Episode #03 : Passive Income Through Crowdfunding with Ian Ippolito
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Spotify
Want to download the transcription of this audio? Click here!
In today’s episode, I’m discussing real estate crowdfunding with expert Ian Ippolito, founder of TheRealEstateCrowdfundingReview.com.
An investor and serial entrepreneur, Ian was impressed by the potential of real estate crowdfunding, but frustrated by the lack of quality site reviews and investment analysis. He created TheRealEstateCrowdfundingReview.com to fill that gap. Today the site is read avidly by over 12,000 users each month, and has a private investor club with 2,000+ accredited investors with over $2.1 billion in investable assets.
In this episode, we discuss…
What exactly real estate crowdfunding is and who gets involved in this opportunity
How The Real Estate Crowdfunding Review was born… and why it transitioned to its current form as a private investor club
The steps Ian recommends investors take BEFORE getting involved in real estate crowdfunding
How real estate crowdfunding gives regular investors access to asset classes that were never available to them in the past
We also dive into Ian’s key criteria for evaluating real estate crowdfunding platforms and deals.
Ian’s Top Tips
Evaluate the platform first – after you’re sure the platform is sound, start looking at the sponsor and the deal.
Take your time – it can take weeks to months to really look at a deal in detail.
Consider each deal in the context of an overall balanced portfolio.
Talk with other investors to get their opinions – this is where a resource like the private investor club can be so valuable to a less experienced investor.
+ Read the transcript
Welcome back to the richer geek podcast. Now, if you have ever looked at real estate crowdfunding, you know that that whole world can be confusing and a little daunting. There's an answer for that. Now, if you don't know what real estate crowdfunding is, that's okay. We're going to get into that in today's episode as well. I am thrilled to welcome Ian Ippolito to the show. Ian, welcome.
Thank you Nichole, it's great to be here.
I became aware of Ian actually, I would say about two years ago, and and the resources that you provide, because I had a small health savings account that when I left my previous company, it was just kind of sitting there. And it wasn't that much money, but I wanted to do something else with it. And I thought, oh, crowdfunding, that's what I could do. Oh, my goodness, I got so overwhelmed. And then I ended up with finding the real estate crowdfunding review. So tell us a little bit about your background, and why you created the real estate crowdfunding review?
Well, I created it for the exact same reason that you mentioned there. So. So with my situation, it was back in 2013. And I'm a serial entrepreneur, and I had a good exit from my company, you know, so I sold it. And now my full time job was being an investor. And at the time, there was even less information out there, there was nothing, but I didn't want to put all my money in the stock market, like was the traditional advice, you know, I wanted to really understand these alternative ideas and crowdfunding had just started. So I went, and I researched every single platform that was out there back then. And it took me a couple of months to do it. So when I created that, then the word kind of got out, hey, he has this list, you know, of the, you know, all the different platforms that he's researched. And so people would email me and say, Hey, can you send me this list. And honestly, I got a little bit tired of, you know, having to email people this list, and I said, Look, I'm just going to put it out on a website. So that's kind of how it was born, it started off just that list. And, you know, I've updated it since, and since then it's grown, it now has over 12,000 investors coming in every month to take a look at the content and produce platforms that have news and stuff like that. And, and then about two years ago, I realized, you know, what, we can't discuss everything we want to in this public platform. So wouldn't it be nice, a lot of is protected and under nondisclosure or sponsors don't want it on a public platform, wouldn't it be nice to be at a private club where we can discuss these deals and really pick them apart, see where the problems are, and also find new deals too and then so then I created the private investor club two years ago, and that was kind of the second part of it. And that has grown. There's now over, there's actually over 2600 members. Now, I haven't updated the stats, over 2.1 billion in investable assets together, and we use that collective amount of money to be able to get better deals with sponsors. So it's worked out really well.
