HomeUnion, an online residential real estate investment firm, is increasing its presence in the single-family rental market.
Back in 2015, HomeUnion began lending to single-family rental investors.
Now, HomeUnion is launching a new program that will make the company itself an investor in single-family rentals, but the company isn’t using its own money.
Rather, HomeUnion is launching a crowdfunding platform that will allow individual investors to buy into a fund that will seek to create a return by identifying single-family rental investment opportunities, improving the properties, increasing the rents, and potentially selling the properties to other investors.
Starting with a minimum investment of $10,000, retail investors now have the ability to acquire interest in HomeUnion’s “Fix-and-Flip Fund.”
The fund allows investors to invest in single-family rental properties acquired for fix-and-flip purposes in seven HomeUnion markets: Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Raleigh and Tampa.
This is how the firm explains the fund, via its website:
Using proprietary algorithms and local market expertise, the fund identifies properties in active HomeUnion markets that present opportunities to increase values and command higher rents through renovation. The fund purchases, renovates, and places renters in these properties. The properties are then sold as tenanted assets on HomeUnion’s online investment marketplace – a leading destination for single-family real estate (SFR) investments, where more than $150 million in transactions have closed to date.
“Consumers can now choose how they invest in real estate with us,” Don Ganguly, CEO of HomeUnion, said.
“With the launch of this new platform, we are empowering buyers to invest in rental assets directly, or invest in a fund that meets their individual preferences and goals,” Ganguly added. “Unlike other websites, which source third-party projects and act as middlemen or brokers, HomeUnion is the investment manager on the newly launched fund. In other words, we curate, renovate and manage the assets using big data and our local real estate experts.”
According to the company’s website, HomeUnion is looking to raise $2 million for its fix-and-flip fund.
Previously, in addition to lending to single-family rental investors, HomeUnion allowed investors to buy both single-family and multifamily real estate through its platform.
Now, investors can buy just a piece of a single-family rental via the firm’s new fund.
