Affordability is one of the gnarly issues that housing faces now. A new system proposes to help buyers proactively invest in the house that they will buy in the future. Not only just a house, but one in a prime urban location.
Here’s an interesting idea: invest in the home you’ll want to buy in five years today.
That’s the crux of a new model being rolled out this week by real estate crowd funding startup Fundrise. The Washington D.C. based company is selling shares in funds dedicated to building and remodeling single family housing in urban locations. They’re calling the new vehicles “eFunds.”
“We need to figure out ways to add supply in the cities where people want to be, not force people to leave the cities because they can’t afford to be there. That is what the eFunds are about,” says Fundrise CEO and Co-founder Ben Miller. The funds “are a way to bring a generation of people together to change the power dynamic, to change the funding dynamic” in the housing market.
Fundrise will launch the concept with two $50 million eFunds, one for Los Angeles and the other for Washington D.C. They received SEC approval last month and have been building up portfolios of projects those cities, 100 in all. By the end of this year, Fundrise hopes to have eFunds in major cities across the country.
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