The founder and head of Profitus, Viktorija Vanagė, is glad that one year was enough to achieve great results and earn the trust of investors and real estate developers.
‘Trust and experience are crucial in the financial sector, so our team is very happy that we managed to achieve great results and become the youngest and one of the leading participants in this market. There are other Lithuanian crowdfunding platforms offering mortgages but they cannot match our results,’ said Vanagė.
The start-up earned an average annual interest of 10.74% and paid out more than €129,000 to investors in its first year of operation. Profitus accepts investments beginning at €100, yet currently the average investment is approximately €8,100 .
‘Within the last six months we have received numerous enquiries from real estate developers; however, only a few of them passed our detailed selection process and received funding. The increase in submissions for loans could be attributed to the spread of positive news about our platform and changes in the lending policy of commercial banks which are more and more reluctant to give loans to small real estate developers,’ said the founder of Profitus.
She adds that out of the 28 real estate projects that were crowdfunded by August 8, 3 have returned full investment, as the one-year financing is the most common.
‘The average value of real estate projects funded by our platform is almost €200,000. We also have smaller projects up to €100,000, but we also have €500,000 projects and ones that go up to a few million, but we tend to divide those into separate stages and funds them accordingly,’ explained Vanagė.
When referring to future plans, the head of Profitus stresses the goal to crowdfund €11m by the end of this year and focus more on the technical solutions for the platform.
‘Raising €11m by the end of the year is possible due to our growth, but we will focus on both, raising the money and improving technical solutions. We plan to upgrade our online platform, automate various computing algorithms and launch communications in English and German to attract German-speaking investors,’ said Vanagė.
Profitus also plans to enter foreign markets with more force in 2020 and to start financing real estate development in other countries, thus offering investors real estate outside Lithuania.