Nowadays, the crowdfunding has become a very accessible and common way for start-up firms to raise substantial initial funding to launch new innovative business ideas. However, the use of crowdfunding practices seems not to be attractive to start-ups only. Indeed, crowdfunding practices start to be incorporated at the root of new innovative business models, for instance in the real estate industry. Here is an illustration of how building house companies can effectively benefit from crowdfunding uses with the presentation of a real case launched in 2014.

To begin with, it is important to distinguish two different business models in the house building industry, since the crowdfunding can only be relevant within one of the two. The first business model consists of the situation when the firm already have a certain client and is creating a project especially tailored to the client’s requests and budget. Since the client is paying as the construction goes on, the firm uses directly this entry of money to cover the construction costs and typically does not need any extra funds. The second business model is the situation where the firm undertakes the construction of a house on an acquired land, without having any clients prior to the construction. When the construction is finished, the firm put the house on sale on the regular market. This latter business model required construction firms to raise funds themselves to cover the costs throughout the construction phase. The firms typically use to issue debt to raise funds for such common projects. An interesting alternative to debt consists of the crowdfunding. One of the lead pioneers in this practice is Blavier, a Belgian company that has recently launched its own crowdfunding platform called ConseilB+. Here is how it works in practice.

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TagTagCity is a recent start-up launched by the cofounder Geoffroy Simon in Brussels in 2011. The idea is born considering the fact that it’s quite complicated and time demanding to obtain sufficient and relevant information about a city, such as the location and basic information about restaurants, hotels, shopping, culture and touristic places, etc. This problem is encountered either by tourists visiting a city, or simply by citizens living in a city. Even though loads of information is actually available, either on guidebooks, on tourist brochures, on diverse websites or simply using word of mouth, it may often become very inconvenient and difficult to use and integrate all these different sources of information while walking on the streets of a city. TagTagCity brought in an efficient solution to that particular problem.

Their main idea was to centralise all this information on a single world map, online. This idea resulted in the implementation of a two-sided online platform presented in the form of a Google world map. On the first hand, any business owners could tag the location and basic information about his business on the map for free. On the other hand, any user could simply go on the website,access the map for free, and benefits from all the information tagged on it. The users has two basic options, either he enters a specific place in the world to check on the map, or he asks the website to localize himself to check nice places around him. Continue reading TagTagCity, a Smart Two-Sided Platform →