And I would agree I get your weekly updates. I have gone into the forum also looked at other you know, kind of you can post questions, but we should back up a little bit and maybe explain what real estate crowdfunding is for those who don't know, if you could kind of walk us through that?
Yeah, sure. So, so real estate, crowdfunding, a lot of people have heard of crowdfunding, which is the idea of multiple people putting money into something. But usually people think of crowdfunding as like, Hey, I'm going to, you know, fund someone to create a startup or make some sort of widget or something. What real estate crowdfunding is, is taking that idea, but applying it to buy real estate. So you know, maybe, maybe to buy something like an apartment complex, it might be a great investment, but it might take someone to put in like $3 million. So someone who doesn't have $3 million, which is the case with most people, it's much easier to cooperate through crowdfunding. So instead of putting in $1 million, the, the basically they cooperate with $25,000 each, so maybe, you know, there's a whole bunch of people, that's a much more approachable. Now, the other thing that's really nice is that with crowdfunding, you can diversify. So we're before maybe if I had, you know, whatever the amount is to say the person has $10,000 to invest, it might be able to put it into multiple crowdfunding platforms. So now maybe they have different types of assets. And they have them in different states, and in different places. So they get a lot better diversification than investing directly.
Perfect. And who are the players? The kind of the, you know, when we talk about crowdfunding, who are the people involved? And what are they called?
Oh, ok. So the people involved with called platforms. And what they do is they offer a place where an investor can come and see all the different deals. So and maybe I'm an investor that's interested in a particular type of investment in real estate, different platforms specialize in different things. So for example, there's a platform called crowd street, and another one called real crowd. And both of them are very, very similar. So you know, as an investor, I'm I go to those, they both do equity. So actually, they do equity and debt, then there are other ones that specialize specifically in debt. So you know, I might go to those, it really depends on the type of investment they're looking for.
Perfect. And you recommend that before someone starts looking at kind of getting into this world and researching all the different platforms, that they should take a step back and really think about how much of their portfolio even belongs in real estate. And you know, then from there, you can determine different assets, class types and real estate strategies. Can you talk more about that specifically?
Sure. Sure. Yeah, I think it's really important because a lot of people kind of take the other way around, where they kind of just say, Oh, I discovered this platform. And I'll just buy a bunch of deals here. And it's really easy to end up with an unbalanced portfolio, and or a portfolio that is just way, you know, that's taking out a lot more risk than they realize if they had kind of taken a step back first. So yeah, so what I recommend is that someone takes a step back and says, you know, how much real estate first of all is reasonable for my portfolio, there are some kind of traditional financial planners that will say, you know, maybe 10 to 20% of a portfolio should go to alternative assets. There are others, you know, that that has, would feel that the amount is more, there was a recent study that was done, called the rate of return of everything. And what it found, they basically compared real estate, they compared bonds, and they compare the public stock market. And for real estate, what they did was they took a look at single family housing, as if it was bought without debt. And what they found was, it was very surprising over the long term, real estate did better than the stock market, and bonds. And even when they did the risk adjusted returns, real estate did very well. So, after that, a lot of people kind of adjusted their portfolios, there's still a lot of people running from the old advice, but I know some people who are like, 90% real estate, which is too much for me, but you know, whatever is comfortable for the person, you know, is what they go with. So, so then after kind of figuring out what percent needs to go to real estate, then the next question is, okay, so I have this pie, you know, what, however much money that how am I going to split this up into a way that meets, you know, my, my type of risk, my risk tolerance. And, you know, there's so many ways to do that. But what, what I kind of do is I, what I recommend people do is figure out, you know, how much risk they're willing to take. I'm a conservative investor, and because of my circumstances, you know, I, as I said, I, I sold my company, so I no longer have a job producing income, my investments have to produce my income. So that makes me very conservative. It's not like I have, you know, a whole bunch of new money coming in, if I lose a bunch. On the other hand, someone that's young, that has a good paying job, and they're not worried about it, they might