Fifth Wall Gains Ivanhoé Cambridge As Partner, Invests In Airbnb Of Self-Storage
Fifth Wall continues to rack up new investments and big-name partners.
The proptech venture capitalist firm led a $53M Series B funding round for online self-storage platform Neighbor, Fifth Wall announced in a press release on Wednesday. Neighbor, which allows owners of both residential and commercial real estate to list vacant space for self-storage, also brought previous investor Andreessen Horowitz into the fundraising round, as well as current and former executives from DoorDash, Uber, Overstock and StockX.
The day before, Ivanhoé Cambridge announced that it had entered into a strategic partnership with Fifth Wall that included becoming the VC firm's largest investor. The Montreal-based developer is the first investor in Fifth Wall's fifth fund, focused on climate technology. Ivanhoé Cambridge has invested $85M across Fifth Wall's four previous funds, joining industry giants like Hines and CBRE.
As part of Fifth Wall's investment into Neighbor, it has already brought in two of its commercial landlord partners, Jamestown and Acadia Realty Trust, to begin posting extra space in their buildings for use on Neighbor's platform, according to the release.
As vacancy rose across multiple property types in the past 12 months, so did the usage of Neighbor to generate revenue from those empty spaces. The company reported a 500% year-over-year increase in revenue from March 2020 to today and a 700% increase in what it calls "organic reservations." Listings on Neighbor are priced an average of 40% to 50% less than traditional self-storage facilities, the release claimed.
Fifth Wall is acting on a glut of liquidity in the real estate capital markets in several ways, including joining in on the craze of special-purpose acquisition companies. After announcing in January that it would be launching its own SPAC in January, Fifth Wall increased the company's IPO fundraising target from $250M to $300M, The Real Deal reports.
