There’s a number of crowdfunding startups in the real estate industry; seeming a new one ends up in my inbox every few weeks. To be honest, I haven’t really dug into many of them much. The latest one I stumbled across is Patch of Land:

From what I can tell, its geared towards accredited investors.

Many know I’m a massive fan of Kiva (see here, here, and here).

My question — is there a true Kiva of real estate?

A platform to help the average person fund home ownership, the same as Kiva helped the average person become an investor in small business loans?

The challenge most young people have is the down payment, not the monthly payment. The friends of mine who have bought homes, have generally been helped heavily by family members. Those that don’t have family financial support, haven’t bought homes. If a platform existed to help fund the downpayment component of the transaction, perhaps we’d see more people buy homes earlier in their lives.

And yes, I realize down payments for houses in the United States (and places like Seattle where I live specifically) are exponentially higher than in most places in the world. Thus, maybe the right starting point is crowdfunding down payments for individuals in the developing world the same way Kiva started with loans in the developing world (they are now expanding their model into the US with Kiva Zip).

Anyone working on something like this?

Just a random thought on a Tuesday..