feel more, more comfortable being more aggressive. So, so an investor has to kind of figure out where they fall in the spectrum of a conservative or aggressive or probably somewhere in between. and then based on that, they can figure out what they want to invest in. So there's choices between equity and debt, for example, that's like the first choice, do you want to invest in debt, which, where the return is not as high, but it's also safer, because you have the protection of collateral. So in other words, if you, if you purchase this debt, like say it's debt on a on a residential property, and the borrower can't pay, you can foreclose on the property. And you, if you've done it, well, you should be able to get all of your money back. So you know, that safe, but you're not going to get the highest return in the world. Then on the other side is equity, where your returns are almost unlimited. I mean, you can, you can get almost anything. Again, there's different levels of risk. But there's no protection, like there is debt, it's like, in the equity side, you basically are taking a loan on equity. So if if the loan defaults, you can lose your entire investment. So, you know, it's taking a look at those things and figuring out, do I want equity? Do I want debt? And then after that, figuring out, okay, do I want to invest in single family homes? Do I want to invest in commercial real estate, single family homes are really, people don't realize this after the Great Recession, but historically, they've actually been very, very stable, other than the Great Recession, and then before that, the Great Depression, but so they tend to be much more stable as far as the prices compared to commercial real estate, which tends to go up and down more. But there's advantages to commercial real estate as well, you can, you can get better debt financing, you know, other things in there. So, so there's kind of a lot to like, learn at first. But once someone can kind of pick, then they can say, okay, you know, now I want to go to crowd Street, because I'm interested in doing apartment complexes for equity, or, you know, I'm interested in this other platform because I want maybe residential debt.
How would you recommend someone put together or find that research around that? So I'm thinking a matrix, right? Well, I want to do this and this, are those kinds of resources available on your site? Or if not, something that you recommend?
It is and I created it because there wasn't anything out there? And I actually treated like a step by step thing like, okay, what's the difference between equity and debt? So there's like, a little right upon that. And then what's the difference between commercial real estate and single family housing? And then in commercial real estate, what's the difference between the different types, like, what's the difference between an apartment complex, and a self storage unit, or an office building, or like a little strip mall, and all of them have their pluses and minuses and they all kind of fall in a different place on the risk continuum. So once someone kind of goes through that, and then they see all the different options, they can kind of come up with almost like a menu of what they want, like, okay, you know, what, I'm, maybe I'm a very conservative investor. So I would like a lot of debt, maybe I'm going to be 80% debt, and I'm going to focus, you know, completely on single family homes, you know, or maybe they're like, well, I'm a little bit more aggressive, I, I'm gonna have a mix of this and the mix of that. So basically, once they understand the riskiness are not risking this of different if a person can kind of come up with their own answer
So that that's helpful, because it is kind of overwhelming, like, where would you start, because you just listed out so many different options. And I love that you kind of pinpoint and provide some recommendations based on the person's own choices. There's another factor and you talked about this on your site as well, the accredited versus non accredited investor, can you share a little bit about kind of the differences there, too?
Sure. So let me first say that an accredited investor is a definition that the SEC has come up with. And the idea is that it's either a person that has $1 million in net assets, or they make a certain amount per year, either $200,000 a year or more, if they're single, or $300,000 a year, if they have a spouse. So that's an accredited investors, you know, high net worth individual. Some of the offerings are only for accredited investors, they're using a certain part of the crowdfunding laws that allow this other offerings are available to non accredited meaning pretty much everybody. So yeah, so it's very important to just kind of the first thing to take a look at, is this an offering or a platform that has offerings that work? For me, there's a few that have goals, like they'll have accredited and non accredited. But yeah, that's, that's a really important question to ask.
Perfect, and it's part of your, as part of the you as a person looking at the matrix and then deciding and also based on the threshold of where your definition fits. Tell us a little bit about why someone would want to invest through a crowdfunding platform, what are the benefits?
