What is next for Estate Baron

Estate Baron has solved the tech and compliance challenges to make raising equity funding for development projects possible.However there are a few structural issues that hamper our growth.

From the developers perspective the process of fundraising takes time as you have to do legals which takes a few weeks and then the actual fundraise. Most developers are not doing the marketing or are starting too late which hampers their success rates.

When you are dealing with a property project which has contractual settlement dates you cant afford the raise to be not successful. The time pressure to raise the money puts the developers in a pincer.

The second issue is developers often need money for land. But they cannot do a public raise if they do not control the land as doing that could mean others could take the land from under their noses while the raise is in progress.

So there was a need felt for a structure which would allow the developers to build out their marketing over a period of time without having the time pressure for a raise. And such a structure would also need to be able to raise money for projects where the land is yet to be identified.

On the investor side, there are other challenges. While an investor may invest in a particular project, they are unlikely to reinvest or refer till they see an outcome. Most development projects take atleast a year or two which means referral loops are hard to establish. So we need a mechanism in which investors can start achieving investors faster.

The final thing is we have always believed that Estate Baron must act as a platform, where there is user generated content (UGC) and user promoted content (UPC). Unfortunately developments are a complicated offering and not anyone can just rock up to a platform and propose a project. We need to be able to allow a simpler offering option to fit the UGC/UPC formula.

To achieve all of this we are taking the following approach. 

Going forward we will be focusing more on pooled offerings. These allow the developers to raise money and then deploy it to various projects that are being undertaken by them without having the time pressure. It also allows them to raise money for projects where the land is yet to be secured.

We will also be focusing on developing offerings that offer a monthly or quarterly income. Giving investors a monthly or quarterly income would mean that investors will start seeing money in their bank account faster. This would lead to potential reinvestments and referrals.

We are also developing a secondary market capability. This would mean the illiquid investment that is locked in for 2 years typically is suddenly liquid. It would bring engagement on the platform as investors would actively want to track their investment as well as have the ability to achieve an exit when they want to.

And finally we are putting together a fractional property platform where people can crowdfund their home deposits or release equity in their properties to the crowd. This is a simpler offering, it is existing built up property Buy and Hold.

All of these things will come into play over a period of time but when they all fall in place we will find higher engagement and better referral loops leading to faster investor growth.