Crowdfunding
Italy Crowd, the First Real Estate Crowdfunding Platform Launched in Italy, Closes
Italy Crowd revolutionized Italian real estate investing over a decade, pioneering crowdfunding with innovations like blockchain-based lending. Despite successes, external crises and new regulations led to its closure. Maintaining transparency, it prioritized investor reimbursements. Now, Italy Crowd shifts to strategic communications and equity crowdfunding acceleration, leaving a legacy of innovation and industry impact.
It was January 15th, 2015 when the first Italian real estate crowdfunding platform, the fruit of the vision of entrepreneur Augusto Vecchi, was created.
Since then, Italy Crowd has marked a turning point in the real estate investment landscape, introducing an innovative model that has allowed numerous Proponents and Financiers to seize new opportunities.
“It’s been an intense 10 years,” said Vecchi, President and CEO of Italy Crowd Srl. “We started as absolute pioneers of Italian real estate crowdfunding, taking on numerous challenges to make this innovative financial instrument understood as a valid alternative to traditional investments. Then, with the arrival of other platforms, we’ve all experienced years of growth and satisfaction.”
Innovation and quality: the distinctive features of Italy Crowd
“Even though we are a ’boutique portal’ we have always favored quality over quantity,” explained Vecchi. This approach has been reflected in strategic choices that have made Italy Crowd a reference in the sector for years.
In 2020, the portal underwent a major technological renewal, becoming a native blockchain platform in Europe for real estate lending, and adopting the Lemonway infrastructure as a payment system.
Another innovation wanted and introduced by Vecchi was the functionality of the “variable ROI” depending on the chosen financing level. All at the discretion of the investor who independently evaluated the operation, based on the documents made available by Italy Crowd, on his own experience, as well as his propensity for risk.
The difficulties of recent years
Despite the successes, the last few years have represented an unprecedented challenge.
Unfortunately for many Proponents of real estate projects who had raised through Italy Crowd, these last few years have been rather complex, due to external events such as the pandemic, the Superbonus and the Russian-Ukrainian war (which led to high energy prices).
And so, the arrival of the new European Regulation on crowdfunding, “has determined the choice of small platforms like ours to decide not to proceed with the request for compliance, stopping at the first filing with Consob,” Vecchi reiterated.
A farewell in the name of transparency and professionalism
Despite the decision to close, Italy Crowd continued to operate for an additional 14 months, albeit without generating any revenue from real estate lending.
“We have supported the technological maintenance costs and the fees for Lemonway’s services exclusively to allow the Lenders to be reimbursed by the Proposers,” Vecchi underlined.
“This choice of transparency and professional seriousness has been recognized by many of our Users, whom I would now like to publicly thank , together with Fabio Allegreni , founder of Crowdfunding Buzz, the newspaper that more than any other has witnessed our journey, promptly reporting my ideas and the innovations that have contributed to implementing the ecosystem of real estate crowdinvesting in our country,” concluded Vecchi.
A legacy that looks to the future
Italy Crowd (.com) has closed its lending portal, but it has left a significant legacy: that of having pioneered real estate crowdfunding in Italy and developed a more inclusive and dynamic model for investments.
It will continue to operate as a strategic communications company ( italy-crowd.it ), offering acceleration services for equity crowdfunding campaigns and managing high-profile vertical events such as the famous FinTech Awards Italia.
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(Featured image by Marek Studzinski via Unsplash)
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First published in Crowdfunding buzz. A third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.
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