Well, the main benefit, I would say is access. So it used to be in the old days, that if you wanted to invest in real estate, you had to know somebody, so maybe you you know, you were a wealthy individual, and you belong to a country club, and you would hear Oh, you know, so and so has this deal, would you like to get it out. And so it wasn't something that the average person could participate in. And so what crowdfunding has done has all of a sudden made all of these fields, public knowledge, where before, it actually was illegal for them to publicize before. So with crowdfunding is now legal, they have to follow certain rules, what the result for the investor is great, because now all of a sudden, they, you know, they have access to I mean, I look at hundreds of deals a month. And, you know, if you can imagine it, it's probably out there. So, I think that's one of the best thing. So access to this. As I said before, it's an asset class that has done very well over time. But most people really don't know about it, you know, people are like, I know, real estate, I'm sorry, I know, like public markets. I know, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs. But it's something that just most people aren't really aware of. And there are also very, very good tax benefits for investing in real estate that just aren't available for other types of investments. A lot of times, you know, the new tax law has been very good for two. But even before that, you can, you can not pay taxes on depreciation, for example. So there are certain investments that will shield anywhere from 20%, to as much as 100% of the cash that is giving off from having to pay taxes. And all of it is, you know, completely legal, and it's part of the law. Just a nice advantage of investing in real estate.
I like what you mentioned about access, because it actually kind of goes both ways. It's, you're right, you, you know, in the past, you would have had to have known someone that, you know, had experience as a real estate investor, and they were, you know, gathering funds to buy an apartment complex, or whatever the case may be. And so there's no, there's greater access and, and all across the United States, right, many different locations, doesn't matter where you live, you can invest, you know, anywhere. And that's pretty interesting and a great benefit. On the flip side, the investor that has does the work finds that the apartment complex evaluates the numbers, they then have access to people that are looking to invest in real estate. So it's it's a good matchmaking kind of scenario.
Yeah, everyone benefits, that's for sure. And someone that is that is looking for a capital to raise before they their options were so limited, and they would basically have to know someone. And so now, anyone who has a good project, can put it out there and find the capital. So yeah, it's nice for all side.
So now, one of the keys is what what do you look for in looking at the platform itself? And I know in maybe if you can kind of explained the platform, the sponsor how those pieces work? And then what do you look for and in the actual platform,
okay, so it can be confusing with the term. So the platform is the website where the investor goes to find deals. And the the sometimes these individual deals are run by the platform themselves. Other times, they are run by third parties, who they're kind of using the site like a Craigslist, where they're like using it to publicize their deals. So so the people that are running the deals are called sponsors. So So actually, now I lost track of the original question.
Sorry, I wanted to clarify that the people who are kind of doing the day in day out and present the overall package are the sponsors.
Yes, yes. So, so so that. So that's basically what it is. And that's the distinction. But as I said, on some platforms, they're the same, because the platform is basically showing their own deals that they've sourced. So as an investor, you probably kind of prefer the first over the second, at least, because theoretically, they should be doing an extra level of due diligence. Because in the first case, you know, so So basically, I'm a platform, and I have, you know, thousands of sponsors coming to me to say, Hey, can you please put yourself, can I please go on your platform? And that's your situation, they have to be selective. versus if they themselves have a sponsor? There's a question of whether or not they're, they're going to be as selective about it.
Yeah, that's a great point. There is a for sure a vetting process before the platform would even let the opportunity be presented to investors in that kind of scenario, because they have to uphold their overall reputation, and that they're making good choices about what their what options are presenting. Yeah. What do you think are some of the so back to evaluating the platform itself? I'm going to bring this up, because I know there's been kind of an interesting cycle in this. There's a lot of different platforms, and of course, they they do have different target areas. But then some have gone out of business, right? Oh, right. So I'd love to hear like, how do you actually evaluate the platform itself? And then we'll start with that question.
