Institutional real estate investors have historically struggled to buy up tonnes of family homes (the so-called ‘Single Family rental sector’) so they can turn us all into rental slaves and lock millions to a rentier economy. A few startups are trying to ease the ‘pain’ of these rapacious harbingers of hyper capitalism.
Immo Capital, a platform for managing residential real estate portfolios has raised $90.7 million. Bricklane is another platform for rental housing (raised £6 million out of London). And Casafari in Spain/Portugal has raised $20.5 million.
Into this market has launched DoorFeed, founded by James Kirimy, an early Uber UK employee. It’s secured a new funding round of €7 million Seed extension round led by Motive Ventures (backed by Private Equity firm Apollo, owners of Yahoo! and thus TechCrunch), with participation of Stride VC and Seedcamp. The firm previously raised a €3.5 million seed led by Stride and Seedcamp in 2021, and a €1.5 million debt financing by BPI France in 2022.
In simple terms, DoorFeed provides the data platform and operations for investment funds to assemble and manage large scale portfolios of apartments and houses. It also allows them to figure out which houses have a bad energy performance, and then renovate them, possibly unlocking ESG credits from governments, it claims.
It makes money via a sourcing fee and renovation management fee, as well as an annual property and asset management fee.
Looking at the market independently, these companies are clearly onto something that would make a hedge fund manager blush.
Investment in European living assets exceeded all other real estate assets classes in the second quarter at €10.6 billion, according to JLL, and 20% of the market is buy-to-let investors.