very profitable real estate platform, however it lacks some features (reports, etc) in the platform as you mentioned. The volume of loans is very small, I think they do not generate any profit at least until now, they should increase it. One more thing, are you sure it is not backed by real estate collateral? I got the answer from them half a year ago.
Do I understand it right that you offer only mortgage backed loans? Who is responsible for collecting default loans? Did you have any default loans yet?
Yes, we only provide loans, if these are secured by a real estate mortgage. All investment projects are carefully selected before made available to our investors. Every Bulkestate deal goes through a rigorous and consistent evaluation process by Investment committee, which is a team of highly experienced real-estate, investment and finance experts. Bulksestate’s partner in evaluation process is BDO – an international network of public accounting, tax and advisory firms.
Bulkestate holds all mortgages and executes them if loans are defaulted. Luckily, we have not encountered any defaults. Procedures will depend on situation. If there will be problems to repay the loan, we will work very closely with the debtor to understand the situation and find the best option for all stakeholders. In most cases, we will aim to achieve a negotiation solution and avoid direct take-over of properties, but that will be done only if necessary.