Well, that's a really good question. At the beginning, I really struggled with, you know, what's the best way to evaluate them. And at the time, when I started, there were no no bankruptcies. But you even then you had to feel that this was a very new field, people could definitely they could go bankrupt. And then what happens? So, so one of the one of the main criteria I look at is bankruptcy protection. And there's kind of two parts of that. So, so if the platform goes bankrupt, I want to know that my deal, my investment, is still going to be alive, and is not going to be sucked into that bankruptcy, us to satisfy some other debts, for example, you know, my money needs to be separate. So that's called bankruptcy remote. So there's a, there's a legal thing that the platform's can do to set it up, it's more money, it's difficult. But when they do that, then it should keep your money out of the bankruptcy. So keep your money in the investment you invested in, and hopefully not sucked into the bankruptcy to pay somebody else. With all of this to it's not, it's not like an exact science, because you can't 100% predict how something will go. But, you know, you can, you know, maybe you can predict 90% of the way. So to me, it's still worth, you know, going through all these steps. So, so then if your investment doesn't get sucked into bankruptcy, the second problem is that usually the platform is running the investment, or they're managing it, or they're doing something with it. Not in every platform is that the case, but in so many it is so. So when that's the case, the other thing is that there needs to be some mechanism where in a bankruptcy situation, investors can take over. And then they can choose another manager, or maybe there's a backup manager that's already specified in advance. So it's kind of these two things that I wanted to see in place on every platform, ideally, was was one of my big criteria. And at the beginning, there were hardly any that had it. But I think kind of the peer pressure of seeing the rankings and seeing that that was an important ranking. So a lot more have offered it than they did before.
So as the industry's grown it that's interesting to see to and you know, they flush out, right, the ones that were run properly. And so it's great, because now you're looking at you make the choices based on your investment criteria. Now you evaluate the platform, and if it has a bankruptcy protection that you talked about, in the end, a backup, backup management, or however the case may be so. So are there any other cons that are things that people should look for? I don't know if I want to say cons, but anything else that you would say people should look for?
For me personally, the second thing I look at is, what's been the experience of other investors? on this platform? Has it been good? Has it been bad? And I especially look at what went wrong? And you know, do I feel okay with that or not? And so, and what I found is that there were a few platforms that were very good, and that investors had great things to say about them. And the majority were kind of maybe in the middle. And then there were a few that consistently people said bad things about them. Oh, I should mention that, as part of my research, I interviewed a whole bunch of investors. So, you know, putting all those things together, there were there were just certain platforms that I questioned whether they had good underwriting or not, because the deals were bad, you know, they're having deals going bad. And here we are in the middle of an economic cycle where things should be going well, if they're well managed. So you know, so it indicates to me that it was a little bit risky, and it should be. So you know, all of this is stuff that in a perfect world, they should be revealing to you up front. Like if this was like the public stock market, you know, it would actually be revealed in a report. And you would just know, but because this is very different. It's real estate. It's not, it's really not under the direct review of the SEC. SEC has rules. But most of these run under exemption so that they're not actually reviewed by the be like a stock would be so so they don't reveal this. And they don't tell you Oh, well, we had 30% of our deals went bad. You know, so for me digging in and finding out what the investors actually experienced was probably one of the most crucial things.
Is that information on your site to where I don't know if there's a rating or something where people?
Okay, so, and actually, we are limited, I am limited on the public website from talking about certain things as well, because one of the sponsors can't reveal certain information. And sometimes there are non disclosure requirements or things. So what I will do on the public website is I might say, well, I might I'll just say what investors are saying about a kind of a high level, investors are reporting that there's a large number of deals going into default. And then that's where the club comes in, someone can click on the link, go to the club, and then get at that point, they sign a nondisclosure, they're going to keep it private, and they can get all the details that other investors are sharing.
