Brickowner

Idea

Introduction

Investment through the Brickowner platform has grown from £347k in 2017 to £1m by February 2018, and over £10m by April 2019.

For property asset managers and developers, we manage their investor onboarding - Anti Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Client (KYC), investor categorisation, and escrow requirements.

This process is increasing in complexity due to increased regulation, and is often done offline, which is slow and expensive. By taking this online for them, we allow them to save money and focus on their core business, property.

As part of this service, we make these investments easier to access for crowd investors on our platform, providing them with professionally managed property investments they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. This benefits the investors and the asset managers.

Our addressable market is all property developers and asset managers who need to streamline their third party investor onboarding and management, and all investors wanting to invest into property.

Intended impact

Brickowner aims to become the leading service provider for property developers and asset managers wanting to improve the cost and efficiency of onboarding and managing their investors.

Our model has been proven with repeat business from 2 client groups:

1. Our experience suggests that for property asset managers, on-boarding and managing investors is becoming increasingly complicated. We have automated this process, making it significantly cheaper and quicker than offline processes. Designed to save asset managers time and money, giving their investors an improved customer experience.

2. We started out as a crowdfunding platform, and continue to have crowd investors as our other customer group. They often find it hard to identify or access professionally managed property investments. Such investments are mostly not well marketed, nor open to investors wishing to invest smaller sums. We aggregate these investors and automate the on-boarding so asset managers are able to take their investment.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Our business is growing fast. In 2017 £348k was invested through our platform, by Q2 2019 over £10m has been invested through Brickowner.

In Q1 2017 the largest single amount invested through our platform was just under £10,000. By Q1 2018 new individual investors were investing up to £200,000.

In 2018 Brickowner earned revenue of £333k.

In 2019 we have already received revenue of £288k between January and May.

We have over 2000 investors registered on the platform. Over 530 have invested into investments. 52% are repeat investors.

We have a 26% 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 successfully exited one of our investments.

We already have repeat business from our asset manager clients.

Monetisation strategy

Brickowner outlines their fees within the property term sheet for each specific investment. They typically charge 2 fees to the property asset manager / developer:

1. 0.75% per annum of the amount invested.
2. An upfront placement fee of between 2-5%.

Fees vary from investment to investment, depending on the size and type of the investment. Further fee generation will be possible from new products to be launched as the business develops, including the introduction of a secondary market.

Use of proceeds

Brickowner is growing fast. Whilst much of our daily costs are covered by revenue, we are raising this present equity round to cover capital costs to support growth, including:

1. Senior hires to expand our capacity.
2. Significant improvements to our existing tech.
3. Developing some new technology to increase the products we can offer.

We continue to follow a strategy towards sustainable growth, with a bottom-line focus on revenue generation. We only raise working capital when it is required to support growth in the business, and we raise only what we need. We feel this strategy creates the right mix of shareholder growth and protection of existing shareholders against unnecessary dilution.