Buy now, pay later tech companies have been booming, with nearly two million Australians using the service on general purchases.
Property and technology platform Bricklet has put a spin on the system by allowing people to purchase a fragment, or ‘bricklet’ of an investment property to help them enter the ever-increasing property market.
Users of the venture, run by Lakeba Group, are registered owners on the title and a property manager acts on their behalf. Users can also choose to be actively involved in managing the property and do get to choose which properties it is they are investing in.
“It came out of looking at the challenges of property; wages aren’t going up the same as what property is and it’s just getting harder and harder for younger people to get into property,” CEO Darren Younger told Yahoo Finance.
“We wanted to address that and look at if there are ways that we are going to fix that by bringing the price point down – not necessarily the value of the property but if people are able to buy in smaller pieces.”
“We came up with the concept and we tested the market with it, so we launched it in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as a starting point.”
Mr Younger said buying now and paying later for property was a much better idea than for general retail products because you were buying an asset that appreciates in value rather than something like a piece of clothing you might only wear a few times.
“It’s interesting. Buy now, pay later – it’s the same as a mortgage, really,” Mr Younger said.
“If you say buy now, pay later is a bad thing, then why do you get a mortgage for a house? You’re basically saying you’re going to pay back $1 million or more.
“The difference with Bricklet is that…. I think this is the first buy now, pay later that’s actually for an asset.”
“We’re just giving you another way to buy a piece of property,” he said.
