For more than a century, residential real estate has been the most immovable corner of American wealth because it is valuable, slow, illiquid and stubbornly analog. You could buy a house or sell a house, but almost nothing in between. There was no adjusting a position, no trimming exposure, no exiting early unless you were willing to move furniture or pay an agent.
Arrived Homes thinks that constraint should no longer exist.
The Seattle-based startup, backed by Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff, has raised $27 million in new funding to accelerate what it calls a "stock market for real estate," a secondary trading platform where investors can buy and sell fractional shares of individual rental homes in minutes rather than years.
The raise was led by Neo, with participation from Forerunner Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and others, bringing the company's total funding to $61.7 million, according to a report issued by CNBC.
The idea isn't entirely new (fractional ownership in real estate has been tried, reshaped and repackaged dozens of times) but Arrived is betting the missing ingredient has always been liquidity. Without the ability to exit, the pitch of democratized real estate access has had a ceiling. The new marketplace aims to change that, letting investors place limit orders, match with peers and trade positions the way they would shares of a public company.
Real Estate for a Digital Investor
Arrived launched in 2021 with a simple proposition; allow everyday investors to buy shares of individual rental homes for as little as $100. Each property is registered with the SEC and structured as its own REIT, a framework the company spent a year working with regulators to create. Investors choose the specific homes they want exposure to rather than buying into a pooled fund.
The model has gained traction. More than 885,000 investors have signed up for the platform, according to the company, investing over $300 million across a portfolio that now spans 550 properties in 65 cities.
But until now, those positions were effectively locked. Investors received rental income and potential appreciation, but exiting required waiting for the full property sale. Many times a multi-year process.
The secondary market is meant to unfreeze that. Over the first three weeks, Arrived says investors placed 57,000 buy and sell orders, a volume that suggests latent demand for real estate exposure that behaves more like a financial instrument.
The timing is not incidental. Traditional homebuying in the U.S. has slowed under high prices and elevated mortgage rates. Even institutional buyers have stepped back. And while investors now make up the largest share of homebuyers on record, that's mostly because owner-occupant demand has thinned.
Fractional investing, in theory, offers an alternative that gives exposure without leverage, property management or a six-figure down payment. But fractional investing without liquidity leaves most of the old frictions intact.
Ryan Frazier, Arrived's co-founder and CEO, framed the new platform as necessary. "This milestone isn't just about new capital — it's about bringing real estate investing fully online and redefining how the next generation accesses, builds, and trades wealth through property," he said.
Neo's Ali Partovi was more blunt, saying, "I love the audacity of the Arrived vision: a stock market for real estate."
Importantly, and unlike public markets, Arrived's trading windows open for one week each quarter, after a property receives its first valuation. Investors can place limit orders to buy or sell, and trades execute when prices align.
Homes are overwhelmingly equity-financed. The company says most of its properties carry no long-term debt, and the small portion that do have mortgages average rates below 4%, which acts as a buffer against the rate environment that has upended much of the broader housing market.
For now, the liquidity isn't continuous, and the system is still early. But, the promise of the model is that it lets investors rebalance, add missed opportunities, or exit positions based on new goals.
Arrived is betting that the future of real estate investing won't look like the mortgage-and-escrow world Americans have known for decades. It might look a little more like a trading screen.
Image: Shutterstock
