Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Roofstock, a company that buys and rents out homes and commercial properties, is offering small investors a chance to get in on the game.
The four-year old Oakland-based startup is willing to sell just a “tenth of a home” to willing investors who’re looking to start small.
What Roofstock does is it buys homes and properties and places them in a trust. The trust then sells stakes in those properties for a minimum of $5,000. The idea is to help investors avoid carrying a loan on their personal balance sheet, while still being able to receive the tax benefits of owning real estate, as well as part of the rental income from it.
“The whole idea at our founding was to create a platform where real estate could trade much more like a stock,” Gary Beasley, CEO of Roofstock, told Bloomberg.
More startups are popping up that want to help investors once again amass large portfolios of rental homes, as they did following the foreclosure crisis. But because deep bargain prices and foreclosures have dried up, some investors have curtailed their buying sprees and many have consolidated with bigger firms.
Roofstock, like some other recent startups, is hoping to jumpstart small-property owners interested in investing in single-family rentals. Roofstock is targeting properties in the $100,000 to $200,000 price range. It is launching in Atlanta and Indianapolis before rolling out to more markets.
