New partnership focused on supporting early-stage companies that make housing cheaper to rent and quicker to build. Forget meal delivery services or direct-to-consumer brands. A new startup fund wants to disrupt the world of affordable housing.
MetaProp, a New York-based tech accelerator and venture capital fund focused on real estate, and Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on affordable housing financing, announced a partnership focused on supporting early-stage startups that make housing cheaper to rent and quicker to build.
MetaProp says it plans to invest a total of $5 million in affordable housing startups by 2020, and aim to invest in three new companies by this fall. Enterprise, which has previously invested in startups such as Rentlogic (grading landlords) and Point Digital Finance (a shared-equity solution for saving for a downpayment), has not yet disclosed how much it plans to invest. ?We?re at a point politically where we don?t expect to see changes for the better, in terms of housing affordability, from the government,? Leila Collins, a senior associate at MetaProp who will serve as an investor-in-residence with Enterprise, told Curbed. ?We don?t expect to miraculously see cities and suburbs get more affordable.?
The partnership comes out of a desire to try a new strategy to overcome the multiple land use, funding, and political challenges impeding the construction of more affordable housing.
It?s also an attempt to expand wha...