Institutional real estate investors have historically struggled to buy up tons 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 (it 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 has secured a new funding round of €7 million, a 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 asset classes in the second quarter at €10.6 billion, according to JLL, and 20% of the market is buy-to-let investors.