Property investment platform. Helping property asset managers onboard and manage their investors.
Business overview
| Location | London, United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | brickowner.com |
| Sectors | Property Digital Mixed B2B/B2C |
| Company number | 09709791 |
| Incorporation date | 30 Jul 2015 |
Idea
Introduction
Since launching in January 2017, investment through the Brickowner platform has grown from £348k for the 12 months of 2017 to £4.9m by Q3 2018.
We have built an automated customised technology platform to process and manage investors for property asset managers and developers, and to allow investors to invest into different property opportunities.
We aim to solve two problems. For property asset managers and developers we manage their investor onboarding, including Anti Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Client (KYC), investor categorisation, and escrow requirements. This looks to takes away a lot of pain for our clients, and allows them to save money and focus on their core business, property.
The second problem we aim to solve is making it easier for investors to find, access, and invest into exclusive property investments which they would not otherwise be able to find or invest in.
We bring new investors to our corporate property clients, and new investment opportunities to our investor clients.
Intended impact
Brickowner aims to become the primary service for property developers and asset managers wanting to improve the cost and efficiency of onboarding and managing their investors, whilst enabling individual investors to access property investment opportunities not otherwise available to them.
We provide a single solution for property managers and investors. This model has been proven with repeat business from both client groups:.
1. Our experience suggests that property asset manager clients face increasingly complicated legal and operational investor on-boarding, client identification, and ongoing investor management. We have automated this process, making it significantly cheaper and quicker than offline processes. Designed to save them time and money, giving their investors an improved customer experience.
2. Our consumer investor clients often find it hard to identify or access attractive professionally managed property investments due to a lack of time or knowledge. We make this possible for these investors.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Brickowner has raised over £550k from investors and innovation grants which has been used to build technology and launch our product.
Our business is growing fast. In 2017 £348k was invested through our platform, by Q3 2018 the total invested through the Brickowner platform had increased to £4.9m.
In Q1 2017 the largest single amount invested through our platform was just under £10,000. By Q1 2018 new individual investors were investing in the region of £200,000.
In 2018 we have already earned and locked in £242,000 of revenue*.
We have already processed investments for 8 asset managers, and have 4 more opportunities in due diligence.
We have over 1,330 investors registered on the platform, of whom over 330 have now invested into our investment opportunities, 46% of these investors are repeat investors.
We have a 25% conversion rate of sign-ups who become investors, compared to an industry standard of 12%.
Since launch we have achieved on average 30% month on month growth of money invested through our platform.
We have made 18 months worth of dividend payments to our customers, meeting marketed returns on our investment opportunities.
We have successfully exited one of our investments.
We already have repeat business from our asset manager clients and have written confirmation from these clients that they wish to fund just under £8m through our platform in 2018.
*This figure is based on unaudited management accounts
Monetisation strategy
Brickowner charges 3 fees, two to investors and one to the property manager:.
1. 3% of the amount being invested at the point of investment.
2. 0.75% per annum of the amount invested.
3. In certain circumstances a fee is charged to the manager. The exact amount varies depending on the raise amount and projected return.
Use of proceeds
Brickowner is raising this round to:.
1. Make further key hires to expand capacity.
2. Add further features to the platform to allow new products.
3. Complete the process to become directly FCA authorised.
The company currently has a £50k director loan, which carries no interest and funds raised as part of this campaign will not be used to pay it off.
Market
Target market
Brickowner is targeting small to mid-sized property asset managers and developers who:.
- Do not have the capacity to on-board and complete all the verification of their investors effectively.
- Carry out AML and KYC offline, which takes too long, is inefficient, and annoys investors.
- Have a good track record at property management and don’t want to be distracted from this by investor on-boarding and management.
- Do not have the compliance or regulatory expertise needed.
Brickowner continues to increase its base of property platform investors. These investors generally consist of people who:.
- are looking for returns higher than they get from their bank or ISA.
- want to invest in professionally managed property through a transparent and accessible web platform.
- want an online platform available 24/7.
- want to invest into property but are unable to find suitable opportunities, or else unable to meet the high minimum investment threshold of most institutional investments.
Characteristics of target market
Our target market are both small and medium sized property developers and asset managers in the UK. Many of these property developers and asset managers have been trading for quite a number of years.
Over the last 3-5 years the significant increases in KYC/AML and regulatory requirements means that these property developers and asset managers face an increasing burden of due diligence and administration of their investors, within an ever more stringently regulated environment. They are therefore being forced to change the way they operate and manage their investors; the majority are unable to do this on their own.
Therefore the increase in our market size is not reliant on the growth in number of property asset managers, but is linked to a change in circumstances and regulatory requirements for the existing market.
Increasing regulation mean this is a large and growing market.
Marketing strategy
To date we have been sourcing our development partners using the contacts and network of the Brickowner team. In the future we aim to hire someone specifically for this role.
We also find new asset manager clients by:.
- Holding specific marketing events.
- Developing our online marketing presence.
- Working with property lenders who can introduce us to suitable partners.
In parallel, to increase our investor base we will continue to use:.
- Referral schemes for new users, either introduced from existing users or from different professional referral providers.
- Affiliate partners who help introduce new users.
- SEO strategy involving the creation of written content and web back links to help drive new users to the site.
- Investor events.
Competition strategy
To our knowledge, many similar platforms appear to use white label products which cannot be adapted or scaled in the same way as our purpose built technology. Our team has a background in the property and finance sector. We believe this has enabled us to source property asset managers and developers for the platform in a way that a number of other platforms cannot, because they lack this experience and industry contacts.
We see ourselves being different from the majority of other platforms in a number of ways:.
- We are not buying and managing property ourselves. This allows us to scale faster and focus on our core expertise: providing a technology platform to investors and property managers.
- By working with asset managers we can offer opportunities across all the different property sub sectors, allowing our investors to greater diversify.
- Our business model is different to most other platforms offering crowd funded property investment opportunities because we focus on servicing the existing asset manager market.
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