Just before Christmas, Thundering Herd acquired BrickX, Australia’s first fractional property investment platform, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. The amount paid for the acquisition was not disclosed, but it allowed major shareholders including NAB Ventures, Westpac’s Reinventure, and local VC fund Bridgelane to cash out their investment in the platform. NAB Ventures and Westpac’s Reinventure invested in the platform in 2017/2018 as part of a $9 million Series A funding round.
Thundering Herd, a Venture Capital & Private Equity Investment firm, has had recent investment successes with Lend Collective and GoFetch, as well as a number of active investments.
BrickX plans to expand its existing property portfolio of 19 properties and venture into other categories, such as Commercial Real Estate. This expansion of the property portfolio will be a much-needed boost for BrickX as there were some underlying issues with their business model, one of which was a lack of supply of property.
Another issue with their model was the focus on residential properties in popular metro areas, mostly in Sydney, which usually do not have the best rental yield. BrickX could only deliver reasonable returns by combining capital gains with rental yields in a booming market. However, this issue may be resolved by introducing higher yielding commercial properties into the platform.
It will be interesting to see how quickly BrickX brings on additional assets and how well this is received by their 70,000-plus users who have signed up for their service.
