This year has been great for Crowdfunding as it got widely embraced by the real estate industry, and David Tobin of Mission Capital thinks it will continue to embrace it in the coming year, Gregg Greenberg of The Street reports.
"People want to take control of their investing domain and in this day and age the alternatives in the fixed income market are non-traded REITs and private placement memos as an alternative to bonds. The fee structures on those just don't work," said Tobin.
However, the real estate trend still faces issues with legal and liquidity concerns for being a new comer in the market, he added. Tobin also points out that the exact legal structure of crowdfunded deals will continue to endure questions and that it is also yet to be seen as to where crowdfunding stands for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
When talking about liquidity, Tobin is optimistic that for those marketplaces and platforms connected to the secondary trading of crowdfunded investments, they are expect to arise and develop, even though they still remain to be seen.
Tobin is also seeing a continuous success for construction of apartments within areas of college campuses in the coming year. The popularity of so-called graduate hotels will continue especially in those cities with a big educational and/or medical infrastructure that produce highly educated people who mainly stays in the area.
"They are good alternatives to very overbought, overbid gateway cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco," said Tobin. For Tobin, cities like like Nashville, Raleigh-Durham and Berkley, Calif., have great real estate metrics."
For 2016, Tobin forecasts the commercial real estate mortgage-backed securities market to crack with the risk-retention rules expected to be implemented and the end for a vintage of questionable pre-financial crisis securities.
"We are seven years past Lehman Brothers and that's a long expansion," said Tobin.
