https://propertyconnect.com/blog/
Blog Connecting the dots – selling property online, facilitating financing, and thus the purchase. An end to end sales channel and ecosystem for property.
We have been flat out at Property Connect executing upon our vision of a frictionless way for investors to access property, either locally or abroad. Investing in property is becoming harder and harder in every country. Developers are finding it difficult to promote their inventory and obtain financing to get their project out of the ground. Meanwhile, there is a whole generation who can at best hope to rent for a considerable amount of time, before being able to afford a deposit to purchase a property to live in. Many others choose to buy in remote locations, whilst they rent in cities close to employment, to beat the affordability gap.
We have a vision at Property Connect - to be the Etrade or Commsec of property investing, allowing everyone to access and manage all their property investments from their sofa. This can be direct outright purchases or fractional investing through a fund, either locally or abroad. Choose your investment type – Commercial, Residential, Industrial or Retail. Choose your location – Europe, Asia or the America’s. Select the property, analyse the returns, review the contracts and legal documentation. Place your bid or make your investment. Organise the financing. Then sit back and enjoy your investment or property and the associated returns or views.
If you are a developer, load your project onto the platform. Define the return profile and the investment metrics. Articulate the time horizon and investment potential. We will syndicate the debt and equity components, whilst also helping with ways to pre-sell your inventory. Thus we open up alternate investing models to our investors, things like mezzanine debt financing and commercial investment opportunities, which are normally only accessible to investors with $1 million to invest via a private Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT).
As a direct purchaser we can facilitate and arrange the lending decision whilst you are at the online auction. Or, if you are a ‘long tail’ property investor with only a small amount of money, we can assist you by getting you onto the property ladder by investing as little as $50,000 into a fund. You have the ability to diversify based upon geography, property type and the specific returns and risk profile that you are seeking.
That is our vision and we have been busy piecing together the building blocks to enable us to efficiently launch such a bold initiative. This has been outlined in the market since our most recent strategy update, but we thought we would explain the concept in words, going beyond the youtube video we released about the property sales funnel and articulate what each of the commercial agreements and announcements we have made really means.
Our Clearmatch partnership provides us with a P2P lending marketplace upon which to build the debt warehouse facilities for developers seeking construction development finance. This allows us to then work with ultra high net worth individuals who are offshore investors, but also property developers to provide debt financing cheaper than on shore banks, or with offshore hedge funds looking to do the same and who specialise in feasibility assessment of construction projects. If we look at the Australian property market and the ROE (Return on Equity) generated by the big four banks, it is double digit. No other bank on the planet generates that kind of ROE. It is a market ripe for disruption, and the recent royal commission and ASIC / APRA contraction in lending policies coupled with increased BASEL IV capital adequacy ratios create a perfect storm for investors who wouldn’t mind being a bank, but with a different operating model.
We can then extend further into providing warehouse facilities for the end residential mortgage market, either locally or internationally. More on this in due course. We are exploring more creative ways to leverage digital distribution for an ever increasingly mobile investor base, taking advantage of secure international tax-free jurisdictions as a digital front door for efficient investing.
We have already completed our investor / buyer, seller / developer, renter and landlord digital dashboards at Property Connect as we have developed the platform from a US focused rental application, to an Australian platform and then one capable of supporting the UAE. In addition, we have extended the functionality to support online property auctions. This means we are effectively a digital real estate agency, able to promote and cross sell to the various stakeholders who interact with our platform. In this vein we have built the requirements for making the platform investment grade, with 100 identity points checks (Anti Money Laundering and Know Your customer capabilities), which is required for operating funds or any form of investment product requiring an Australian Financial Services License, or an international license in another jurisdiction.
Further, our most recent partnership with Damac Properties, a listed property developer from the UAE, with in excess of $7bn in deposits, provides us with an impressive list of projects and immediate investment opportunities for our customers, not to mention direct sales stock. We have also been working hard to onboard additional developers internationally and locally.
The time is right for a new and digital only real estate agency, however we are more than just that. We are working with data providers and advertising platforms to go beyond the traditional agency model. We are an international platform capable of facilitating lending and investment syndication in due course. That is our vision and the building blocks which we have put in place in the past several months and announced to the market. We simply thought it worth explaining in detail where we are headed and how we join the dots to help the property market thrive and excel on a global basis. Feel free to reach out if you have a project you want to list or register to explore all the investments we have on the platform today – browse here.
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