Yieldi co-founders Joe Ashkouti and Josh Lloyd want to make real estate investing as easy as Amazon shopping.
A little over a year ago, the founders launched the Yieldi platform, which allows people to browse and add individual real estate investments into their virtual cart and sign everything online.
Now, Yieldi has about 30 investors and about 65 active loans totaling more than $40 million, according to the founders.
"We’re in that rocket ship phase,” said Ashkouti, who’s looking for a credit partner. “We’re trying to get to $100 million loans as fast as we can.”
The founders tested out Yieldi’s model without technology for 18 months before launching the platform. They started by doing private lending and still use a lot of their own money in the deals. That system caused them to act cautiously when finding the best loans to finance, a trait they’ve continued as they build out the platform.
The platform brings together the founders’ separate areas of expertise. Ashkouti has family experience in real estate development, while Lloyd has grown and sold two companies: e-commerce startup ShopVisible and fitness tech startup FitMetrix.
Ashkouti said the founders look at about 30 potential loans per week and choose one or two of them to finance. Most projects right now are in the Atlanta area and Florida, and the founders go and check the property before agreeing to the loan.
Those individual real estate projects get listed on the Yieldi platform, and accredited investors can pick which to add their names to.
Yieldi makes monthly payments to investors, which the founders say is a better rate of cash flow than other real estate investing and makes it a good opportunity for retirees.
It’s an alternative investment than getting into the stock market, Lloyd said.
After his companies exited, Lloyd looked for a way to grow his money but didn’t understand the stock market. In search of passive income, he turned to real estate investing because the assets are tangible
Now, he hopes the Yieldi platform makes the process even simpler for new investors.
Lloyd said he’s trying to automate as much of Yieldi’s technology as possible to keep the employee count and overhead low for the startup. They have a small operating and underwriting team helping the co-founders.
“The automated communication platform takes the workload off us and keeps the team lightweight, so we can give the investors better returns,” Lloyd said.
