“Economically, nothing is viable anymore,” says Erwann Le Guilcher, founder of the crowdfunding platform CrowdyBee, while the real estate crowdfunding sector is shaken by the market downturn. “There is a structural problem,” he continues. It’s all about the volume of transactions, but there are fewer good files. The players are hyper-regulated, while the public is poorly educated about crowdfunding. We need to clean all floors! »
Until then, however, this type of investment intended to finance concrete projects (construction of housing, investment in renewable energies, assistance for start-ups, etc.) attracted a growing number of individuals. At the height of its glory, in 2022, crowdfunding financed operations worth 2.4 billion euros, including 1.6 billion for real estate. But the rise in interest rates hit their growth, resulting in an explosion of repayment delays of more than six months. In 2024, 9.5% of real estate projects financed via bonds encountered repayment difficulties; in 2025, this proportion increased to 30%. Collective procedures logically followed. To date, a quarter of the real estate operations financed would be affected.
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This violent reversal has lifted the veil on the fragility of the platforms financing real estate projects. The first players in this sector, launched in the mid-2010s, started with a model without fees for savers. The majority of them are paid exclusively by the project leaders they finance, by imposing an interest rate much higher than the 11% which will accrue to savers and pocketing the rest for their operation.
The platforms today pay a high price for the absence of subscription or management fees, which do not exist for any other investment except regulated savings, because they themselves advance the costs of recovery procedures against bad payers. However, these prove to be very costly in terms of lawyer or expert fees. “Savers were made to believe that they could collect 11% returns for free. It is illusory to think that this market anomaly can continue,” warns a professional in the sector.
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Originally published at Almouwatin.com
