Community-Based Finance with Eve Picker
At the core of every real estate project is finance. That’s why we are excited to share this interview with Eve Picker, founder of the real estate crowdfunding platform Small Change.
With a focus on helping impact-driven real estate projects get funded, Small Change represents a shift towards community-based finance. This is significant as federal regulations have historically barred the majority of the American population—the 97% of people that are not accredited investors—from participating in real estate investments.
Eve, a disillusioned Australian architect that calls Pittsburg, Pennsylvania home, has a long history of spearheading challenging real estate projects. Her development career focused on projects that would help to revitalize communities where little to no investment money was readily available. She learned to piecemeal together sundry funding sources that spanned private capital, conventional funding, and public financing such as community reinvestment grants.
In a male dominated industry such as real estate development, Eve’s passion for Small Change comes from the hurdles she faced trying to secure financing. Turned down and diminished by male bankers, Eve claims her ability to push forward on projects came as a result of two female bankers that believed in what she was doing. She now is passing that spirit on and is excited about creating a platform that helps to level the playing field for female and minority developers.
We believe that Eve and her work at Small Change is at the frontier of finance and real estate. By both enabling ordinary people to invest in transformative projects in their own communities, as well as supporting local developers accomplish incremental development projects; this is where the winds of change are blowing.
