At Fundrise, we’ve combined innovative strategies with deep investing expertise to create a low-cost platform that offers private alternative investing, with billion-dollar scale and high-performance technology.
Our platform and team do the hard work of alternative asset acquisition, maintenance, and portfolio management for you — all while our assets sustain the strong investment performance and stability that alternatives are famous for.1
However, we know that any investment represents an important decision by the investor. With that in mind, we’ve put together this short introduction, to help you understand some of the most important elements of the Fundrise investment experience.
How does it work?
Fundrise lets you invest in alternative assets, from private real estate to venture capital, with all the efficiency and speed that you’ve come to expect from tech solutions in other areas of your life.
It typically takes less than 5 minutes to create an account and begin investing with Fundrise.
- Sign up: Open an account via our website or mobile app.
- Select an investment plan: Depending on your goals, select an investment plan that will help determine how your portfolio is allocated (Growth, Income, or Balanced).
- Receive a portfolio: Fundrise builds you a dynamic portfolio with dozens of assets that match your desired investment profile.
- Manage your account: You can painlessly monitor and manage your portfolio from your information-rich Fundrise dashboard. Here you can view your real-time returns, read in-depth project updates, set account goals, set up auto-invest, make manual subsequent investments, and more.
- Earn returns: Fundrise portfolios are typically positioned to earn money through a combination of ongoing, long-term appreciation and passive income. As dividends potentially accrue, our platform makes it easy to automatically reinvest them back into your account, typically on a quarterly basis,to continue powering your portfolio’s growth, or they can be distributed directly to your connected bank account as income.
What’s unique about Fundrise’s offerings?
We’ve designed Fundrise to give you low-cost, easy, tech-enabled access to alternative investments that have traditionally been costly or inefficient for individuals to access, such as private real estate and high-growth venture capital.
Why does that matter? Private market alternative assets have been the cornerstones of some of the world’s best-performing, long-term investment strategies, thanks to their relative stability and outperformance potential. For instance, private real estate — more specifically, real estate private equity — has famously powered the world’s largest portfolios for decades. For example, according to a 2022 report, the average pension fund had 18% exposure to alternatives like private real estate or venture capital, and the average endowment fund 28%, while the average individual only 6%.2 Real estate private equity firms like Blackstone have subsequently amassed hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management from these massive institutional investors.
Meanwhile, venture capital has dominated headlines for years, as a method for well-connected investors to secure excellent, high-growth return potential, with extremely attractive returns. But now, with our 2022 launch of the Fundrise Innovation Fund, Fundrise investors can also invest in the growth potential of some of the most exciting technology companies today, at the cutting edge of their industries.
Fundrise has paired smart technology with market expertise to offer these kinds of investment opportunities to everyone, regardless of net worth — all while minimizing fees, increasing transparency, and improving long-term return potential.
How does an investment potentially earn returns?
Fundrise portfolios typically generate returns in two forms:
- Dividends (Income) — Revenue generated on an ongoing basis through a reliable cash flow, like tenants paying rent, in the case of some real estate investments. Many Fundrise assets produce cash flow of this kind, and those investments generally distribute the returns they produce every calendar quarter, as dividends (although quarterly distributions are not guaranteed). Investors who are interested in earning a new stream of passive income can prioritize cash-flow-generating real estate with the Income plan. You can learn all about dividends here.
- Appreciation — The increase of an asset’s overall value over time. Appreciation is realized and reflected in your account value over time, as an investment progresses, such as when a property is sold, in the case of real estate, or when a tech company gets a higher valuation or IPOs, in the case of venture capital. Many Fundrise real estate assets have the potential to appreciate at the same time that they’re generating income. Investors on Fundrise interested in leveraging a longer time horizon to maximize their overall returns can do so with appreciation-focused properties through the Growth plan.
Investors who are interested in prioritizing either dividends or appreciation can do so by selecting the Income or Growth plan, respectively. Alternatively, Fundrise Pro members have the option of building a custom investment plan, with the potential of setting their own, preferred balance of targeted income and appreciation.
Does Fundrise charge fees?
One of the keys to our business model is our ability to ruthlessly minimize fees by eliminating typical industry inefficiencies. We’ve used our improved technology and in-house teams of experts to achieve the following fee structure for our offerings, unmatched in our industry:
- Fundrise charges an annual advisory fee of 0.15%, paid directly by you, the investor. An investment of $1,000, for example, would pay $1.50 per year in fees. For the sake of comparison, Vanguard’s famously-low advisor fee is 0.20%.3
- The expenses inherent to Fundrise's real estate funds — our Flagship Fund, our Income Real Estate Fund, and the family of eREITs and the eFund — are covered via an annual 0.85% flat management fee, paid directly by the funds, before the money passes on to the investor level. That's $8.50/year for every $1,000 invested.
