Former Goldman Sachs analyst and Brooklyn based entrepreneur Seth Wesissman has established a new fund for real estate investments. City Shares seeks investors who want to get in on the ground floor – pun intended – of the next big real estate deal.
How often have you looked around at all the property deals going on where you live in which buildings and land get sold for dozens of times the amount that their owners originally paid for them just a few short years ago? How many times have you heard yourself saying, “if I only knew then what I know now then I would have bought a house there?”
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Yes hindsight is 20/20 and one never knows which old neighborhood will suddenly turn into the next gentrified hottest place to live. But City Shares seeks to help its investors do exactly that.
The fund works like this. If you can put up at least $100, 000 then you can earn a piece of rental buildings in an area that stands to see increases in rents. Then you will get to cash in on a share of the profits from those rents or from the resale of the property. Weissman’s first such fund, which will be used to acquire assets in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, is already halfway to its goal of $5 million.
Weissman then plans on adding more funds to acquire real estate in Harlem, Bushwick, Crown Heights and Sunset Park. His goal is to reach $20 million in investments. All of those areas can expect to see increases in rents and property values as more and more people have been priced out of more desirable locations.
As Weissman told Bloomberg, “One of the things we learned from talking to investors was a lot of people thought about value creation through the evolution of a neighborhood. Everybody seems to have that anecdotal story — my aunt and uncle bought an apartment in Chelsea in the late ’70s and made a lot of money. There were so many of those stories.”
CityShares boats that it offers a 12+% annual return with 60-80% of that return coming from rental income and the balance from market appreciation and its active management strategy. That strategy, says the company, comes from its ability to increase returns by buying the right asset at the right price, sourcing ancillary income, reducing expenses, and optimizing the property financing.
