Eve Picker has a plan to add bigger commercial real estate transactions to her crowdfunding platform Small Change, after adding five new partners to the campaign she launched in 2016.
Picker, founder and CEO of Small Change, expanded her team with the addition of Julian Anjorin, Derek King, Richard Rogers, Mitchell Skomra and Jacob Walsh, who she said all bring different areas of expertise to the table within real estate crowdfunding.
“All five of them are very well versed in regulatory rules and how to go about listing offerings under regulation crowdfunding,” Picker said. “It really gives us an opportunity to quickly add significant resources to what we’re doing.”
Anjorin joins Small Change with a background in cybersecurity and has founded other crowdfunding platforms.
King specializes in historic preservation, while Rogers is an urban planner and attorney.
Picker said Skomra, a software engineer, and Walsh, who specializes in operations management, add integral experiences in regulation crowdfunding that will be critical in driving future growth.
The five new Small Change partners will look to drive the company’s growth, which thus far has funded projects in 27 U.S. cities. While it historically has tackled smaller developments for investors, Small Change recently listed its largest project to date in the $41 million King Henry project in Alexandria, Va., involving Wall Street Capital Partners’ planned creation of a 50-unit apartment building with retail space at a parking lot site.
Picker said the Alexandria project at 912-920 King Street underscores how developers like Wall Street Capital Partners — owned by Joel Miller — are open to utilizing regulation crowdfunding as a financing source. In addition to eyeing bigger size projects, Picker is also looking to target developments that achieve impact goals such as King Henry, which is led by a Black developer, or projects with an environmental focus
“We see movement towards very credible deals and very credible developers who really want to include this community piece,” Picker said. “We’d really like to be known as the crowdfunding platform that showcases and helps raise money for projects that have some piece of impact in them, and five new partners, I think, will really help accelerate that growth.”
Andrew Coen can be reached at acoen@commercialobserver.com
