Posted On : December 8, 2022
Profitus is a real estate investment platform. Profitus started its operations in 2018 in Lithuania. Platform reached a milestone of 10M EUR capital raised in January 2020. Being a mid-field player in in the real estate crowdfunding platforms market, Profitus is one of the fastest growing platforms based on capital raised on month on month bases as a proportion from total capital raised.
NOTE: This review does not include review or analysis of the projects presented in the platform, neither their performance over time. Selection of investment projects is a sole responsibility of the investor. This review is focused on the quality of the platform, functionalities, ease of use and etc.
Profitus does not provide specific eligibility criteria on who can invest. However on the Trustly phone confirmation you can find country codes of all EU countries + EEA, Turkey and UK. This indicates that only parties coming from these countries will be able to deposit funds.
On top of the above, regular KYC and PEP procedures are applicable.
Both individuals and legal entities are eligible.
Minimum investment amount 100 EUR.
Source: profitus.com
All of the above are quite a typical requirements for real estate crowdfunding platforms with minor deviations on countries accepted and minimum investment amount accepted.
Side note: Profitus is HQ in Lithuania and most likely primarily it was developed for Lithuanian users and only later on translated to English. In most of the areas poor English translations can be found on the web. This does not influence operations or usability, however slightly decreases credibility.
It is quite typical, that onboarding process for most of the platforms is easy. They try to optimize as much as possible in order to reduce drop out’s on the registration phase.
It starts with the main credentials and email, which is followed by email confirmation email.
Source: profitus.com
Later on, you will be asked for some more personal details including last name, living address and so on. Confusing field for me was ““Personal number”, which I got wrong for a couple of times as it is placed right after phone number. Ultimately that is personal ID number, a bit confusing, but manageable.
For the personal identification Profitus uses Ondato as a service provider. They are a trusted third party and a process with them is really smooth. You get redirected to their platform.
Source: ondato.com
Ondato’s process is relatively simple, you take a picture of your ID/passport of both sides and a selfie. It took approximately 3minutes to be completed and another 2 minutes for the identity to be confirmed.
After this you are ready to go. No additional questionnaires or extra confirmations.
For the deposit process, firstly you need to find, how to do it. It is there ->
Source: profitus.com
Quite an unusual name for deposit, which you want to be on the front page and blinking, but this is not a deal breaker. Once you will find it, you will remember where it is placed.
On the deposit side, Profitus is using Trystly, again a third party which is well known in the market. Trustly is coming from Sweden is in the market for 14 years. As a first step you are asked for a phone number, to which you will receive a confirmation code. After confirming the code, you receive deposit options. In my case that was all the local banks and Revolut. Local banks, nothing special compared to others, but Revolut’s option is a nice one.
Source: profitus.com / Trustly
To my view, Revolut is much more flexible in terms of ways of deposits – credit cards, cash, etc.
Excluding a hidden deposit feature, Profitus gets a bonus for using Trustly and in such a way ensuring more ways to deposit money to the account.
Again, in terms of functionalities, there are three main functionalities on the website: primary market, secondary market and automatic investment.
Primary market
At the time of writing the review, there were three investment opportunities open. Maximum I have seen 6 or 8. So quite a decent selection. However all of the opportunities are in Lithuania. So no diversification in terms of various geographies.
Source: profitus.com
Projects themselves are very well structured and visually very well presented, all KPIs are visible. However that is not the case on the descriptive parts of the project. Very little information on the legal entity, no financials, no previous track record.
Source: profitus.com
A bit better situation is on the other description tabs. E.g. under project information tab, you can find financial information – expected project costs, sales revenue, net profit. Only a few lines, but this allows you to benchmark this with the market prices and decide if that is feasible.
On the downloadable documents section, there is real estate appraisal report and a document called “List of risks”. Most likely this is required due to regulations, but the content of it looks quite funny.
Source: profitus.com
Secondary market
The concept is the same as in the other platforms. If you want to get rid of your investment you can place it on the market and maybe someone will pick it up. Alternatively you can look into this as an investment strategy. At time of checking, there were many opportunities on Profitus secondary market.
Souce: profitus.com
While analyzing this, I have spotted two down sides. Firstly – filtering. It is quite hard to find a good opportunity as you can do in only based on the annual interest rate and project rating. No possibilities to filter on status or other parameters. Secondly, if you found a project, no possibility to deep dive into it (if you click on the project name). But if you click on a button “buy” you can get initial project details.
All in all, secondary market option exists, but I am not sure it is user friendly to find decent investment options quickly.
Automatic investment
If you click on automatic investment, this is where you get excessive questionnaires. Some platforms put this at the registration form, Profitus allows you to do only when you are engaging with the services which requires this to be done. Bonus on this one too.
Source: profitus.com
When you pass the questionnaire, you get to the automatic investment selection. It is designed in a way, that you have to insert you investment KPIs yourself and it gives you the estimate, how many projects you will get matching those criteria. It is not self explanatory, you have to read all the tool tips to understand it.
Down side of this, is that if you want to go with conservative strategy, minimum amount per project is still 100 EUR. Conservative strategy gives you a lot of matching projects, but if you want to keep high diversification per project, you will have to allocate significant amounts for investment.
Source; profitus.com
Summing up functionalities. Platform maintains market standards in terms of what is being offered for investors, but from the content it is mainly focused and oriented for investors based in Lithuania. For anybody else it will be very hard to make risk assessment.
Dashboard in Profitus is divided via two windows, which are accessible in separate menus. One is under “My account”, which shows a summary of the investments and there other one is “My investments”, which shows performance on the investment level.
Again, key features and KPIs are there and you get find them. If you have a longer investment track record in their platforms it could be difficult to navigate and you will not get graphics or deep dives. But besides that, you will get key things you are looking,
I like the zeros next to the fees. There is a number of fees which are applicable to project developers, but they try to keep it free for the investor as much as possible. No fees for keeping the money in the account or interest spread deductions. This is another bonus for Profitus.
It is clearly seen, that platform is focused for Lithuanian market. Projects are originating only from Lithuania, a bit poor translation from time to time and limited information on project level for outsider to understand. Nevertheless the platform keeps the market standard in terms of functionalities and gets a few bonuses for multiple payment methods as well as low fees. What is important to mention, platform is one of the fastest growing in the market in terms of capital raised month on month compared to total capital raised. Something they are doing good.
Bottom line – 4.5 out of 5.
December 8, 2022
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