What is Profitus?

As for all real estate crowdfunding platforms, Profitus is a financial platform that allows investors to invest in real estate projects, along with other investors in order to acquire shares of properties that are listed on the platform. Profitus was founded in 2018, so they are already in the field for a while now. They are based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Profitus allows investors to invest in development loans - meaning the money will be used to develop new real estate projects. The money is then usually returned quarterly, with project terms around 12 months.

They currently have over 20,000 investors registered on the platform, and already financed more than 300 projects for over 45 millions Euros funded via the platform.

What returns can I expect from investing on Profitus?

The returns you can expect on Profitus 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 yields, and with most projects in the 8-9% range. This is quite similar to other similar platforms in the field.

Is it safe to invest on Profitus?

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 Profitus

On Profitus, all projects present on the platform are backed by real estate, in the form of first rank mortgages. They basically list on their platform borrowers that want to launch real estate projects, that will then be financed by the investors money. 

To evaluate the level of the risk on a platform, I also like to look at the track record of projects already completed by the platform. They have an excellent track record here - with no project gone to default, and only 5% of the projects overall that had delays in payments.

The company & the team

As I mentioned earlier, the company is operating from Lithuania, and as for all platforms I add to my portfolio I checked if the company was officially registered in Lithuania, 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 platforms I add to my portfolio, I also checked the profile of the members of their management team, for example of their founder Viktorija Čijunskytė. She has a long track record in the real estate & finance space, having for example been the head of investments for a real estate company before creating Profitus.

Projects originators

On Profitus, the originators of the projects are borrowers that are looking to finance projects using the money from the investors. Profitus is doing some very strict selection for the projects that they list on their platform, and in addition to first rank mortgages, most projects on the platform have a low LTV (Loan to Value) ratio, meaning that the amount of money asked is much lower that the value of the collateral attached to the project. Meaning that if something bad happens in the project, there will be enough money to cover the money that was invested by users of the platform.

As I mentioned earlier, the company has an excellent track record of successful projects - meaning this process of selecting projects for the platform is efficient.

Getting started with Profitus

It is actually really easy to get started with Profitus and have your money start generating rental 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 5 minutes.

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

Once this is done, you can actually start investing in projects on the platform. For that, the first option is to check the primary market:

From there, you can immediately see what projects are currently available, and get some details about the projects like the annual yield, project rating, and project term. Note that the minimum investment amount is 100 Euros, which is in the lower range compared to other similar platforms, which is great to diversify across many projects.

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

On this page, you will find much more details about the project, like pictures of the property, the funding goal & remaining amount to be funded, as well as the risk rating of the investment.

You will also find more financial details about the project, especially which securities are attached to the project. 

The Profitus platform also has a secondary market, where you can buy shares in projects that have already been financed. When I first started to invest on Profitus, there were a lot of projects already available on the secondary market:

The other nice thing about Profitus is that they have an auto-invest function, meaning you can completely automate your investments on the platform. Those are the criteria that I used for my own portfolio:

As you can see, even with those quite restrictive criteria (short term projects only, up to 70% LTV and good ratings only), there were still 11 projects available in the short term on the 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 Profitus

I only invested in 2 projects so far on Profitus, and this should give me returns of around 8% 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.