Perfect.And I've been in the club, and I love where people will post. So they will post actual deals that they're looking at. And you're very active in the as well. And because and I also appreciate that you're a conservative investor. So you will you always, you know, kind of preface whatever you said, with Hey, I'm really conservative. And in today's market, a lot of the things that you're kind of saying, Hey, you know, I, I wouldn't do it kind of at the top of the cycle. But I'm conservative. And here's some things that I like about that offering. And here's so it's nice. You're right, that you can then speak a little more freely within the within the club itself.
Yes, yes, exactly. Well, that's good to hear that you appreciate that. Yes, thank you.
So what do you personally look for then when evaluating the options offered?
Well, as you said, I'm pretty fussy. So because I'm so conservative, you know, I want to see several things. So if I'm okay with the platform, then I start looking at the deal. And actually, before I look at all the details of the deal, which can take, you know, it can take months to really look at a deal in detail. It's at least weeks to look at it really well. What I do is a very quick series of quick checks where I look at the sponsor first, and some of the high level things about the deal. So So first, I looked at the deal, and I said, you know, what does this kind of fit that I agree that you were talking about before, but how does it fit my portfolio? So, you know, what's the asset class, it's self storage value added? And you know, its equity. Okay? Is that something I really want in my portfolio? Right, now I take a look at my portfolio, maybe I don't have a spot for it, path. If I do, okay, so past that. So then the second thing I do is I look at the sponsors themselves. And this is this is like, there's different ways of doing due diligence. And, for me, what I find works is I start with a sponsor, and then look at the deal, some people will go the opposite way. But like I was saying before, for me, this cuts down on time, because a lot of times I can just read the beautiful out at this point and not have to dig into the details. And that allows me to get like 100 of these in a month. So, so why Look, look next is that the sponsor, and in a mainstream asset class like this, like we, which is the typical case, like it might be mobile, or whatever, I'm pretty strict. So I require I want to see full real estate cycle experience, and no investing money lost. So for real estate cycle experience means that they basically have navigated both the ups and the downs of a cycle, I'm really, really concerned about the downs. So I don't want someone that never experienced adverse conditions to be trying to do that for the first time with my money, because, you know, things can definitely go wrong, and it can be very expensive. So I want that full cycle experience. And then I want the no investor money lost to show that they have been, you know, managing their their money conservatively. And I will make a small exception on that, like if they had like one or two deals that are gone bad. And they were badly times like they were right before the last recession, you know, and they've learned lessons from that, where they wouldn't repeat whatever it was, maybe they had too much leverage or something like that, then I'll make an exception. But by using that, we've got a lot of deals. So very interesting, I'm a sponsor, if they pass, then the second thing I look at is skin in the game. So this is the concept of like, if you have a financial planner, the financial planner is going to usually make a percentage of money off of you based on your assets, or they're going to make money off of you based on how many deals they put you into or into the deals, but they may be stocks or whatever, but how many investments that put you into.
But there's no such thing as a financial planner that would actually lose money if you lost money. Well, the cool thing about real estate is that that situation actually exists. It's really good for linemen. So it's called skin in the game, or it's called co investment with the sponsors actually putting in their own money right next to you as an investor as cash on the same terms. So, so for me, I'm conservative, I love this. And the more the better, because I know that they're going to be very cautious about losing their own money. And they're going to act in a more conservative way, then if they had none of their money involved. So, so for me skin in the game is the next thing that I look at, then I start to look at the debt. So again, because I'm conservative, I will I'm concerned if it defaults on the debt, I could lose all my money. So that's like a situation I want to avoid at all costs. So I'll take a look at the debt and say, You know what, it needs to be 65% loan to value or less. So loan to value is just how much loan versus how much is the property worth. So most deals are above that. Okay, fine, I'm done. If it passes, then I take a look at the other thing. So so I'm concerned in the debt about refinancing risk. So in other words, packing the Great Recession, a bunch of deals died, because the bank's stopped loaning what So typically, a commercial real estate loan might be like five years, and then has a balloon payment, meaning everything is due. So if you can't refinance it, you're basically you're going to lose the property, because you can't come up with that balloon payment. So for me, as a conservative investor, you know, maybe that won't happen again, anytime in the near future. But since it can happen, so for me, I want to see that they've locked in long term debt seven to 