Crowdtolive®

Idea

Introduction

CrowdToLive® is an ethical-driven online platform connecting home buyers and investors to finance and invest in residential properties through shared ownership.
The increase of average house prices by over 67% in the last decade has caused an affordability crisis in the UK housing market. Full-time employees needed to spend 9.1 times their annual salary on buying a home in 2021, compared to 7.9 in 2020 and 3.5 in 1997.
With lenders multiplying the household income by 4 to 4.5 on average for the mortgage amount, homeownership is out of reach for an increasing number of people.
On the investors' side, many cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, lost over 50% of their value in the last 6 months and some stock market indexes have had a double-digit loss since the beginning of the year.
At CrowdToLive®, we are committed to helping home buyers move into their dream homes debt-free and allowing investors to generate stable income without the stress involved in tenancy management.

Substantial accomplishments to date

*We have been selected to be part of several Accelerator programmes:

* We have been approached by a major financial institution thinking that we “could be part of the solution” for the homebuyer affordability crisis.

* We have signed distribution and business development partnerships with a handful of GCC-based institutions.

* We have launched our secondary market option to allow people to sell their shares prior to the investment maturity; this is adding a new exit option for our investors.

*After being initially an appointed representative, we acquired our FCA license back in August 2019.

Monetisation strategy

Through its simplicity, we believe our fee structure has the potential to generate strong revenue streams.Our fee structure is currently comprised of:

- An upfront fee of 3% on each transaction funded on the platform
- A fee of 2% is charged every month on the rent collected
- An exit fee of 1% is paid by the home buyer each time they increase their ownership in the property

As we finance people's homes, we believe we build a great deal of trust with our community. Down the line, we are looking at using open banking to offer our community more financing and investment products.

Use of proceeds

The proceeds of the round will allow us to accelerate our development by investing in the following areas:

- Legal and tax review to support expansion (10%)
- Business Development (15%)
- Adding key hires to the team (25%)
- IT infrastructure: We are looking at migrating the platform to a micro-service structure and leveraging the Open banking opportunity to increase the lifetime value of each customer (25%)
- Marketing: We will invest in brand awareness and customer acquisition in the UK and abroad to accelerate our growth (25%)