What's In This Month's Edition?

1. Top Stories From The Month

   • 🚨 Fraud Hits CrowdStreet Investors

   • 🚰 Equity Crowdfunding Liquidity Improves

   • 🪦 Roofstock One Starts Winding Down

2. News Articles From The Month

3. July's New Educational Resources

4. Site News & Commentary

‼️ TOP STORIES
🚨 CrowStreet Investors In 2 Offerings Lose Millions

Two of CrowdStreet previous offerings resulted in investors losing $63M. How was it lost? A bad deal, disruption from interest rates, a building collapsing?

Nope! It was lost to what basically sounds like fraud.

The Sponsor raised funds on the platform, CrowdStreet sent all the funds directly to accounts controlled by the Sponsor and its CEO, and they ran off with the money. 💸 There's barely over $125K remaining in the accounts.

While it seems like CrowdStreet may work to improve their processes after this, it's a very troubling development in general.

Some platforms that offer sponsor's deals to investors may simply view their role as a Tinder of investing. They're in the business of making matches - not necessarily investor protection.

In response to the CrowdStreet developments, at least two other platforms have sent communications to investors differentiating their process, protections, and platforms from CrowdStreet.

🚰 The Tap Is Open - StartEngine Liquidity Is Here

After completing the acquisition of SeedInvest, StartEngine continues to plow forward with developing their equity crowdfunding platform.

This month saw the launch of extensive liquidity improvements through their new secondary market ("Marketplace").

There are over 6000 companies listed on the Marketplace for trading.

That is a huge number for the beta launch. With Republic's secondary market seemingly stuck in a closed beta and Wefunder's nowhere in sight, this is a huge step forward for StartEngine.

We are in the process of making our first sale through the new Marketplace. We'll have more information about what the process was like and how long everything took.

So far, the Market place seems easy to use, with one exception. It's not good for discovering the companies that are available for trading.

🪦 Roofstock Announces Roofstock One Is Ending

Roofstock One is a somewhat unique real estate investment offering. It's basically a mix between Fundrise and Arrived Homes.

They had one evergreen fund that held a wider range of properties. This was likely intended to be like the Fundrise's Flagship Fund.

In addition to that, they would periodically offer funds that held a small number of properties (think 3-10). You had less control than Arrived, but more than Fundrise.

Ultimately, its accreditation requirements, higher investment minimums, and unlucky timing (it launched in late 2021) resulted in it not reaching the desired scale.

This basically triggered a provision in the offering that is leading to the whole offering being wound down.

Roofstock will explore options for closing things down quickly (late 2023/early 2024).

If those don't pan out, they'll have to go through the processes to renovate, repair, and sell the properties on the open market. That may mean investors don't receive their returns until 2025.

While not the same as something like Arrived Homes, this could still be an interesting test for how crowdfunded real estate offerings sell on the open market after a shorter holding period.

📰 LATEST NEWS & ARTICLES
Roundups

The Week Of July 23rd

The Week of July 16th

The First Half Of July

📚 NEW RESOURCES
Masterworks Overview

Masterworks is a very recognizable name in the alternative investment space. Their fractional contemporary art offerings sell out quickly. However, they have a very complex fee structure and some controversy.

Take a look here

Vint Summary

While we already have an overview of Vint and its SEC-qualified fractional wine and whisky offerings, we revisited the platform to do some data analysis and add some high-level information.

Take a look here

🌐 SITE

July, August, and September are all months with heavy demands from my personal life. So the rate of content will be a bit slower during this time.

My main goals during this time are to keep the news roundups coming and to have some additional educational resources available each month.

This month we did something new. I'm not sure what to call this type of content, so I'm just referring to it as a "Summary" for now.

We did our first summary of Vint. It includes some brief introductory and contextual information about the platform before getting into the more exciting stuff. Breakdowns of their offerings so far and a look at their performance.

We also have a cool, interactive tree map of their offerings so far for desktop users. It's worth taking a look! We do want to say sorry to our mobile users on this one, but it's just not practical. Using the tree map on that screen size would require clicking on very small things and wouldn't be a good experience.

This is something we'd like to do more of in the future. Arrived is a platform on our radar to do more data analysis on and provide some new visualizations. Have any others in mind? Let us know!