REI Wealth Monthly Issue 10 | Page 18

INTERVIEW WITH NAV ATHWAL, REALTYSHARES CO-FOUNDER NOLAND ARARACAP You mention that all investments are passive. Does this mean that your investments are mostly buy and hold opportunities? When we say passive, what we really mean is that the Investor does not have to worry about any of the usual headaches that come with owning, operating and managing real estate (i.e. tenants, taxes, insurance, repairs, etc.). Rather, the investor is investing passively just like they would in a stock or bond and the Investment Manager handles managing and operating the investment. However, the type of investment can be anything from a stabilized apartment building in San Francisco, to a short term fix and flip investment in Florida. B ut, regardless of the type of investment, to the investor it is still a passive headache free real estate investment. How does an investor monitor the performance of their investment? They can through monitor an Dashboard”. easy the to performance use “Investor Through this dashboard, investors have the ability to monitor their real estate investments, cash distributions and returns. The dashboard also serves as a repository for all of their investment and tax Investors documents, can also including K-1’s. manage their investments in the dashboard, including their cash distributions, returns and all paperwork. We’re like a Scottrade or ETrade but for real estate. How did you come up with the idea for RealtyShares? My co-founder and I met while in grad school at UC Berkeley - I was at the law school and he was at the Haas MBA School. Upon graduation in 2009, we immediately started looking for real estate investment opportunities in the Bay Area. However, we found that raising capital for these investments was extremely inefficient. In fact high quality Investment Managers spend more than 40% of their time trying to raise capital for great deals rather than focusing on what really matters – the real estate itself. At the same time, investors lack access to quality real estate