By Andrew Blackman | The Wall Street Journal
Before last year, Ed Medley had never invested in commercial real estate. Now, he’s a part-owner of shopping malls, mobile-home parks and apartment buildings from Los Angeles to Tennessee.
Dr. Medley’s springboard into real estate investing was supplied by a process known as crowdfunding—the sale of shares in a venture, in this case real-estate projects, to hundreds or even thousands of individual investors. Dr. Medley, a consulting engineer and geologist in San Mateo, Calif., has invested in 15 properties, with a minimum of $5,000 in each.
“Being able to invest relatively small amounts of money into different real-estate ventures was appealing” as a way of limiting risk, he says.
Clearly, other real estate investors feel the same way, with new websites springing up that allow individuals to buy stakes in everything from self-storage facilities to luxury hotels.
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