Posted On : December 8, 2022
Profitus is a real estate investment platform. Profitus started its operations in 2018 in Lithuania. Platform reached a milestone of 10M EUR capital raised in January 2020. Being a mid-field player in in the real estate crowdfunding platforms market, Profitus is one of the fastest growing platforms based on capital raised on month on month bases as a proportion from total capital raised.
NOTE: This review does not include review or analysis of the projects presented in the platform, neither their performance over time. Selection of investment projects is a sole responsibility of the investor. This review is focused on the quality of the platform, functionalities, ease of use and etc.
Profitus does not provide specific eligibility criteria on who can invest. However on the Trustly phone confirmation you can find country codes of all EU countries + EEA, Turkey and UK. This indicates that only parties coming from these countries will be able to deposit funds.
On top of the above, regular KYC and PEP procedures are applicable.
Both individuals and legal entities are eligible.
Minimum investment amount 100 EUR.
Source: profitus.com
All of the above are quite a typical requirements for real estate crowdfunding platforms with minor deviations on countries accepted and minimum investment amount accepted.
Side note: Profitus is HQ in Lithuania and most likely primarily it was developed for Lithuanian users and only later on translated to English. In most of the areas poor English translations can be found on the web. This does not influence operations or usability, however slightly decreases credibility.
It is quite typical, that onboarding process for most of the platforms is easy. They try to optimize as much as possible in order to reduce drop out’s on the registration phase.
It starts with the main credentials and email, which is followed by email confirmation email.
Source: profitus.com
Later on, you will be asked for some more personal details including last name, living address and so on. Confusing field for me was ““Personal number”, which I got wrong for a couple of times as it is placed right after phone number. Ultimately that is personal ID number, a bit confusing, but manageable.
For the personal identification Profitus uses Ondato as a service provider. They are a trusted third party and a process with them is really smooth. You get redirected to their platform.
Source: ondato.com
Ondato’s process is relatively simple, you take a picture of your ID/passport of both sides and a selfie. It took approximately 3minutes to be completed and another 2 minutes for the identity to be confirmed.
After this you are ready to go. No additional questionnaires or extra confirmations.
For the deposit process, firstly you need to find, how to do it. It is there ->
Source: profitus.com
Quite an unusual name for deposit, which you want to be on the front page and blinking, but this is not a deal breaker. Once you will find it, you will remember where it is placed.
On the deposit side, Profitus is using Trystly, again a third party which is well known in the market. Trustly is coming from Sweden is in the market for 14 years. As a first step you are asked for a phone number, to which you will receive a confirmation code. After confirming the code, you receive deposit options. In my case that was all the local banks and Revolut. Local banks, nothing special compared to others, but Revolut’s option is a nice one.
Source: profitus.com / Trustly
To my view, Revolut is much more flexible in terms of ways of deposits – credit cards, cash, etc.
Excluding a hidden deposit feature, Profitus gets a bonus for using Trustly and in such a way ensuring more ways to deposit money to the account.
Again, in terms of functionalities, there are three main functionalities on the website: primary market, secondary market and automatic investment.
Primary market
At the time of writing the review, there were three investment opportunities open. Maximum I have seen 6 or 8. So quite a decent selection. However all of the opportunities are in Lithuania. So no diversification in terms of various geographies.