- For the Fundrise Innovation Fund — our groundbreaking product that allows individual investors access to venture capital-style investments — expenses are covered by an annual 1.85% flat management fee, the equivalent of $18.50/year for every $1,000 invested.
You can learn more about why we charge fees at all, how we save investors money, and why we believe our model is the future of real estate investing here. For details on other situational, potential fees that may be borne by the individual funds, please see the disclosure in each offering document available at fundrise.com/oc.
How does withdrawing money work?
Important: In order to protect the entire Fundrise investor community, we may suspend redemptions during periods of extreme economic uncertainty.
Private market alternatives, such as real estate, are naturally illiquid asset classes. Unlike securities such as public stocks, these kinds of investments don't have an “always-on” market where buyers are readily available and sales can be facilitated in a matter of minutes.
For those reasons, Fundrise’s platform is designed to best serve investors who hold their investments over a 5+ year timeframe. We plan for our funds to liquidate their underlying assets only when we have the right market conditions — ideally when sales will deliver favorable returns to our investors, and hopefully never when those sales would be forced and undervalued. That timing is inherently unpredictable.
However, since we understand things can come up in life that may prevent our investors from remaining invested for the full term, we have historically worked hard to provide a plan that lets investors request to redeem their shares early, subject to certain conditions and limitations.
Here are a few key details about how that policy works:
- The Flagship and Income Funds offer quarterly liquidity (in the form of quarterly repurchase offers) with zero penalty or cost associated with liquidating Flagship or Income Fund shares.
- If investors want to redeem their shares for the eREITs and eFund, they can place a redemption request at any time. After the request is submitted, we typically review and process those requests quarterly for the eREITs, and monthly for the eFunds after a minimum 60-day waiting period.
- Any eREIT or eFund redemptions processed before an investment is five years old will be subject to a flat 1% penalty. After five years, investors can request to redeem their shares at any time for their full value, with no penalty applied.
- Similarly, investors of the Fundrise Innovation Fund can place a redemption request for their Innovation Fund shares at any time. After the request is submitted, we typically review and process those requests quarterly.
- It’s important to note that while under normal market conditions we seek to provide our investors with liquidity through the redemption plan, during a financial crisis, investors should expect us to pause the redemption plans of certain funds long enough to allow enough time for whatever events may unfold. You can learn more about how Fundrise may act in a financial crisis here.
For complete details about our redemption policy, please see our offering circulars, available at www.fundrise.com/oc.
Is there a mobile app?
Yes. Fundrise’s app is available for both iPhone and Android devices. The app includes the Fundrise experience from sign-up and account creation to initial investment, to reinvestment, to ongoing management and monitoring of your account.
Will there be different kinds of investment products and experiences in the future?
While we can’t speak directly or definitively to future plans here, our company’s history has been defined by our dedication to innovating in meaningful ways, resulting in new, powerful investment opportunities that serve you, the investor.
For a quick glimpse at some of Fundrise’s most meaningful innovations over the past 10+ years, check out our retrospective article here. Most recently, our latest and greatest production evolutions (as of April 2023) have included the launch of the Innovation Fund in late 2022 and now the launch of Fundrise Pro.
Where can I keep up with Fundrise news and updates from Fundrise’s leadership team?
Once you open an account, one of the best places to stay up to date with Fundrise news is your investor dashboard, both regarding your personal portfolio and the company in general. There, you’ll be able to find letters from our team, updates on the specific properties in your portfolio, market analyses, and other key announcements.
In addition, subscribe to Onward, a Fundrise podcast hosted by CEO and co-founder Ben Miller, where Ben shares his thoughts on the current state and future of the markets, introductions to key financial concepts, and interviews with guests, including some of the most influential figures in the modern financial world.
Finally, the Fundrise company blog has additional news articles, investment education content, and an archive of many of our past communications to our investors.
Where can I contact you?
Our Investor Relations Team is our in-house department of experts dedicated to helping you understand Fundrise, the opportunities driving private market real estate, and your investments placed through our platform.
You can reach them by email at any time, at investments@fundrise.com. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Also, take a moment to view our Help Center, where we answer many investors’ most common questions.
How do I get started?
Now that you’ve learned some of the important Fundrise basics, you might want to get started with a portfolio of your own.
If so, you can open your account here and start your journey in alternative investing.
