Ben Miller

Ben Miller

Co-Founder & CEO

Fundrise

Washington, DC

Ben Miller is Co-Founder and CEO of Fundrise. Ben’s responsibilities involve strategic partnerships, deal underwriting, real estate development, PR as well as setting the long-term strategy and goals for the company.

Ben has 15 years of experience in real estate and finance, and he has acquired, developed, and financed more than $500 million of property in his time as Managing Partner of WestMill Capital Partners and President of Western Development Corporation.

Ben also started US Nordic Ventures, a cross-Atlantic private equity and operating company. Ben has worked as an analyst for Lubert-Adler, a private equity real estate fund. Ben was part of the founding staff of Democracy Alliance, a progressive investment collaborative.

Ben Miller is also co-founder of Popularise, a real estate crowdsourcing website.

The fundrise story

“Historically, real estate has proven to be one of the best-performing investment classes.

As real estate investors ourselves, we spent years investing through the traditional approach, only to see much of the profits from those investments eaten up by inefficiency, unnecessary overhead, and middlemen who added little value.

Fed up with the old way of doing things, we started Fundrise with the simple idea to use technology to redefine how people invested in real estate — lowering the costs, improving the quality, and broadening the access.

We faced our fair share of skeptics, including industry professionals who told us that our idea was impossible. Turns out, they were wrong.

After nearly a year of working through audits and multiple filings with the SEC, we launched our first online investment offering in 2012. Then we did it again and again. Eventually, we built an entirely new system, outside the conventional industry, and in doing so eliminated the high costs and poor incentives that had become the status quo.

Today, there are more than 500,000 members of Fundrise, and we’ve invested in nearly $2 billion worth of real estate across the country.

The idea is simple yet powerful. Take a high quality investment class and make it available to anyone through one simple, efficient, and transparent platform. At Fundrise, we put our investors first, period.

Welcome to the future of investing.”

Articles featuring Ben Miller

Build Your Own: 6 Successfully Crowdfunded Architecture Projects

In today’s financial environment archipreneurs have to be creative when it comes to funding. Crowdfunding, the practice of investing in projects through the use of a crowd-supported web based fundraising campaign, has been proven to be successful to get projects off the ground. Last week we shared with you 5 essentials models you should know in […]

Crowdfunding for Architects: 5 Essentials Models You Should Know

Crowdfunding presents a fantastic opportunity for architects to get projects off the ground and have more control over the entire development process. The use of crowd-supported fundraising campaigns is fundamentally changing how architects approach their work, and is proving to be an increasingly viable option for getting designs built. Conventionally, architects’ role in funding projects […]

Archipreneur Interview: Ben Miller, Co-Founder & CEO Of Fundrise.com

“Archipreneur Insights” is an interview series with experts and entrepreneurs in the field of architecture, building and development, highlighting the creative and unusual operations of their businesses and projects. Considering we’re very deep within the age of technology, we also look at how these community leaders have used alternative methods to achieve their career and […]

Quotes from Ben Miller

  • "I’ve worked with a lot of architects, and the architect has a lot of knowledge in architecture, but often they have not a lot of experience outside architecture."
  • "So if you want to be an entrepreneur outside of architecture, as a developer, probably the first thing they should start doing is understanding finance."
  • "Too often architects don’t understand the economic rationale behind a project, and get frustrated that they can’t design what they want."
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