EstateGuru review

EstateGuru’s overview

EstateGuru focuses on real-estate loans. The projects are rather conservative, usually yielding around 11% for durations of one year or more.

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Loans characteristics

Real-estate loans

Unlike what the platform’s name implies, EstateGuru‘s loans aren’t all real-estate related. Many of them are also used to finance businesses.

Overall, they have rather diverse purposes, such as :

• development loan
• business loan
• bridge loan
• reconstruction loan

Loans durations are usually above one year; their yearly interest rate is around 11%. While the financed amounts vary greatly, they recently ranged from €25 000 to €440 000.

For investors with large amounts available, a 1% bonus is available for selected loans when the invested amount is above a given threshold (usually €10 000 or €20 000).

Buyback guarantee

There’s no buyback guarantee. However, EstateGuru‘s website lists a long string of successfully repaid projects. As I’m writing this article, there were 184 repaid loans, 4 defaulted ones and 1 recovered. The recovered loan didn’t incur any loss for investors. On the other hand, as the public auction is still being set up by the bailiff’s office, we don’t know what the outcome for the defaulted loans will be.

Investors who are curious to know what happened when a loan defaults should read their blog post about their first defaulted loan.

Platform’s features

Secondary market

EstateGuru unfortunately doesn’t feature a secondary market. As a consequence, investors won’t be able to resell their loans before term.

Manual investment

Due to the auto-invest restriction evoked below, I only invest manually at EstateGuru. Investors are notified of new loans availability by e-mail. Although they usually get filled up quickly, it’s totally possible to manage a portfolio manually.

Auto-invest feature

For some reason, if you choose to invest less than €250 per loan, you don’t have access to detailed criteria; you can only choose the maximum loan duration. Otherwise, you will be able to use many criteria including interest rate, LTV, loan type and loan security type.This restriction will unfortunately force most investors to invest manually.

Website’s ease of use

Funding methods

Registration process

Opening an EstateGuru account is rather quick, in spite of the additional KYC (know your costumer) checks.

Investors first need to provide basic information about themselves. The second step is to take a picture of themselves using a webcam, as well as one of some identification. Checking the documents is supposed to take as long as two days, but in my case my account was ready after a few minutes.

Account funding

The most common way to fund your account is via a SEPA transfer. As usual, the platform provides you with an identifier that you have to use as the reference for the transfer. The funds were available on my investor’s account two business days after I sent them, which is the standard delay for processing incoming transfers.

In June 2019, EstateGuru added Trustly, which allows for faster deposits.

Website’s design and ergonomics

EstateGuru‘s website’s was redesigned in late 2018. It’s now much more readable and its usability was greatly improved.

Reporting

The reporting is rather complete : transactions list, portfolio, account balance… I especially appreciate the fact that data can be exported as PDF, CSV or Excel file.

Actual performance of my EstateGuru portfolio

In late April 2019, the XIRR for my EstateGuru portfolio reached 10.62%. This value actually fluctuates a lot as I invest in loans yielding quarterly interests.

EstateGuru’s main competitors

EstateGuru’s facts and figures

Who can invest

You must be at least 18 years old and have a bank account any of the EEA member states or in Switzerland in order to lend through EstateGuru. We also have to perform certain “know your customer” checks on you before you can start investing on EstateGuru.

Disclosure

Please note that this review may contain affiliate links. It means that I will earn a commission if you decide to invest after clicking through the link – at no additional cost to you, of course -. Please understand that I have experienced all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the commissions I make if you decide to invest through my links.