Just this week, on behalf of Park Avenue Capital, RealtyMogul announced the launch of the Woods of Ridgmar, a 235-unit multifamily property in Fort Worth, Texas that will undergo numerous environmental and sustainable upgrades - including a solar power system for the property. This investment marks the beginning of RealtyMogul’s sustainability program, which aims to promote an increasing number of sustainability-focused projects in the quarters and years to come.

While operators and developers have used the RealtyMogul Platform to finance hundreds of projects historically, Woods of Ridgmar will be the first investment on the Platform that is leveraging crowdfunding to finance solar upgrades on a multifamily property. Owen Barrett of Park Ave Capital explained, “Executing solar on existing multifamily properties is not as easy as it should be. The regulatory landscape is fragmented and most sponsors don’t understand the value proposition. Solarizing apartments requires additional coordination and investment, but ultimately is a unique value-add strategy that reduces long-term operating costs. It's the savvy thing to do, the right thing to do, and exactly the kind of thing that 21st century investors are looking for.”

RealtyMogul has a community of 200,000+ individual investors across a $3.5 billion portfolio that includes over 18,000+ multifamily units. They have rapidly become one of the top online real estate investing platforms, and this crowdfunding reflects both the evolving needs of modern renters - who value both cost savings and environment sustainability - and the evolving appetite of RealtyMogul’s investor base to financially back sustainable initiatives.

Chris Fraley, Chief Investment Officer of RealtyMogul explained, “According to the United Nations Environment Program, the real estate and construction industry accounts for 39% of greenhouse gas emissions. We launched the Sustainabilty Program as a way of connecting investors looking for opportunities to invest in sustainable strategies with sponsors who are skilled at providing profitable solutions to our environmental problems. It was very surprising to me that we saw very few business plans submitted that included elements of sustainability. We discovered that it is much more challenging to implement sustainable upgrades in a profitable fashion than we imagined. We made the decision to actively pursue sponsors who were skilled at executing these strategies given that 70% of our investors in a recent poll conducted by RealtyMogul said that they were more likely to invest in an offering that had an element of sustainability.” The Woods at Ridgmar is a good example of a project that has positive environmental benefits without sacrificing investor return. We believe it is possible to do well by doing good.”

Chris Fraley and Owen Barrett will be panelists on a forum hosted by the Impact Finance Center (www.impactfinancecenter.org) on the challenges of solar retrofit and upgrades in multifamily properties on September 21st. Please see IFC’s website for more information.