Estateguru Analysis

Estateguru was founded in 2014 in Estonia. It has quickly become the largest real estate lending platform in continental Europe and gradually expanded beyond the Baltics into a total of seven European markets (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and Finland). It has funded more than €690m worth of loans to date - see Estateguru statistics for more historical performance insights.

• Series A venture capital-backed platform with a leading investment of TMT Investments - an early backer of Bolt
• Real estate loans to property developers in eight European markets, backed by a first-rank mortgage on land, residential or commercial property
• Over 8.5% average return on fully recovered amounts with only 0.01% historically being written-off.

Estateguru offers short- and mid-term property-secured loans to SMEs and property developers. Three categories of loans are available: development, bridge, and business loans. Most investments are structured as bullet loans, which means investors receive periodical interest repayments while the principal is returned at maturity. All loans are secured with a first-rank mortgage on the underlying property, which can include residential or commercial real estate or land. Most loans mature in 12-18 months.

You can choose a ready-made investment strategy (‘conservative’ or ‘balanced’), set up your custom strategy (auto-invest), or invest manually in the primary or secondary market. If you want to exit your invests early, Estateguru offers to buy back the loans at 35% discount or you can set them for sale on the secondary market. You can view all live Estateguru’s projects directly at P2PMarketData.

At P2PMarketData, based on the API integration of all live and historical Estateguru loans, we verified Estateguru basic statistics and calculated the average nominal interest rate to be 10.45% (before delays and defaults). Additional factors such as late payment fees and a referral bonus can increase, while defaults and fees will decrease the real returns. Net of all the fees and bonuses, investors have made, on average, an 10.79% average return to date, according to EstateGuru.

According to their statistics page, the default rate decreased since our last update of this analysis and stands at 14.07%, but most defaults are successfully recovered. Estateguru has written off only 0.01% of its total loan volume. Investors can expect 5% of their loans to be late on average, but early repayments are also common.

Investors incur a 2% fee on secondary market sales. Estateguru also charges several borrower fees, including a 2.5%-4% intermediation fee and an annual administration fee of up to 2%. For the whole fee structure, see the price list.

Marek Pärtel is the Founder and CEO. He is a renowned expert, public speaker, and angel investor in the FinTech and PropTech scenes.

Estateguru has successfully attracted venture capital. In the last funding round (A series) in 2021, the company raised €5.8 million. The lead investor is TMT Investments Plc, a UK VC company that also invested in Bolt and Pipedrive. Other contributions come from Swiss and Czech VCs, and individual investors via a crowdfunding equity campaign. The platform has also raised funding through several Equity Crowdfunding campaigns at Seedrs with the latest in May 2022.

Estateguru made a loss of -€26,668 in the 2021 financial year (up from a loss of -38,008 in 2020). The latest annual report is audited by KMPG Baltics.

Estateguru has been expanding to several markets in Europe but has recently withdrawn from a number of them. Estateguru is one of the first platforms in Europe to receive the ESCP Crowdfunding Investment License. In an interview with P2PMarketData, Mihkel Stamm - Estateguru’s COO, draws three priorities for the company - growing volumes, market expansion, and getting more institutional investors:

We aim to facilitate €5 billion in loans annually by 2025. We have an ambitious expansion roadmap that will see us roll out our service in more European countries to achieve this. We are also stepping up our efforts to partner with institutions to raise volumes.

Note that the return figures on the Estateguru statistics page do not consider delays and defaults.