CrowdStreet Raises $43M From CRE Giants To Expand Platform For Small Investors
Commercial real estate crowdfunding platform CrowdStreet has closed its own funding round with $43M in new equity from industry stalwarts.
TIAA, Cypress Equity Investments, The Dinerstein Cos. and Foulger-Pratt participated in the investment round, the Austin, Texas-based startup, which was founded in 2013, announced in a press release.
TIAA, the insurer that is the parent company of Nuveen, participated in the round through its new TIAA Ventures arm. Previous investors Grotech Ventures, Rally Ventures, Seven Peaks Ventures and Green Visor Capital also chipped into the latest fundraising.
CrowdStreet allows smaller investors to place equity into commercial real estate developments and investments via online crowdfunding.
“What we’ve changed is to have brought the old syndication model of raising capital through institutions, ultra-high-net-worth individuals and family office money, the way it’s traditionally been done, into the online paradigm,” CrowdStreet CEO and co-founder Tore Steen told Commercial Observer. “By doing that, we’ve opened up new sources of raising capital for commercial real estate developers and operators with individual investors that haven’t been able to access that offline, more limited access model.”
The company has seen more than $3.6B of investment raised on its platform since its founding, including a record $1.2B last year, according to the release. Its investments have generated an average internal return rate of 17.5%, it said in the announcement. This year, CrowdStreet launched a flagship nontraded REIT of its own — CrowdStreet REIT I Inc.
The firm plans to use the equity and debt capital from this latest round of funding to expand its growth as it looks to expand product and service offerings. It will also allow the company to expand into wealth management with financial advisers helping their clients add commercial real estate to investment portfolios.
“We've watched for several years as CrowdStreet has evolved its fintech platform to better serve real estate project sponsors and its community of investors," Nuveen Chief Investment Officer and Head of Real Estate Funds Management of Americas Shawn Lese said in a statement. "CrowdStreet's innovation is modernizing, demystifying, and streamlining access to commercial real estate so that more investors have the potential to reap the benefits of investment in the asset class."
Crowdfunding for commercial real estate investment has been met with skepticism in previous years. Prior to the pandemic, experts warned that the model may not survive a significant economic downturn.
The model had been taken up and largely abandoned by several of its early crowdfunding peers, like Fundrise and Cadre, which pivoted to launching nontraded REITs as their preferred vehicle, Bisnow previously reported. Other startups, like RealtyShares and Prodigy Network, went out of business.
But last year, amid a bullish stock market, crowdfunding became attractive to retail investors looking for different places to put their cash, driving CrowdStreet's biggest year yet and pushing legacy CRE firms like Jamestown to launch crowdfunding vehicles of their own.
CrowdStreet's Series D round brings its total funding amount to $67.9M, according to Crunchbase.
