“In today’s new model of real estate investment, a prospective investor can search for projects of interest on a laptop and, several mouse clicks later, send funds along. With no middlemen and no banks to decide which projects are worthy of financing, investment opportunities are no longer restricted to the very wealthy or the tried-and-true,” writes Barbara Balfour, in The Globe and Mail.
The Globe and Mail, together with Dream Unlimited and Zibi, recently hosted the Building a Better City forum in Ottawa. Discussions focused on the challenges of modern urban development.
With ever-growing populations and increasing urbanization, finding capital is always a challenge. Eve Picker, a keynote speaker at the forum, found that when she wanted to remake buildings in distressed neighborhoods or build the first tiny house in an underserved neighborhood in Pittsburgh, the capital just wasn’t available.
“Innovation makes banks really nervous. They want to finance tried-and-true solutions, not new ones. But we need innovation – lots and lots of it – to build better cities,” says Eve.
Fintech, the marriage of finance and technology, is all about innovation. And equity crowdfunding has brought disruption to the old financial system. Now, where banks won’t invest, the crowd just might. Eve founded the crowdfunding platform, Small Change, to match investors with developers and raise funds for transformative real estate projects that change cities and neighborhoods for the better.
Read the original article here.
Image by Sergio Souza, licensed free to use by Pexels
