EasyProperties has an investment committee that selects the properties that are made available to invest in. Once a property is selected, a company is registered for that property and you as an investor can buy shares in that company.
To give you the ability to buy shares in the property company, the shares need to be made available to the public which is done through the process of an Initial Public Offering (IPO). This means that initially a property is only available to invest in during a specific and limited period of time when the IPO is open. It also means that the total investment amount needs to be reached in its entirety in order for the deal to happen. If there are not enough funds invested in the IPO from the EasyProperties community, the deal falls through. It can also happen that there are more funds invested than the investment target, in which case the IPO is oversubscribed and any additional money over and above the target amount is returned back to investors proportionate to their original invested amount.
On EasyProperties, 1 share is valued at R1 in an IPO. This means if the total capital required for the investment in a property is R5 000 000, then there will be 5 000 000 shares issued.
Once an IPO has closed and the property has transferred, investors have the ability to buy more shares or sell their shares at regular online auctions which take place on the EasyProperties platform.