10 years. So that way, if we have a recession, and say, three years from now, you know, that gives them plenty of time to ride it out before they would have to refinance. So I want them to have that flexibility, someone that's less conservative may not care, you know, they might be fine with that. And it's the same thing with the interest rate, I want to see them have a fixed little rate, because I'm worried about interest rates going up, interest rates go up, it'll just totally mess up the performance, performers, the projections. So real estate is just heavily based on the interest rate and things like that, because usually, there's so much leverage. So, you know, I want to see it locked in at a low fixed rate. So if I see floating rate, boom, it's out for me. And then there's several other things I go through. So I go through the debt, I go through, I take a look at the fees, I look at the fees and the waterfall, and I compare them with other sponsors doing the same thing. And if they are, you know, out of line, that alone might be enough to say, Hey, you know what, I don't love this deal that much, you know, pass. And only, then you'll actually go and look at the deal. And really, by this point, 95% have already fallen out. But then I'll go and look at the deal, I'll do something that I call pro forma popping, which is a, so I'll take the pro forma, which is the it's kind of like you can imagine like a spreadsheet of how they are projecting the deal to work on a year by year basis. And then I'll pop it I'll just challenge every assumption in there and say, hey, why does it seem not right? and see where I can see where they've been making maybe aggressive assumptions, they're assuming that rents going to go up 10% every year, and in the past, it's only gone up 3%. So and it doesn't, of course, doesn't just include a recession. So I'll do that. I'll run a recession stress test on it, I will check the sponsor out on Google, where I'll just google everything about them, check them out on Glassdoor, look at their Yelp ratings. And then also check the legal documents, the VPN. And if it passes all those things, when I finally have a view of that I can invest.
Let me just say, you were the perfect person to come up with this website. Because this resource, because here's the thing, especially now, a lot of people are super excited about real estate investing. And, and I love real estate seed investing. But you have to be so cautious. And what you've done here, and you've just taken us through the steps, is you've brought that all that analysis to that crowdfunding opportunity that people have to really passively invest in real estate really have not that much work to do except for this analysis, and to make those good choices. And you've brought all that detailed to your site and as much as you can have in the public site into the club. And, you know, it's just it's very thorough, and obviously, you're very thorough and everything you do so, you know, again, thank you, because that's just an awesome resource. Tell us a little bit about kind of two things. First, what resources we've talked about a little bit the matrix, and a few of those things are available on the on the public site.
Yes. So there is a competitor matrix, that competitors, you know, all the different platforms, kind of talks about the basic thing, is that accredited and non accredited, do they have bankruptcy protection, do they not? There's also public reviews of every platform. And the older reviews were back in the days when I didn't get as deep into them, you can tell the newer ones, because they say at the top comprehensive. So I mean, the comprehensive ones, it will take me a few days just to type up everything, but it goes into everything on the platform. So looking at how it's setup legally. I'll go through a sample deal on the platform, and kind of like what I just did with you, but go through that on that particular deal and say why I like certain things or don't like certain things, from my perspective, of course, which is not going to be the same as everyone? And, you know, so those are there for every single platform. And for a few on the non accredited sites. There are, there's ratings or our analysis of individual deals. And the reason why is because some of those are actually allowed to be discussed publicly by the SEC, when they're running under Regulation A plus. So, so I've done that. And in fact, there was a recent one that just got posted up there just a couple days ago. And so that's there too. There's news, there's blog, that kind of talks about the latest thing. So there's tutorials
Oh, I, as I mentioned before, there's tutorials to kind of take someone through, you know, starting at the beginning, what is real estate to I wanted in my portfolio, what are the different asset types? What do they mean? What are the differences? What does it mean to me, you know, kind of taking them from that level, to some pretty advanced stuff, like, I've been able to interview some, some amazing minds in real estate, where I've spoken to Paul Haysbert, who has done over two point, I think it's over 2.4, now billion dollars of transactions. And he said on both sides of the table as a buyer and a seller, and he has he has a book that he wrote that I think is like one of the best for both beginners and advanced people. And he gave an interview, I did a couple interviews with him where he kind of shared insights on some of the kind of the dirty secrets of the industry and things to watch out for, and kind of exploding some of the sacred cows that are out there that people believe. But really, maybe they shouldn't. So all that stuff is out there on the public side.
