MetaWealth, the Fintech startup with offices in Bucharest, Dublin and Toronto, has sold its first real estate asset to 153 retail investors from Romania, Cyprus, Austria, Switzerland, the UK, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Canada, Sweden, and Greece, for a combined value of USD 2.14 million.
The sale, achieved in record time since MetaWealth first launched across the EU, the UK and Canada a month ago, provides a glimpse into the revolutionizing impact that this platform can have on real estate investment, while making Romania take the lead in tokenizing the industry at global level.
“In less than 8 weeks, 30 brand new, fully furnished and fully rented apartments in Bucharest became the joint property of investors around the world that were attracted by the asset’s premium quality, the competitive 6% annual yield carried out by their investment, and the promising forecasts for the Romanian real estate market,” says Michael Topolinski, a MetaWealth co-founder. “We expect the second asset of $2.5 million, also a residential project in Bucharest, to be under contract soon. This is extremely exciting for us, as not only are we enabling Romanian real estate developers to sell their assets globally, while bringing foreign capital into the country, but also because we are now ready to take this project to the next level.”
With the support of broker company Colliers International, MetaWealth is expanding its reach, looking to enlist new investment opportunities of $3-5 million each from more mature real estate markets, including Warsaw, Budapest, Athens and Prague.
MetaWealth aims to diversify the platform’s portfolio to include residential, office buildings, retail and logistics assets, and to achieve a total Assets Under Management (AUM) of $100 million by April 30, 2024.
In parallel, MetaWealth is negotiating a strategic partnership with a digital bank headquartered in London that is interested in offering the app to their clients.
“As we expect an increasingly intensifying pipeline in the months to come, we are also taking steps to grow our core team from Bucharest, which represents MetaWealth’s tech hub,” adds Amr Adawi, one of MetaWealth’s co-founders. “The young, talented and skillful local staff has so far played a strategic role in providing a streamlined and secure user experience for our investors, and we aim to maintain the same quality and security of service going forward. We currently have 10 job openings for our office in Bucharest, mostly for technical positions that we hope to fill with Romanian talent soon.”
MetaWealth allows users to safely purchase already expertly vetted and rented, debt-free real estate assets in the form of digital tokens, allowing them to receive approximately 6-7% yields from rental income plus extra from asset appreciation, at their own pace, for an initial investment starting from 100 USD.
The platform mainly addresses professionals living in cities, with income levels above the national average, who want to invest their savings in a safe and profitable investment but can’t usually afford the time and cost of buying an entire real estate asset.
The founders and owners of MetaWealth include two real estate investors and developers – Michael Topolinski and Richard McLaughlin-Duane, with a track record and cumulated pool of real estate investments and pipeline of 1.3 billion USD, Amr Adawi, a startup entrepreneur with direct experience in building fintech startups with over 8 billion USD in assets, and Darren Carvalho, a former Vice President at Goldman Sachs at the New York office, who brings in depth experience working with the GS Growth Equity Group’s existing and potential portfolio of companies and startups.
