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.”