Estateguru background
Estateguru is quite old, being founded already in June 2014 by Marek Pรคrtel, Kaspar Kaljuvee and Julian Kaljuvee. Incidentally, Julian was also a co-founder of Bondora, another platform I like a lot (read my Bondora review).
These guys are actual somebodies, unlike many of the failed platforms of late. One thing I've learned in the recent months is to make sure I like the team, and this team has a solid background.
At the time of writing, Estateguru is already operating in 8 countries, including Finland, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal and Spain. They also are closing in on 50 000 investors.
To read more, check out the About Estateguru -page and Estateguru's AngelList entry.
How to start investing on Estateguru
To start investing on Estateguru, just follow these simple steps:
1. Register
First you need to head over to estateguru.co and click on Register. Have your identification at hand as you will need to provide proof of identity.
2. Transfer funds to your Estateguru account
Once your account is set up, you can transfer funds to your account with a SEPA transfer for free.
3. Select a loan to invest in
There are usually at least a couple of loans open for investing. Choose one of those or wait for new ones to open. Even before registering, you can check current and funded loans on the Estateguru front page, but in order to see more details, you do need to register.
Key Estateguru features
Loan overview
Perhaps the best part of Estateguru is the amount and depth of detail they give out on each individual loan. On the loan page, you should draw your attention to details such as:
- Loan-to-value: what can be the maximum debt-to-value ratio on this project
- Stage loan: Often customers can raise loans in stages, only getting the next loan when certain thresholds are met. This prevents anyone from raisin a huge loan and running with the money.
- Type: How will principal and interest be paid
- Borrower: Check the details out of the borrower.
- Appraisal report(s): Estateguru evaluates projects using external valuators. Make sure you read those valuation reports and check who made them.
- Project information: Most importantly, check out what the loan is for and if it makes sense to you.
There's boatloads of information to digest. It might seem a lot at first, I'll rather spend time reading the brochure and deciding on each loan individually, than switching on an auto-invest and not be in the helm. Auto-invests are for high-volume consumer loans.
Secondary market
You can sell your loans on a secondary market, which of course is really nice. Since the secondary market is quite new, you can actually find some pretty good deals on it. Some loans sell for close to 30% IRR with 6 months left in the loan even without being delayed.
Buying good deals on the secondary market could be a great strategy, but one does need to avoid buying the troubled loans.
Loan updates
For each loan there's a monthly loan update. When things go as planned, it will look like this:
If you consider buying something from the secondary market, having a look at the loan update is absolutely must as it will show the full history of what has happened with the loan.
Estateguru Auto-invest
Estateguru has an auto-invest feature with two flavors: basic and advanced.
The basic auto-invest only allows for the first three settings, and advanced opens also settings 4-9. In order to use the advanced settings, you need to set the Amount for one loan to at least 250 €.
This is what the settings do:
- Amount for one loan is the euro amount the auto-invest will invest in a loan.
- Period sets the maximum loan period in months and options are up to 12, 18, 24 and 60.
- Type lets you choose repayment schedule types, with options: all loans, all bullet loans, bullet with interest, full bullet (also interest is paid at maturity).
- Security lets you choose debt preference in case of liquidation (first rank, second rank or any)
- LTV or Loan-to-value sets the maximum debt in relation to collateral valuation. The lower this is, the more secure the loan should in theory be, assuming the valuation is done properly.
- Refinancing loans lets you choose if you want to invest in Estateguru's refinancing loans, where a new loan is taken to pay back an old one.
- Interest is pretty self-evident with choices starting from 8%+ to 11%+.
- Stage loans defines if the auto-invest should be allowed to invest in different of development of the same loan/project.
- Invest all funds available: if set to Yes, will invest your remaining funds even if balance is lower than setting #1 (probably assuming still the minimum of 50€ per loan)
I don't particularly like auto-invest features. I prefer to check out the loan manually and decide if I want to invest in it or not. I do like however how Estateguru's auto-invest works.
Estateguru long-term return rate
An average investor so far has received 11.84% interest on Estateguru. I've invested in 10 different loans with an average of 11% interest rate, and so far have had no defaults. Since Estateguru is international, I have diversified across three countries.
Now 11% interest isn't too shabby, considering all of the loans have proper collateral. Most LTV rates are below 50%, but there are some occasions where you see 60% and close to the maximum 75%, but those usually come with higher rates as well.
Assuming you get the average of about 12% interest rate, how does that look like in the long term? Try it out on my Estateguru compound interest calculator:
But as always, historical performance isn't a guarantee of the future and there are always risks as with any investment.
Estateguru risks
Credit risk is probably the most likely one. From the 2018 Estateguru annual statement, you can see that 2.4% of loan capital is in default. You should expect some defaults when using Estateguru. However, since the loans have high enough loan-to-value, there have not been loss of capital yet.
Liquidity is a significant risk, since the loans take years to pay back. If you need cash before maturity, the only option is to sell on the secondary market, most likely with severe discount.
I'd evaluate platform risk to be small: Estateguru is a long-term player already and was profitable in 2018. As they are expanding on new markets, it seems the only direction for Estateguru is up, not down.
Surprisingly the most annoying risk is inactivity fees though: once you stop investing since you want to discontinue on the platform, you'll eventually get locked into projects that don't generate any income due to legal processes - for months, years. You'll stop watching the Estateguru account since nothing's happening there. Then, there's the odd, once a year random payment from some project, but, since you haven't been able to invest anything in 12 months, there's a inactivity fee of 50 euros per month. Imagine that! They do send email notifications 7 days prior. sSince this already happened to me once, I've asked about the possibility to do automatic withdrawals or an SMS notification in addition to just email, but I believe this is too lucrative for them to change.
I think this risk will bite you too, it's too easy to miss an email.
Full disclosure
I used to be a fan of Estateguru. They were the best. Good projects, solid historical performance. Boy have things changed.
I've changed my 5-star review to just one sad star ⭐, solely due to the way I feel they use the inactive fees to steal from your account, how likely I believe it happens to every single investor on the platform, how they simply decide to not provide automatic withdrawals or SMS notifications, and how this results in a catastrophically bad financial investment for a small investor. Exiting the platform while avoiding the inactive fees is too difficult.
Stay away!
Maybe have a look at this instead:
- Crowdestate review: the most financially stable real estate platform
