The team at The Real Deal interviewed Sharestates CEO/Co-founder Allen Shayanfekr about how Sharestates works. He shares why Sharestates has been so successful as a crowdfunding platform since it was founded in 2015.
Since then, Sharestates has handled $2.3 billion in loan volume, mostly in prime East Coast fix-and-flip markets like Brooklyn.
“Brooklyn is where Manhattan was, from a pricing standpoint, 20 years ago,” said Sharestates CEO Allen Shayanfekr. “It doesn’t matter where you buy in Brooklyn today, within the next decade or two you’ll be sitting on a gold mine.”
But now — with thousands of customers, over 2,500 closed loans and a wealth of experience — Sharestates is pushing the real estate crowdfunding business into fresh markets and creating opportunities for those who have struggled to find funding. They are now lending in 43 states and growing.
“We’re letting investors go direct to the borrowers,” said Shayanfekr. “And they can actually individually pick and choose which borrowers and which properties they want to lend to. And the investor will actually hold the paper to that loan directly. So they have more transparency and they have the benefit of a higher interest rate.”
Shayanfekr added that instead of making 1 percent or 1.5 percent in a CD, Sharestates is able to offer returns of 10 to 12 percent on an investment. That’s proved to be an appealing pitch to investors nationwide, allowing the company to swiftly expand from East to West Coast — and even to Hawaii.
