Institutional real estate investors have historically struggled to buy tons of single-family homes (the so-called “single-family rental sector”) so they can turn us all into tenant slaves and trap millions in a rentier economy. A few startups are trying to ease the “pain” of these greedy harbingers of hyper-capitalism.
Imo Capitala residential real estate portfolio management platform, raised $90.7 million. Brick path is another housing rental platform (raised £6m from London). And Casvari In Spain/Portugal it collected $20.5 million.
In this market launched Door feed, founded by James Kirimi, one of Uber’s first employees in the UK. It has secured a new €7 million funding round in Seed’s extension round led by Motive Ventures (backed by private equity firm Apollo, owner of Yahoo! and thus TechCrunch), with participation from Stride VC and Seedcamp. The company previously raised €3.5 million in seed funding led by Stride and Seedcamp in 2021, and €1.5 million debt financing from BPI France in 2022.
In simple terms, DoorFeed provides the data and operations platform for investment funds to aggregate and manage large-scale portfolios of apartments and houses. It also allows them to see which homes are performing poorly on energy, renovate them, and potentially obtain environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) credits from governments, it claims.
It makes money through sourcing fees and renovation management fees, as well as annual property and asset management fees.
Looking at the market independently, it’s clear that these companies are after something that would make a hedge fund manager blush.
Investment in European live assets outpaced all other real estate asset classes in the second quarter 10.6 billion eurosAccording to JLL, 20% of the market is buy-to-let investors.