New Platform Deep-Dive Review: Arrived Single-family Residential and Vacation Rental Platform

This Jeff Bezos backed firm offers deals in the desirable but difficult-to-access class of single-family residential and vacation rentals. It has impressive deal volume (5 currently), ultra-low minimums ($100), and even has difficult-to-find debt-free investments. It also claims a secondary-market is coming in summer of 2025. Downsides for some investors may include the lack of disclosure of Arrived's full track record, apparent lack of previous real-estate experience of principals, and issues concerning co-investment.

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A Changing of the Guard for Real Estate CrowdFunding?

The recent downturn has caused a lot of pain and disruption to the older crowdfunding sites (as discussed in previous reviews). And it's also caused a ton of new companies to popup (like daisies after a spring rain). And unsurprisingly, many of these new firms are taking a different approach than the old guard did.

So this is the fifth article in a new series about these fresh platforms. And this one is about Arrived, which specializes in residential real-estate (and specifically, single family residential and vacation rentals).

Loving Single Family Rentals

In the groundbreaking study, "The Rate of Return of Everything", residential real estate's long-term performance (1870 - modern era) walloped virtually every other asset class.

It absolutely destroyed bonds and treasuries. And to the surprise of many, it did about as well as the stock market did.  And when investing, the after-tax return is what matters the most. But the study didn't factor in taxes (and how real estate often enjoys many tax breaks that stocks don't). So after factoring that in, residential real estate almost certainly beat the stock market, too.

So I personally love the single-family rental asset-class. And it's the bedrock of my core portfolio.

But, there just aren't a lot of residential equity funds available. So it can be very difficult to access this asset class as a passive investment. And many investors are forced to own this kind of real estate directly (if they want in their portfolio).

And so when I saw Arrived I was excited to dig into the details.

Arrived Options

Arrived offers three different types of investments:

1. Real-estate equity investments in single-property deals

2. Real-estate equity investments in a diversified fund (the "Arrived Single Family Residential Fund") .

3. Real-estate debt investments in a diversified fund (the "Arrived Private Credit Fund").

Since these products are so different, a separate review is being done for each one. This is the first of three Arrived reviews and is about the single-property residential and vacation rental investment deals.

Arrived (Single-Property Investment) Features

There just aren't a lot of residential equity funds available. So it can be very difficult to access this asset class as a passive investment. And many investors are forced to own this kind of real estate directly (if they want in their portfolio). So I like the fact that Arrived focuses on this asset class.

They also currently have 5 open properties which is very impressive for a newer site.

And knowing that Jeff Bezos (Amazon's founder) and Mark Beniof (Salesforce's founder) have funded Arrived, is impressive.

Additionally they accept all investors over 18, so you don't have to be accredited. Minimums are very low and accessible at $100. And it's nice that they send checks so frequently (monthly instead of the usual quarterly).

Additionally they claim that in the summer of 2025 they will be opening up a secondary market. If they do, this will give investors a very nice liquidity option.

Also some of the investments have no debt.  This is rare and as a conservative investor, I really like seeing this. As I discuss in my portfolio deep dive, I use debt-free residential real estate as the core of my portfolio (because I feel this hardens it against a recession). So I consider this to be a major plus.

On the other hand Arrived does not appear to disclose their full track record. For me, this is inadequate transparency and a major negative (and I hope they change their decision on this, for the future). And this includes the amount of co-investment (which may suggest there is none).

Additionally some may find it off-putting that the founders have no previous real estate experience (let alone experience managing other people's money in a real estate fund).

​Accredited investors also generally dislike how nonaccredited offerings (like this) are much more expensive than other options they have access to. And in my opinion the pitch page is inadequate.  It forces the investor to wade through dense SEC filings for basic information (and I feel that's asking way too much from an investor that doesn't even know if they're potentially interested or not). And I do hope they improve their pitch page in the future.

This new review has more info on how Arrived works, its pros and cons and also a due-diligence deep-dive on a current Arrived deal. Click here to see the full Share SFR review.