September 23rd marks the first anniversary of Title II Crowdfunding. The number of portals has grown exponentially but most or all portals continue to offer investments in single deals, e.g., an apartment building in Austin. Before long, I believe the market will shift to investments in pools of assets. Rather than the single apartment building in Austin, a portal will list a pool of 20 apartment buildings in the Southwest.
Accredited or not, very few individual investors have the knowledge or experience to invest in individual deals. And based on the stock market, most individual investors don’t want to. Individuals have historically preferred mutual funds over individual stocks; a mutual fund is just a form of pooled assets.
An investor can create his own pool, investing $5,000 in each of 20 apartment buildings rather than $100,000 in a single property. On Prosper or Lending Club, I bet most investors participate in multiple loans.
But that doesn’t give consumers quite what they want. What they want is a fund manager, someone who will choose the 20 apartment buildings and also decide when to sell them. A stock market investor who wanted to creat her own pool could buy 20 individual stocks, but instead she buys a mutual fund.
Do Crowdfunding investors view the portals themselves as mutual funds? Maybe investors expect Fundrise, Patch of Land, Wealth Migrate, or iFunding to play the role of the mutual fund manager, selecting only deals worthy of investment. On the advice of counsel, every portal tries hard to disclaim that legal responsibility, but maybe investors ignore the disclaimers, looking for a “brand” for investing.
I certainly expect portals to start offering asset pools. I’ll go out on a limb and say the first portal offering curated pools will have a great competitive advantage, and I’ll go further and say that Crowdfunding won’t reach its potential until pooled asset investments are widely available.
Pooling assets makes things a bit more complicated and a bit more expensive: more legal rules come into play; you have to think harder about giving investors liquidity; and, most important, you have to pay someone to make investment decisions and take the legal risk. But that’s where the market is headed.
Questions? Let me know.