Here’s our weekly roundup of news stories across a variety of platforms for investing in alternative assets.
Arrived
In addition to launching new properties, Arrived had a busier week when it comes to small news announcements.
Arrived has now reduced the minimum investment on their Wefunder campaign to $100. If you are interested in being an investor in Arrived the company, there’s still time to reserve shares. Keep in mind that the round is very oversubscribed though. It’s not exactly clear how that will play out, but we know not everyone will not be able to get their full reservation amount.
After many requests from investors, Arrived launched a mobile app this week. Currently it’s only available on Apple’s iOS. If you followed us on Twitter then you also would have caught a helpful reminder from us. The announcement email for the app launch actually had instructions for a $10 credit (valid for ~24 hours) towards the bottom!
Now for one last piece of news that investors may not like. In an email to investors today, Arrived announced they would change when they provide share price updates for vacation rental properties. Originally, all Arrived’s offerings were eligible to receive a quarterly share valuation update after the offering had been closed for at least 6 months. That has now been changed to 12 months for vacation rentals.
If you log in and take a look at the Portfolio page, you can see the new dates for the first valuation updates for vacation rentals.
Fundrise
In an email to investors, Fundrise indicated that the Innovation Fund will soon be open for additional investments. They cited the macroeconomic environment as the main reason that they deployed capital conservatively. Since they weren’t deploying much money, they also limited the amount that was being accumulated by the fund.
Another piece of news that we missed from earlier this month is that the Innovation Fund has made its second investment. On June 9th they announced a ~$1M investment in Immuta. Immuta is another data infrastructure company that focuses on enabling their customers to better understand and secure their data.
Doorvest
Doorvest announced a new perk in an email earlier this week. The “DV Boost” perk will provide more stable cash flow for the first 5 years of ownership. As an example to what this looks like in practice, here’s how DV Boost works for 544 Pennylake Ln ($311,510):
As you can see, the most added cash flow is at the first two years of ownership. Then it begins decreasing before stopping entirely at year 6. Overall the additional monthly payments are worth a total or $20,100. That’s about 6.5% of the property purchase price.
ANote Music
In a series of tweets TrustSwap revealed that they would be hosting ANote Music’s “Private Round Token Offering” beginning on July 7th.
ANote also made some changes to improve the user experience on their platform.
With the launch of the “Investor Protection Programme,” several warnings will now be presented to users making trades in the secondary market under certain conditions. These cover situations like low liquidity, where more inexperienced or inattentive investors are more likely to make a very bad trade without realizing.
There were also additional changes to how primary auctions function to ensure a fairer and smoother process for onboarding these new assets.
Landa
Are there more properties coming? In their June Property Performance email, Landa recently included a section about construction updates. Based on the update, it sounds like there are 30 new properties that are currently being constructed for Landa investors. Once construction is complete, they will be available for investment on the platform.
Landa shared on Twitter that they had improved the workflow for updating secondary market orders. Instead of canceling and re-placing the order, there is now a workflow to resubmit the order in one step.
Untapped Global
In a June email to investors (that we missed last week), Untapped announced that they were expecting to close a $5M+ seed round in the next few months.
Prosper
In a Tweet, Prosper announced they were expanding their home equity line of credit (HELOC) lending options. While we aren’t sure if those loans will ultimately make it onto the investment side of the platform, it’s a potentially interesting data point on their view of home equity.
In short, after a lot of disruption and uncertainty in the housing market, some data suggests that the worst may be behind us. It’s of course possible to find data for the other side of the argument as well. We imagine that Prosper wouldn’t choose this time to expand their HELOC offerings unless they were expecting relative stability or strengthening in the housing market over at least the mid-term.
