What is Max Crowdfund?

As for all real estate crowdfunding platforms, Max Crowdfund is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in real estate projects, along with other investors in order to finance development of new real estate projects, or renovate existing properties. Max Crowdfund is a well-established platform with a good track record, having been funded back in 2014. They are based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and offers projects in Netherlands, Germany, and the UK.

As I mentioned earlier, on Max Crowdfund investors are financing projects, which are either development projects of new properties or renovations on existing properties. In both case, you will get your money back with interests during the term of the project, usually around 18 to 24 months.

I really like the fact that they offer real estate projects in Netherlands, the UK & Germany, which is quite rare in the real estate crowdfunding space and a nice way to diversify my portfolio. They also have the ambition to become an international real estate crowdfunding, offering projects worldwide from a single platform.

They currently have over 6000 registered users, and funded near 17 millions Euros worth of real estate projects.

What returns can I expect from investing on Max Crowdfund?

The returns you can expect on Max Crowdfund 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 10% annual returns, and they advertise an average annual return of 9.55% for investors. This is in the usual range of similar platforms for western 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 crowdfunding platform based in this part of Europe.

Is it safe to invest on Max Crowdfund?

The question of the safety of the investors funds is central when investing on a real estate crowdfunding 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 Max Crowdfund

On Max Crowdfund, all loans present on the platform are backed by real estate projects, in the form of mortgages as well as sometimes personal guarantees of the borrowers behind the projects. 

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 Max Crowdfund, as they currently have a perfect track record with 0 projects that went to default. So this is definitely an excellent sign for the platform, and it means they do an excellent job of selecting projects that they put on the platform.

The company & the team

As I mentioned earlier, the company is operating from the Netherlands, and as for all platforms I add to my portfolio I checked if the company was officially registered in Netherlands, and it is indeed. They are also approved by the Dutch Finance Authority, which is a license that is quite difficult to get.

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 Jan Angel who is the business development manager of the platform:

I could see that he is definitely has experience in the field - and also I talked to him as well as their marketing manager Marc Bakker before investing on their platform, and I can confirm that they definitely know what they are talking about.

Projects originators

I already mentioned earlier projects originators for Max Crowdfunding are all borrowers that are cherry-picked by the Max Crowdfund team based on their experience in the field and their track record. As I mentioned earlier, they didn't have any defaulted project so far, meaning that their due diligence process is efficient.

Getting started with Max Crowdfund

It is actually really easy to get started with Max Crowdfund 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 it was all done in under 10 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 in Max Crowdfund, as you can do it via a bank transfer.

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

From there, you can immediately see what projects are currently available, and get some details about the properties like the project type, term and location. Note that the minimum investment amount is 100 Euros, which is definitely in the lower range compared to other similar platforms, which is great to diversify your portfolio.

Also note that projects on the platform are funded really fast (sometimes in less than one hour), so make sure to activate notifications on the site to not miss opportunities.

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 risk rating of the investment. You will also see which annual rate you will get annually for the project.

You can also see more details about the collateral attached to the loan from the same page:

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 payments according to the project repayment plan.

Note that for now, there is no auto-invest function on the platform, so you will have to select projects manually. I am currently talking to their team to see when this function will be available on this platform.

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 Max Crowdfund

I only invested in one project project so far on Max Crowdfund, and it should give me a return of 10% annually. It is of course too early to talk about long-term yields on the platform as I will only get my interests back after the term of the project, but I can say that so far everything went smoothly and I will definitely invest more on the platform in the future.