Fundrise invests $1.5 million in Northern Virginia Innovation Business Center

Published May 11, 2015 by Paula C. Squires

Fundrise, a Washington, D.C.-based real estate crowd-funding platform, said Monday that it has partnered with Buchanan Partners to provide $1.5 million for the acquisition and recapitalization of the Innovation Business Center in Manassas.

According to Fundrise, the property is 100 percent occupied as flex office by eight tenants including Nikon, Tokyo Electron, the Commonwealth of Virginia and Prince William County.

“We are excited to be partnering with Buchanan, one of the leading development firms in the D.C. region,” Ben Miller, co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, said in a statement.  “This type of investment is something that larger institutions would traditionally fight over and to be able to offer it to investors through the platform shows how far crowd funding has come.”

Fundrise said investors in the project are expected to receive an annual return of 12 percent over the projected 36-month term.

Brian Benninghoff, a partner with Buchanan Partners, said Fundrise’s model of financing “will open up a whole new set of opportunities for us.”

Founding in 2012 by brothers Ben and Dan Miller, Fundrise markets itself as a company “that brings real estate investing to the mainstream” by offering small-scale investors the opportunity to invest in the same real estate as billion-dollar investment corporations.

It says it was the first company to successfully crowd fund investment for real estate online, raising more than $50 million for more than 55 projects, including landmark projects such as 3 World Trade Center in Manhattan, from thousands of individual investors to date.

Based in D.C., Fundrise also has offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

Buchanan, based in Gaithersburg, Md., has acquired, developed, and owned more than 5 million square feet of property, including 4,000 residential units, across the Washington, D.C., metro market.