Jan Vecerka: Providing Investors With the Opportunity To Invest in Real Estate Crowdfunding Projects

BrikkApp is an online real estate investment platform. We provide investors with the opportunity to invest in real estate crowdfunding projects originated from various property crowdfunding platforms.

Investors pool their money together in order to provide loans to real estate developers In one simple dashboard, investors can create a property portfolio with projects from all over Europe. Additionally, BrikkApp provides the ability to research, compare, and educate investors on real estate crowdfunding platforms and projects.

Tell us about yourself?

I am an entrepreneur with expertise in technology, financial and operational management, startups, commercial real estate, and proptech.

Generally, I enjoy building projects from scratch and developing new ideas. In BrikkApp we enable investors to access independent and concise market data to make educative investment decisions and to invest from one smart dashboard.

Our mission is to make property investing easier for everyone and to bring transparency to the market.

I cofounded Data4You, which is an organization focused on building a digital society, providing coding education to career-changers, and developing startup ideas. I am passionate about working with smart people to build a technology company.

Before founding Data4You, I previously acted in several executive and specialist roles in the corporate world. I used to be responsible for the execution of commercial real estate and banking projects.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

While working in the bank, I noticed a gap in the market for real estate developers needing funding. Banks are less willing to provide loans for even high-quality projects, which has given rise to real estate crowdfunding as an alternative financing source.

With this opportunity seen, the idea of BrikkApp was born. Originally, the plan was to create a traditional real estate crowdfunding platform, however, the market has plenty of businesses operating at that level.

We decided to create BrikkApp to go a step further – to become a marketplace for these fragmented platforms. Now, BrikkApp can provide investors access to the entire market, from one simple dashboard.

What is your magic sauce?

BrikkApp is unique for several reasons. Typically, for an investor to participate in a real estate crowdfunding project, it requires completing an identification verification process with their selected real estate crowdfunding platform. The platform likely focuses on one specific market, and also likely does not have a large number of available investments at any given moment. To invest in another platform requires the same sign-up process, with the same limitations. This means an investor currently needs to sign up for multiple platforms, check multiple dashboards, and track their portfolios across several websites. The market is highly fragmented, with over 160 European crowdfunding platforms currently operating. BrikkApp resolves these frictions for investors, by bringing the projects to one platform. We partner with a wide range of real estate crowdfunding platforms, so investors can access a wide variety of projects and build a diversified portfolio from one platform: BrikkApp.

Additionally, many real estate crowdfunding platforms are nothing more than an investment dashboard for the platform’s projects. BrikkApp offers our investors so much more; in the form of market reports, the ability to use our Crowdscanner to search for projects and platforms across the market, and our educational resources such as articles explaining LTV, the different types of investments, and so on.

All this together truly makes BrikkApp the “one-stop-shop” for real estate crowdfunding investments.

Where do you see your company going in 5 years time?

BrikkApp will continue to partner with real estate crowdfunding platforms in order to bring even more options and opportunities to our investors. We would also like to continue to refine our technology, giving investors deeper insights into their returns, portfolio, and investment strategies.

Additionally, we plan on offering our technology to other platforms. Many real estate crowdfunding platforms are simple websites with little functionality. We believe that BrikkApp can be the backbone that these platforms operate on, providing their investors with a better experience.

What has been your biggest setback so far?

As with anything in the tech world, building BrikkApp took longer than originally anticipated. Creating the platform required a great amount of planning, as we wanted to make sure we did it correctly. We made sure to set ourselves up for success in the future, by making sure we can scale appropriately and that the technology behind the scenes was the best it could be.

What is the next big challenge for your business?

The next big challenge for BrikkApp is to continue our work building a real estate investment platform association. As mentioned before, the market is highly fragmented.

We believe that through cooperation and standardization, real estate crowdfunding can transition from an “alternative” investment, into a mainstream staple of any investor’s portfolio.

Creating the rules, framework, and education necessary to do so will be a challenge that we are excited to be a part of.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

Investors can sign up for free on https://www.brikkapp.com and follow us on social media to stay up to date on our latest investments, education resources, and more. We provide a free eBook to our new users so they can jump right in and begin learning how to invest in real estate immediately. They can get the eBook here:

https://www.brikkapp.com/reports/crowdfunding-guide-2020. Additionally, we have low minimum investment amounts, meaning people can invest in their first project from amounts as low as 100 EUR after completing their identity verification on their BrikkApp account.