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Welcome to the next instalment of my The House Crowd series. If you missed out on the others see here:

an introduction to The House Crowd

The House Crowd – tax efficient investing

This time round the big news is that The House Crowd have launched their new website! So I thought it would be useful to have a quick look around and see how easy it is to sign up and browse around.

My initial reaction to it was that it seems much easier to navigate and find the information you need, along with the styling update you would expect, which has been jazzed up a bit. I also get the feeling it’s been designed with mobile/tablets in mind because a lot of the buttons are now much bigger and easier to press with sausage fingers, and it also looks responsive i.e. the layout switches automatically when the screen size gets smaller to accommodate those smaller devices, which is great!

 

the sign up process

This seemed as straight forward as any other website I’ve signed up for. Here is screen one of the sign up process:

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This is on the “large mobile view” which I thought I would take screen shots of this view so you could see what was going on a bit better than if I took screen shots of the desktop view which would then be compressed into this tiny space.

Please also note that you shouldn’t use a blatantly fake email address as they email verify you straight after this step 🙂 (sorry to the real Mickey if this caused him to get some unwanted emails!)

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Once your email is verified you need to do a 4 step FCS Accreditation to identify yourself and make sure you understand the risks of investing on such a platform. The four steps are:

  1. Personal Information (Just confirming your details from earlier, plus occupation)
  2. Investor profile
  3. Risk warning
  4. Appropriateness test

The only 2 really worth talking further about here are 2 and 4.


Investor Profile

Pretty simple really, you get to pick what type of investor you are which really boils down to your Net Worth and how much you are planning to chuck at P2P property investments. I’d imagine most people reading would fall under the “Crowdfunding Investor” but if there are any High Net Worth Investors reading please let it be on record that I never said I don’t enjoy a private yacht party or two.


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You can also then say what property type and location you are interested investing into. I think I just ticked all the boxes here but this might mean you get a few too many emails from The House Crowd, so you might want to be a bit more choosy than me.

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The property type logos, from top left and going clockwise, represent:

  • Buy to let
  • Short term development
  • Commercial
  • Leverage investments
  • Regeneration
  • Tax advantaged investments 1

Appropriateness test

This is probably the hardest part of the sign up process but it’s still very easy and if you get any questions wrong, then in all honesty investing in this sort of thing might not be you in the first place. An example question is here:

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And no I’m not going to give you the answers to any of them 😛

That’s it, sign up process done. Now you can browse the site and start investing in properties!

 

the rest of the site

Is actually very straight forward. You can view your personal dashboard to view your current investments, which are split into 3 different tabs to denote the 3 different types of investments available at The House Crowd.

This view has a summary:
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And if you scroll down you can view more details of each investment and download the share certificate:

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And view even more details here:
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You can obviously also view new properties to invest in, the most important part!

These are handily colour coded by the type of investment – the same colours as the tabs in the dashboard view as you probably have noticed. Examples:

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Purple is “Property Crowd funding

Turquoise is “Peer to peer lending”

Yellow is “Property development”

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To read more about the differences of each type of investment see either my introduction to The House Crowd or their own crowdfunding information packs here.

If you click on View Details on any of the panels you can get full information on each project including downloadable fact sheets, legal documents, and T&Cs.

Once you are ready to invest you will also need to go through an ID verification process, which is obviously reassuring. To make sure you can jump on a deal you like it might be good to go through this process as soon as you sign up, although in all honesty most properties you will have at least a weeks window if not more to be able to invest after it’s first announced.

All that’s left then is to fund your account, press the button, and The House Crowd will take care of the rest!

 

wrapping it up

Hopefully that’s given you some insight into the whole investment process at The House Crowd. It’s slightly more long winded than other products I’ve used recently (e.g. Ratesetter) but given the much more complex type of investment, you would expect that. I think they’ve done a good job with the new site of streamlining the process and making it as simple as possible whilst still getting across all the relevant facts and risks inherent in investing in property crowd funding.

Final fun fact, the latest investment opportunity announced is actually in a castle (hence the lead picture above). Yes a full blown freakin’ castle!!! Here it is again for your viewing pleasure 🙂

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Notes:

  1. I notice the designer couldn’t come up with a suitable logo for these last two… a tough ask in all fairness 🙂