Let me share the next investment we have lined up for DS, made through the platform DagobertInvest from Austria. Unlike previous links to the company’s main page, the link I offer is already including my personal recommendation to new investors, so would be glad to see readers becoming investors there and will be glad to acknowledge you if that is your wish, as well as report on how they incentivize it. This FinTech is a crowd-funding platform focused on Real estate projects mostly offering projects in their home country, but offering the investment opportunity to investors from other countries, especially neighbor Germany.
Not offering the highest yields in the market, this platform is probably more suitable for investors who are still new to FinTech investments and peer-to-peer lending, and rather prefer to put their money on something more concrete, but still wants to get decent returns for it.
DagobertInvest highlights
- Silly as this might seem, their customer experience seemed very good, despite not looking too structured. Basically my question to them was if I could invest as a GmbH rather than as a person,. The service telephone was a mobile, the attendant was clearly out of the office in a noisy street, but made a real effort to help out. Turns out their instructions on how to create an account for a company was in their website’s FAQ section – which I don’t find particularly intuitive – and even less self-explanatory was their recommendation to complete the standard registration field for people with a combination of “Firma” as a prefix (or suffix, can’t really remember) and the company’s name. As I mentioned, didn’t seem overly structured or even super careful, but they were friendly, welcomed my investment and we got to where we needed without any hassle, so I recommend calling them if you want any additional information;
- After being in Germany for little more than 2 years, I’ve already learned to appreciate the perceived security of the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland abbreviated in German) region. This is even more the case when considering real estate projects, because you automatically assume the developers have a high standard, they already went through all the necessary bureaucratic and preparatory steps and so on. Contrary to the general experience in my country of origin, projects here are often concluded earlier than planned, and it’s actually happened to me to receive the agreed interest amount ahead of time, which means an actual higher annual return;
- Easy and straightforward on boarding process, and so far found that projects seemed to be coming available quite regularly.
Downsides of the platform
- Not sure exactly why this is, but DagobertInvest releases and announces projects that are first only available for Austrian investors, and subsequently release them for German investors. The platform makes the effort to explain and communicate this, but I personally find it confusing and a bit annoying. If it’s not available for me, I know it would be more trouble for their IT department, but just communicate separately for different segments and just let me know when I actually can invest. In the end it offers the advantage that you know what is coming on because of this waiting period, but as a client and investor you don’t want to be in this ‘subsidiary’ position, even if this is because of regulatory or tax issues out of your control;
- Less relevant unless it later becomes a problem, the process of transfering the investment amount wasn’t too clear. In sum, I didn’t – and still don’t – know when the money would be taken from the account, which creates a cash management issue. Their presented alternatives of paying right away (and interests would count from that moment) or offering your bank data for them to collect once the project kicks off are generally great. Problems were: first, I didn’t manage to choose the first option, maybe for being a German investor, and second the communication around when they would take the investment amount in the second case just isn’t clear. Good thing DagobertInvest can solve this easily, hoping they will soon
Financials
- Initial invested amount of 2000 Euros, half of which in one of the following projects;
- Project Kaiserstraße 34 offers 6,85% annual interests and period is 20 months;
- Project Future Living – Goldenes Ottakring offers 7,00% annual interests and period is 18 months;
- As most of the real estate investments, their repayment schedule is all at the end of the project, so we don’t expect to get any news other than the projects going on as planned and get our repayment plus interests in the first half of 2020.