Co-Investing Club: Group Real Estate Investments

Yes. We have members who routinely invest through their self-directed IRAs, and you can do likewise with most self-directed 401(k)s.

We open a new LLC for each deal, and you get listed as a partial owner of the LLC. You’ll receive your own K1 at tax time each year. 

Participating members pay $75 a year to cover the joint LLC accounting and administrative costs. 

No. We earn our money through investment club membership fees. We do charge operators an administrative fee, but that comes out of their pockets, not our members’ returns.

Deni and Brian invest as club members themselves, as equal participants and passive investors.

Yes, but you need a U.S. bank account to transfer and receive funds. You need a taxpayer ID number in the U.S., which you can get by creating an LLC and getting an EIN.

Yes, we can list spouses together as investors.

You can buy and sell shares of real estate investment trusts (REITs) on public stock exchanges. They come with great liquidity, and you can invest for the price of a single share. That makes them an easy way to get started on a diversified portfolio of real estate assets.

But that same liquidity from trading on stock exchanges comes with some drawbacks too. Publicly traded REITs come with volatility and they correlate with stock markets. And, because anyone can invest with just a few dollars, you can’t expect outstanding returns.

Fractional ownership in real estate through syndications involves private equity investing, historically only available to the rich. In other words, you aren’t competing with every Tom, Joe, and Harry for returns.

That said, real estate crowdfunding often offers similar types of real estate properties including apartment buildings, commercial properties including industrial or office buildings, and even single-family homes and vacation properties. Individual investors who don’t yet have $5,000 to invest should consider starting with crowdfunding platforms such as Fundrise, Groundfloor, or Arrived, which let you get started with $10-100.

No returns are guaranteed, all investments have risk, yada yada yada. But in general, you can expect a yield of 4-8% on these group real estate investments. Most deals pay a relatively low yield in the first year or two while they renovate the property and stabilize rents, then the yield jumps up. Investors receive distributions at regular intervals, usually monthly or quarterly.

If the sponsor refinances the property and returns some or all of your initial investment back to you, you can expect your yield to leap even as the actual dollar amount of distributions drops.

Each joint LLC comes with its own accounting and administrative costs. Participants in each deal typically vote on whether to outsource this work to a third party or handle the work in-house. If the latter, it costs $75/year per participant.

We create a Pennsylvania LLC (limited liability company) for each deal, to jointly hold our collective ownership. We then create a joint checking account for that LLC, used only for that single property or deal. Ideally, someone steps up to serve as treasurer and oversee distributions to each member.

It depends on the deal. Some sponsors have an in-house property management team, others outsource to a property management company. Either way, expect similar costs for property management fees.