Fantastic. And then what is in the private investor club, how is it useful to investors?
So the private investor club is where an investor goes, like you said, they found a new deal. But do I want to invest in it. And a lot of a lot of people are are new. So they'll post it up, and they'll say, Hey, here's what I like about it, and what I don't, but I'd like to get your opinion. And they'll get it, they'll get opinions from other people saying what they think. And a lot of times, it can save people, you know, a lot of potential headaches and losses when they get different opinions. So that's part. The other thing is, it's a place to find deals that aren't on the platforms. Because one thing that I found so so crowdfunding is awesome, for all the reasons you talked about, you know, it's like, it enables access for both parties. But if you think about it, the most experienced the best sponsors, the ones who have been for from my point of view, as a conservative investor, the ones that have been around for an entire cycle or more, and they haven't lost money. These are people that have developed a very enthusiastic investor base already. So most of the times, these are not sponsors that have to go on a crowdfunding platform, because they already have that investor base they can use Why should they pay a platform extra money, when they already have the investors. So So part of the club is networking with other club members and bringing in new deals. And so we find about a new sponsor or a new deal when we put it up. So that's the second part. And then the third part is that through the club, we can negotiate your terms usually. So said, we find that sponsor, and we all love it, it's a fantastic deal. So I'll go to the sponsor and say, Hey, you know, what, we are interested in putting in, you know, individually, we're not putting in much, but together as a group, we're going to be putting in $3 million into your fund, you know, can you please give us all some special terms we'd like, you know, to make a higher profit, a better a better preferred return. Or maybe we want to lower minimum to get into it, you know, so by aggregating that together, all of us get a much better deal than any of us could individually.
That's fantastic. It is such a useful resource, both the public and private investor club. And I think that's clear as you have you taken us through all the all the detail that you put into this. So how can listeners get in touch with you? And or, well, we've talked about the site but find more information.
Yeah, so they can visit the real estate, crowdfunding review dot com. When they're there, there is a little thing called a renesant, this is private investor club. So if people are interested, they can click on that. And you can kind of see what the club is about. Now, membership is free. But there are some requirements, we have to vet people, because we have to be very careful about keeping the information, the club pure and something that we all can trust. So So if a person is a sponsor or platform where they're affiliated with one, unfortunately, they can't be in the club. So there, there is a you know, a vetting process, but it's free, you know, nothing that cost any money. And then they want to contact me directly. There is a contact page on the site. They can also look me up on LinkedIn. So under my name, Ian Ippolito, and find me that way.
Excellent. And thank you so much for coming on the show today. And for the listeners. The details will be in our show notes.
ABOUT IAN IPPOLITO
Ian Ippolito is an investor and serial entrepreneur. He's been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, TIME, Fast Company, TechCrunch, CBS News, FOX News and more. Ippolito was impressed by the potential of real estate crowdfunding, but frustrated by the lack of quality site reviews and investment analysis. He created TheRealEstateCrowdfundingReview.com to fill that gap.
Today the site is read avidly by over 12,000 users each month, and has a private investor club with 2,000+ accredited investors with over $2.1 billion in investable assets. It's been featured in USA Today, Bloomberg News, Realtor.com, Curbed and more. Past interviewees include MIT's Prof. David Geltner (author of the #1 read book on commercial real estate) and Dr. Glenn Mueller (winner of the Groundbreaking Research Award by the American Real Estate Society).