Fintown Review 2024: an Innovative Real Estate Investing Platform

I love to diversify my real estate investments on as many great platforms as possible, which is why I continuously review new platforms & share my experiences with those platforms on my site. In this article, I will review the real estate investing platform Fintown, which I added to my portfolio in 2023.

In the article, I will tell you what I think are the biggest strengths (and weaknesses) of the platform, how to start using it, and what you can expect from investing on the platform. Let's start!

What is Fintown?

As for all real estate investing platforms, Fintown is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in real estate projects. Fintown is a platform based in the Czech Republic, with all projects at the moment being in that country as well. They have been funded in 2022, so it is a relatively new platform. However, it's worth to mention here that the platform is powered by the Vihorev Group, which is a larger real estate investment company in Czech Republic that has been active for over 10 years now.

As I mentioned earlier, on Fintown investors are financing real estate projects, and the platform actually have mostly rental projects, which is something I really like to see on platforms. You basically become like a landlord, meaning you will get rental distributions at regular intervals, as well as the profits of selling the property when the project comes to its end.

Their main product is actually called Rental, and it comes with several advantages compared to other platforms.

First, you can withdraw money out of a project at any time on their platform (after the initial investment period), meaning there is no need for a secondary market or that you will be locked in some project for several years. Your investment is liquid, which is something that is really rare on a platform like this.

You also get daily interests on Fintown, and they are paid after 30 days on a monthly basis (at the start of each month), meaning you can reinvest quite often or just withdraw this money back to your account to enjoy the passive income.

I also really like the fact that they offer real estate projects in Czech Republic, which is quite rare in the real estate investing space and a nice way to diversify my portfolio. As we'll see later in this article, Fintown also offer most of their rental properties on the holiday rental market via platforms like Booking.com, which is something that I really like to see on a platform.

They currently have over 470 registered users, and funded over 2.3 millions Euros worth of real estate projects.

What returns can I expect from investing on Fintown?

The returns you can expect on Fintown depends on which projects you invest in, which I will tell you more about when we'll see how to use the platform. Currently, with projects listed on the platform you can get up to 12% annual returns, and most of the projects are around 10% of annual returns. This is definitely above the range of similar platforms for central Europe, with projects usually being more in the 8-9% range on average. So it is definitely nice to see good returns on a real estate investing platform based in this part of Europe. 

If you compare that to the yields you would get by investing in classical real estate (usually around 5%), you definitely get great yields by investing on this platform.

Is it safe to invest on Fintown?

The question of the safety of the investors funds is central when investing on a real estate investing platform, as they will be managing all the money that you deposit on the platform and invest it in the projects. When reviewing a new platform before adding it to my portfolio, I look at three things: what the platforms offers in terms of guarantees, the company itself (and their team), and finally the source of the projects present on the platform.

Risks & guarantees on Fintown

On Fintown, all projects present on the platform are backed by real estate projects, in the form of loans that are usually refinancing loans with quite low LTV (loan to value). On top of that, most of those loans come with a corporate guarantee. Rental income is then paid to investors directly from the rent generated by those properties on platforms like Booking.com and AirBnB.

As I already mentioned before, they are powered by Vihorev Group, which is a large real estate investment company in Czech Republic.

I also like to look at the track record of projects on a platform before investing, to see if they are doing a good job with selecting projects that they offer to investors. This is definitely the case for Fintown, as Vihorev Group has funded over 64 million Euros worth of development projects in the country so far. This is definitely a very good guarantee to have this large company behind Fintown.

They also have skin in the game in all projects present on the platform - at least 20%.

The company & the team

As I mentioned earlier, the company is operating from the Czech Republic, and as for all platforms I add to my portfolio I checked if the company was officially registered in Czech Republic, and it is indeed. 

They also are completely transparent about their team on their website, with a complete description of the role of each person in the team, which is also something I appreciate seeing on a platform.

As for all the platforms I add to my portfolio, I also checked the profile of people in their management team, for example Maxim Vihorev who is the founder of the platform, but also of the Vihorev Group:

I could see that he is definitely has experience in the field - having run the Vihorev Group for more than 10 years now.

Projects originators

All the projects that you can find on the platform are actually developed by the Vihorev Group, so basically in-house.

 I also wanted to check that the flats they offer to investors are actually really present on platforms like Booking.com. They are actually really transparent about it, and it was really easy to find them:

Thanks to the large history of the Vihorev Group in the field of real estate, I can definitely say they have everything required to be a solid real estate investing platform.

Getting started with Fintown

It is actually really easy to get started with Fintown and have your money start generating income on the platform.

The first step is to open an account and get verified. This was done really quickly, and including the ID verification part (that was automated and instant) it was all done in under 5 minutes.

Next, you will have to deposit funds in your account to start investing in loans and generate interests. This is also really to do on Fintown, as you can do it via a bank transfer.

Once this is done, you can actually start investing in rental projects on the platform. For that, you can go over to the current projects page:

There were 4 projects when I started investing on the platform, all holiday rentals located in Prague. From there, you can immediately see what projects are currently available, and get some details about the properties like the investment goal, LTV and potential yield. Note that the minimum investment amount is 50 Euros, which is definitely in the lower range compared to other similar platforms, which is great to diversify your portfolio.

If you want more details, you can simply click on the projects you want to get more information about it:

On those pages, you will find much more details about the project, like pictures of the property, funding goal & remaining amount to be funded, as well as the capital structure of the investment. You will also see which annual yield you will get annually for the project.

You can also see more picture of the flat on the same page, as well as links to the holiday rental platforms (like Booking.com) so you can check it's a real flat:

Once you selected a project that you like, you can simply put how much you want to invest in it, and you will start to receive rental payments daily.

Note that you can also get out of any investment at any time after the initial investment period, and therefore there is no secondary market on the platform as it's not needed.

As for all the platforms I review, I also tried to withdraw money, and the money was back on my account in just 1 day.

My Results so far with Fintown

I only invested in one project project so far on Fintown, and it should give me a return of 12% annually. It is of course too early to talk about long-term yields on the platform, but I can say that so far everything went smoothly and I will definitely invest more on the platform in the future.

To sum up, I can definitely say that Fintown is a really solid player in the field of real estate investing in Europe. It offers great yields, an excellent core product (Rental), and it is also backed by a large group with a long experience in the field of real estate. Add to that a great user interface and a friendly support team - and you get an excellent platform on which I will definitely invest more in the future.