Fundrise – Lanny’s Year-End Update

Fundrise, Investing, Real Estate, Real Estate investing

To start, we’ll go through a brief background on Fundrise, as this may be the first time you have heard of this investment Platform.  I will then dive into our portfolio holdings as of 12/29/2019, describe them and show how we actually arrived at our current balance (my wife and I).  Since this is a year-end update, we’ll also go through the performance we’ve experienced on Fundrise over these last 9+ months of our involvement with the platform.

Fundrise: brief background

Fundrise has been around since 2012, investing over $2.5 billion into real estate.  They are a premier, real estate crowdfunding investment platform.  Fundrise has 3 different plans to invest and non-accredited investors can start with a minimum $500.  Their fees are approximately 1.00% and your taxation, luckily, can be a 1099-DIV.  It can be a 1099-DIV, if you select the appropriate plan (plan I chose was Supplemental income and has eREITS), which is what us dividend investors want to see!

You can review Fundrise service and approach to investing here.

The three plans are listed below and you can guess which plan we invested into (hint – it is the one with the longest dividend meter).

Fundrise, real estate investing, REIT

 

For further details on my investment and background, see – Fundrise Review – A New Investment, Pros & Cons

Fundrise: Our Current Positions

For our position listing, I have taken a screen directly from the Fundrise platform.  My attempt is to make this as transparent for you, the readers, as possible.  We initially started with a $1,000 investment and we have contributed $100 monthly for the past 9 months.  Therefore, you can see those results under “Real Estate” and the total is $2,002.63 as of 12/29/2019.

What’s great is that the investments are spread throughout the country.  In addition, the Fundrise investments are on different horizons from an investment standpoint.  Different horizons such as – new investments, to stablized positions and then fully operating real estate investments.

What you’ll also notice is the $1,006.25 from the Fundrise Investment Internet Public Offering (iPO).  As an investor on the platform, you receive an opportunity to own shares in Fundrise, in and of itself.  I took the opportunity and based on my holdings, was able to invest $1,006.25.  The Fundrise iPO article can be found here.

Fundrise, real estate investing, REIT

Fundrise: Year-to-Date Performance

My friends, including Bert, and I have a very good joke.  We send a message out about how our Fundrise investments are doing and each response always follows the lines of, “Steady Eddy”.  As you can see in the first image below, there has not been a single dip in performance.  Performance continues to be steady with each additional investment.

As stated earlier, we add $100 per month, hence the slow/small step-ups each month in the first image.  Not surprisingly, the best part of the performance is that it’s primarily driven off of Dividends, as we’ve earned over $101 in dividends (see left side of image) over this time.  What happens with the dividends earned?

Fundrise, Investing, Real Estate, Real Estate investing

The dividends are reinvested, of course!  Fundrise gives you the options to either receive as cash or to reinvest back into the real estate investments.  You better believe, sticking to my dividend investing roots, that I am reinvesting dividends earned.  Each quarter end – dividends are reinvested in that subsequent month.  Below you can see that this typically occurs between the 10th to the 12th.

The question you may have is – what is your actual return %?  What have we returned since owning this investment?  Well – the screen shot below does a fairly decent job at depicting that, again – straight from the Fundrise dashboard.

The investments, on a weighted average basis, have returned 7.2% since investing with Fundrise.  Obviously this lags the S&P 500 by a great deal, as the market has returned over 25% YTD.  To note, the returns below primarily are from the income being generated.

My goal wasn’t to beat any index or market, but to differentiate my investment portfolio.  To have a differentiator that also produces a steady stream of income.  I would say, Fundrise has fit the bill perfectly, thus far.

Reporting, REIT, Performance, Fundrise, eREIT

Fundrise: Investment Update #1 Conclusion

Fundrise, overall, has been a sound and steady investment.  The investment definitely hasn’t tracked the S&P 500, which was the goal and provides a steady stream of income.

We are going to continue to invest $100 per month to finish the one year of investing with Fundrise.  After that point, we will re-evaluate how much we would like to contribute monthly.

To sum this up, our investment in Fundrise has provided a very transparent, consistent income stream that has differentiated our portfolio.  The platform has been tremendously easy to use and understand.  The time input after the initial investment has been maybe a minute or two per month, to read on new investments and update performance on my spreadsheet.

Is there something more you’d like to see in this or the next update?  Something you are not sure of that I can go into detail on?  Please let me know, as I’d love to help out as much as possible.  Thank you again for reading, good luck and happy investing!

-Lanny

2 thoughts on “Fundrise – Lanny’s Year-End Update

  1. Lanny-
    The lag was obviously from lack of appreciation. I’m not sure where this type of investment falls on the risk spectrum, but 7% dividend is tough to beat if you’re comfortable with that risk. Thanks for sharing and the free tax advice!

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