My RoofstockONE experience - first distribution
Hi,
I haven't quite found anyone else who has shared their Roofstock One experience in the forums - there are a few posts talking about the general Roofstock experience, but not their "fully managed, buy shares" program for accredited investors, so I'd thought I share my short experience to date and hope others can also share.
First to clarify, RoofstockONE is different from Roofstock in that you are not actually purchasing the property yourself - you are buying a SHARE and collectively buying the property that will be fully managed "by Roofstock". (Simplifying things a bit here).
I bought my first "share" in summer of this year - so it's been about 4 months (as of Nov 2019). Property located near Atlanta, GA - a SFH of about $150K, target IRR of 10%-14%. I bought 1 share (out of 10), and the share price was about $7K (50% financing built-in). The purchasing process was relatively smooth - sign a bunch of documents online, verify that you are an accredited investor. Then you wire the money, they acknowledge the receipt of money, then.... nothing. This pattern of nothing after wiring money usually gives you the alarm bells, but I didn't see it as such (for various reasons) so decided to play the "wait and see" game.
Literally nothing for months (beyond the standard marketing emails). No email or guidance on what happens next on the purchased share. There isn't really even a dashboard in the website - just a table stating you have 1 share of this property purchased at a particular date. For months, held off the urge to contact them.
Then suddenly in middle of November(4 months after), I see my first distribution in the bank of about $100! (around the 45 day mark after Q3 close). There was no email or communication from Roofstock on when I might be receiving distributions, so pleasant surprise (although it's expected in a sense). With some activity finally from this, a few days later, I decided to contact them and ask whether there is going to be any kind of statement that corresponds to the distribution, a "investor dashboard", or... something/anything. TLDR answer from them was a "no, but we're working on it".
My experience overall as you might imagine is "underwhelming". Communication is lacking, software is lacking, and you can tell they are new at this. Meanwhile, it looks like they are busy trying to find more ways to monetize their base - like building their "roofstockacademy" and charging $1700+ for it. I wish they would put those resources in enhancing their product to some baseline... but perhaps they might make less (short-term) money that way.
Other analysis is that these properties are not really "cheap". In real estate, one of the biggest way to make money is when you are buying the property - most of the properties (on both Roofstock and the RoofstockONE program) are either "at market" or sometimes above market (depending on what source you use to determine "market"). I'm sure some of you might have found great deals but I have yet to see a great deal.
I'm not really regretting my initial $7K investment - I have over $200K in other Real Estate Crowdfunding sites, not to mention other traditional real estate assets. I wanted to see how well this RoofstockOne program works... and for now, it's not working too well for me from a product/offering perspective. The actual returns might be okay but way too early to tell (and hard to analyze with no details forthcoming from them). At this point, my ongoing investment will likely focus on other CRE sites and/or going directly to sponsors.
Does anyone else have experience with Roofstock One?
John.