BrickVest, BEOS in first German employee participation fund (EPF)

London-based peer-to-peer real estate lending platform BrickVest has established a partnership with BEOS, the Berlin-based project developer and investor in German industrial real estate, to offer an employee participation fund (EPF) for BEOS employees to invest alongside BEOS's institutional investors. The fund is the first of its kind to be set up in Germany.

The co-investment fund, known as BrickVest/BEOS EPF, will be managed by BrickVest and will invest in a €300m higher-yielding German portfolio of industrial property assets managed by BEOS. The fund itself is expected to reach about €3m.

According to Holger Matheis, a board member at BEOS, “Many of our employees wanted to participate in the real estate deals they are managing on a daily basis. In BrickVest, we have found a partner with whom we have been able to implement an innovative solution that makes this possible. Not only can our employees benefit from the returns generated from their investments, but so can the company thanks to the higher employee satisfaction and the increased motivation induced by this scheme. In addition, our institutional investors will know in the future that our employees who take care of their investments will be able to benefit together from its results.”

BrickVest said the announcement is just the start of a series of services that BrickVest intends to offer to sponsors in the fintech, regtech and proptech sectors. The company says its goal is to connect sophisticated investors with institutional real estate opportunities in the UK, Europe and the US.

BrickVest is FCA approved, and in February of this year was the first real estate online platform to be granted a full-scope AIFM license with an EU-wide passport. This allows BrickVest to market and manage a wide range of products across all member states and grow beyond the €100 million assets under management threshold.

Thomas Schneider, chief investment officer at BrickVest, said the company is actively looking to partner with more European commercial property firms on similar deals.

“We are continuing to attract institutional sponsors, thousands of investors and family offices that are seeing BrickVest as alternative investment solution,” he said. “Our innovative platform continues to see soaring levels of demand for accessible real estate investment.”

BrickVest was founded by a tech-savvy team with backgrounds in finance and real estate, with the goal of enabling investors to participate in closed club deals at professional terms with a lower minimum investment than normally possible. Its investors can avoid the heavy fees loaded by banks onto retail clients, while at the same time accessing deals at well below the usual $5-$10m minimum investment.