Crowdfunding Meets Amazon

The Future of Investing is Here

Investing & Financing DEALS is Now as EASY as Shopping on Amazon!

By Lori Greymont

Here’s another big statement: InvestNestis about to completely disrupt investing as you know it…and not just real estate investing — investing across different classes of assets.

What do I mean when I say ‘disrupt’? Look at Uber — it completely disrupted the transportation market. When you take the middleman out of the supply channel or financial arena. Uber took out taxi companies and simply connected drivers with folks who need rides. The same thing is happening right now with investing…

High-yield investment opportunities just recently hit the market in a big way. Until the Jobs Act passed in 2012, sponsors weren’t able to advertise deals. Investors only found out about them via golf course meetings and backroom deals. You had to have an incredibly strong network, one that took years to build, to really get in on these opportunities. As a result, services have cropped up to help sponsors get the word out and to help investors find deals. Unfortunately, these services have been based on a middleman model. The middleman, who connects investors with sponsors, takes a cut. This drives costs for everyone and slows the whole process down.

Enter InvestNest. This marketplace ditches all the barriers to success in investing and financing by replacing them with a clean, simple platform that has one goal: facilitating deals. In the same way that you can go to a shopping mall looking for a suit, browse different stores, and even get measured right there to have the suit tailored, InvestNest has it all.

“We’ve created a technology that is really simple for the investor to get information, share information, stay in the app, and compare opportunities.“

Users can follow investment opportunities, follow builders, lenders, operators, and more. The app is user-centric and intuitive.

An investor finds a deal and says, “I really wish I could get my financial planner to look at this.” That’s easy. Click a button, shoot the planner an email and he gets to go right to the deal. Want your attorney to check out a deal? Again: hit a button.

For developers and sponsors, the shopping mall model also applies. InvestNest gives them all the benefits of opening a store in a place with lots of digital foot traffic instead of opening one off the beaten path that takes lots of time and marketing money in order to generate any real buzz.

So, what’s the backstory behind InvestNest? One name: Brian Barbuto. Brian’s 41 years of reinventing the real estate wheel and racking up successes have guided him to this moment in time: he’s poised to completely change the way we buy and find buyers.

A family man by heart and an inventive builder and entrepreneur by trade, Brian has developed everything from playgrounds to the first equestrian communities and single-attached family homes. And now, he’s developed the investment platform of the future.

Early in his career, he was known as a whiz kid. He completed his first development project by the age of 22; by age 27 he was awarded BIA Builder of the Year. From there, he went on to pioneer the first attached single family housing project in Southern California. He’s the guy who coined the phrase, ‘single attached family homes’. His career could be best defined by successfully, and continuously, finding demands and meeting them.

“Throughout my career, I’ve probably built everything that you can imagine building. I’ve built golf course communities, industrial parks, medical/professional centers, retail centers. The fun and theenthusiasm of building something that had never been built before was always more interesting to me than the cookie cutter concept of just building something over and over and over again.”

His work speaks for itself. He has developed more than one million square feet of commercial space, completed over 1,000 residential units, and worked through over $100MM in real estate project funding. Brian’s portfolio includes mixed-use, commercial, industrial, and resort communities, as well as innovative residential communities and world-class vineyard estate homes.

Now…Brian has merged all of this excellent experience with the right technology. The result? A state-of-the-art marketplace that’s going to change the way we find and fund deals.

Brian is a problem solver, “a lot of folks have teed up some really great projects, projects that are in great demand, that will be very successful, but the capital isn’t there.

At the same time, I was starting to see just how much our lives were becoming interwoven with tech — especially for millennials. They’re self-driven: they go to WebMD and self-diagnose, they go to LegalZoom for legal advice. They go online for pretty much everything today: Recreation, entertainment, work, and to create wealth.

What we’re looking at is seven million accredited investors in the Millennial bracket: they want to do everything on their own. We have a shortage of capital in the development and business world— statistically right now, as an example, there are over 3,700 development projects spanning across the U.S. that are teed up, entitled, ready to build, but are stagnant for a lack of capital and funding. And this cross section between developers who need financing and millennials who want to use technology for investing….that’s exactly where the big opportunity is.”

InvestNest is not crowdfunding. Brian explains, “We’re not a private equity firm operating on the Internet. The majority of crowd investing you see online today basically is putting a new spin on what private equity firms do or capital companies have been doing forever, but they’re using their technology to tell the story about an investment opportunity, instead of sending it by way of an email or placing a call.”

Brian continues, “We say, that’s great for them, but we want to get beyond that. Let’s do something better. Let’s educate and empower the investor. Let’s give the institutional investor a place to go, and let’s tee up sponsors with investment opportunities in all industries, in all asset classes, in a standardized fashion, so they can be seen and evaluated in a standardized fashion.”

InvestNest is the only place that investors can insure their principal investment. Capital Asset Protection (CAP) is an insurance product that was specifically designed for the InvestNest marketplace. Sponsors who want to offer this option to their investors must go through rigorous third party due diligence reviews, then pay for the protection.

It will insure the investor against several kinds of loss, possibly up to as much as 80% of their investment. As you and I both know, investing is not saving. With every investment, you have a chance to lose money.

Can you imagine the peace of mind investors will have knowing there is a backstop to their loss with this insurance?

InvestNest is a true market disruptor and it’s about time. For far too long, investing has been restricted to the Ol’ Boy’s Club. Now, anyone who’s an accredited investor or sponsor can start taking advantage of the deals and capital that’s out there with just a few clicks of a button.

I’m not impressed easily. I’ve been immersed in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley for decades.

I also head SJREI, an award-winning real estate investors association in San Jose. Because of this role, I’m cautious as to where I direct our members. InvestNest managed to not only impress me, but excite me. I’m excited about what the future holds for all of us investors and developers.

When I think about shopping 10 years ago vs. now, I can’t believe the difference. I wonder what we’ll all say about investing 10 years from now.