Composite: Depositphotos.com, REFIRE
German real estate crowdfunding platforms are contracting sharply as investor losses mount, with more than 1,000 projects now in default and another 1,000 issuers insolvent, according to analysis by Stefan Loipfinger, founder of InvestmentCheck.de, who has tracked the sector for a decade. Nearly 100 crowdfundings have already closed with total loss. Behind these figures stand hundreds of thousands of loss‐making retail investors. The crisis is forcing major platforms to close or merge, while those still operating report mounting losses and dwindling new business.
Rendity, a Vienna‐based platform that brokered 222 property projects for 38,000 investors, announced in early 2026 that it would wind down operations and close its platform by June. The company stopped offering new crowdfundings in April 2024 and recorded a €1m loss for 2024, reversing a €1.1m profit the previous year. Shareholders’ equity collapsed from €1.9m to €709,000. Its German subsidiary was liquidated in early 2025.
Rendity blamed the changed market environment, citing interest rate shifts, high inflation, rising construction costs and geopolitical uncertainty. These factors led to project delays, borrower insolvencies and sharply reduced investor interest, making continued operations economically unviable.
Loipfinger was less charitable in his assessment. “Rendity was particularly sloppy in project selection,” he wrote. “Very many financings are defaulting or insolvent.” The platform was obligated as a financial investment intermediary to check the plausibility of offerings. “The temptation of higher fees through ever more fundings was apparently greater than the duty to investors,” he concluded. An investor group, IG Rendity, is pursuing legal claims. Rendity has dismissed these as misunderstanding the platform’s role, arguing that it merely brokered direct contracts between investors and project companies and was not itself a contractual party.
EV Digital Invest, another major player, filed for insolvency in mid‐2025 despite backing from a pension fund and a stock market listing for its operator. Thousands of investors were left without a functioning contact point. Numerous issuers found themselves unable to manage payment processing and investor correspondence independently, highlighting a structural risk that was widely underestimated: what happens when the platform itself fails.
Dagobert Invest, which financed over 370 projects across 150,000 transactions, is also struggling. CEO Andreas Zederbauer has postponed the company’s annual general meeting repeatedly and announced in January that the bond interest payment due on 31 December 2025 had not been made. He expressed “sincere and deep regret”, an uncharacteristically humble tone for an executive previously known for confidence.
Defensive consolidation
Surviving platforms are pursuing defensive mergers. The servicing of EV Digital Invest’s collapsed portfolio was taken over by a 50/50 joint venture between Bergfürst and Exporo, two established crowdfunding operators. The newly created ev-digitalinvest.de Servicinggesellschaft GmbH is managed by Bergfürst CEO Guido Sandler and Exporo’s Patrick Hartmann.
It’s not yet clear from either company whether the joint venture signals a broader merger or which forms of cooperation are planned. It is also unclear how many issuers have signed new servicing agreements, which fundings currently lack support, and whether the new contracts have increased costs for issuers.
Separately, Zinsbaustein merged into Wiwin, with the Zinsbaustein brand disappearing from new business in 2026. The combined platform has completed over 250 projects and brokered more than €360m across 83,000 individual investments, with Zinsbaustein focused on real estate and Wiwin on renewable energy and sustainable startups.
A further warning signal comes from outside Germany. The Tallinn‐based platform Estateguru, one of the most aggressive cross‐border entrants into the German mezzanine market, has effectively stopped new lending in Germany and is now preoccupied with the workout of its German loan book. After several years of rapid origination and a Berlin office launch (which REFIRE attended), Estateguru paused new German business in 2023 and has since warned investors that losses on parts of the portfolio are likely, despite outsourcing recoveries to a specialised servicer.
While the company has secured an EU‐wide ECSP licence and continues to write new loans in its Baltic core markets, Germany has become a multi‐year recovery project rather than a growth story. Estateguru’s experience suggests that even seasoned Baltic platforms, used to faster procedures and higher nominal yields, have struggled to transplant their model onto Germany’s slower, more legalistic enforcement environment.
Structural losses persist
The consolidation reflects deeper problems. Most platforms never reached profitability despite years of operation. Bergfürst AG reported a €1.43m loss for 2024 and is attempting to diversify into gold savings plans. Exporo had accumulated losses of €56.4m by the end of 2023 and has not yet published its 2024 results. The company is now offering renewable energy projects alongside real estate.
Loipfinger argues that new business has become “hardly possible anymore” due to the collapse in investor confidence. Platforms fought for market share in cut‐throat competition, prioritising fee income over investor protection. The result is a sector characterised by platform failures, massive investor losses and structural unprofitability.
The crisis raises fundamental questions about the crowdfunding model. Platforms operated under a prospectus exemption introduced in the German Investment Act ten years ago, allowing them to broker investments via three‐page information sheets rather than full prospectuses. The new ECSP regime was designed to strengthen oversight and harmonise standards across the EU, but it arrived too late to prevent the current wave of insolvencies and defaults – and has yet to restore investor confidence.
For institutional investors, the sector’s collapse signals both risk and potential opportunity. The distressed project portfolios being liquidated by failing platforms may offer acquisition opportunities for those with the operational capacity to manage workout processes.
However, the scale of retail capital destruction — hundreds of thousands of investors suffering losses across thousands of defaulting or insolvent projects — suggests that alternative real estate finance structures require significantly more rigorous due diligence than many platforms ever applied. The crowdfunding boom promised democratised access to property investment. The bust has delivered industrial‐scale capital destruction instead.