Fees matter. For too long, the financial services industry in private markets has made a killing on excessive fee structures. Today’s investor, though, is more aware of the importance of careful fee management than ever.
At Fundrise, we’ve worked tirelessly to eliminate the old-fashioned industry inefficiencies — and the lack of modern technology — that helped create unnecessarily burdensome fee structures. To that end, here’s a frank look at the fees we do charge our clients, why they exist, and how we’re working to save you more money.
Fees with a purpose
Let’s start with the obvious: Fundrise charges its clients a small fee for our advisory services — 0.15% in annual advisory fees, to be exact. This means that over a 12-month period, you will pay a $1.50 advisory fee for every $1,000 you’ve invested with us. For the sake of comparison, Vanguard’s famously-low advisor fee is 0.20%.1
The advisory fee covers things like:
- Customized real-time client performance reporting
- Automated dividend distribution system
- Automated tax management processing
- Customer support and investor relations
- Portfolio construction
We manage all of those things, and a lot more, with technology. Our talented team of engineers, accountants, and other specialists have literally invented new ways of doing old things that save our clients millions of dollars.
Our obsession with doing everything ourselves, rather than relying on a bloated list of third-party service providers, necessitates that we charge the annual advisory fee — but it’s also the main reason why our annual advisory fee is so low.
The future of the private investing business
We’ve covered advisory fees now, but it’s important to note that most alternative asset investment companies — along with virtually every mutual fund, ETF, and REIT — incur expenses at the asset or fund level. In general, an ETF can be viewed as a “fee wrapper” for the individual companies it contains — that is, it “wraps up” and simplifies the expenses of its many individual assets into a single fund-level expense — just as a REIT is a fee wrapper for its multiple properties. These asset-level or fund-level expenses are often offset by investors via annual management fees.
As a point for comparison, Charles Schwab — which is famous for charging $0 for commissions on online stock trading — alerts customers of their managed portfolio products that they will still be subject to fund-level fees.
The expenses inherent to Fundrise's real estate funds — our Flagship Fund, our Income Real Estate Fund, and the family of eREITs and eFund underlying your real estate portfolio — are covered via an annual 0.85% flat management fee. 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.
This money goes toward the investment allocation and advisory oversight of the hundreds of real estate projects in our clients' portfolios. Everyday, we write software to improve performance and lower operating expenses.
Again, we handle virtually every piece of our investment business, real estate and beyond, with technology. Unlike our competitors, Fundrise is a financial technology company that constantly works to replace traditional financial functions with automation. We work directly with the real estate assets and high-growth companies in the Innovation Fund, and we leverage technology to oversee and analyze how your funds get deployed. Because there are no intermediaries, we’re able to keep expenses as low as possible.
That’s how we’re able to charge our clients a management fee that’s so low it’s essentially unheard of in the real estate and broader alternative asset investment world.
Everyday, we work to improve performance by taking over adjacent operations and business previously provided by other companies in order to replace them with technology. We call that “consuming the value chain.” We take over and modernize these services because we believe it will produce better results for our clients and make our product ever better over time.
We have also brought in-house certain operations and the development of certain tools that formerly relied on our partnering with (and paying) traditional companies in the real estate and financial industries — real estate in particular is a sector that has historically resisted and been slow to adopt new technology. As a result, some of our investment strategies entail us managing our individual assets' operations in-house instead of engaging third-party real estate companies. When we do leverage our in-house capabilities, we charge standard market rates or less.2
Why we’re obsessed with minimizing fees
We’ve shared how we use our technology and team to execute as a financial technology company, investment manager, real estate private equity and venture capital firm, proptech company, and an investment advisor for hundreds of thousands of clients of our products. But we haven’t necessarily talked about why we go to such extreme lengths to maximize your earnings.
The real estate, private equity, and alternative investment industries have been traditionally riddled with inefficiencies, from blatant mismanagement to excessive fee structures. But, for decades, no one noticed, possibly because, (1) It’s been extremely profitable, historically speaking, and (2) Outdated regulations ensured that only the largest institutions and wealthiest investors could participate in the first place. What’s a few dollars here and there when there are billions on the table?
Fundrise was built with a simple idea: What if anyone could invest directly in high-quality alternative investments, without the middlemen? We knew that unlocking this world for the everyday investor would demand a nonstop stream of innovations. That’s why we’ve worked tirelessly to build the simplest, most intuitive investing platform ever. It’s also why we work so hard to flush out industry inefficiencies and use every tool at our disposal to maximize the dollars you earn on our platform.
This sort of approach is not the norm for the alternative investing world, or the investing industry at large. It requires more responsibility and an intense consolidation of a long list of necessary expertise. But it’s a model that puts the investor first, so we believe it offers the maximum benefit in the long run and much-needed innovation for an otherwise stale industry.
If you ever have a question about fees, or anything else related to investing with Fundrise, please reach out to our friendly investments team at investments@fundrise.com.