How to Unlock the Real Estate Market for Small Investors

Want to buy or sell a small apartment building? It’s surprisingly hard — and Jeffrey Gopshtein wants to make it easier.

“It’s a very fragmented and broken process. The big commercial brokers don’t spend time on these small deals,” says Gopshtein, who received his BSBA in finance with a concentration in real estate from the LeBow College of Business in 2017. “Essentially, the residential realtors have taken over, and they’re charging crazy high commissions. This is a $20 billion a year segment that has no real liquidity, no real kind of intermediary or formal brokerage process.”

A native of Richboro in Buck’s County, Gopshtein founded Yieldeasy to change that dynamic. The online platform looks to connect small-residential buyers and sellers, with lower fees and a higher degree of transparency. “Our goal is to simplify the historically grueling process that has plagued these deals,” he says.

Gopshtein came to Drexel with an eye toward an investment banking career. Co-op experiences in investment banking and private equity changed his mind. “One of the most underrated aspects of the co-op program is the possibility of learning what you don’t want to do,” he says. “That can be an incredibly valuable experience.”

With too much energy and creativity to spend his days in front of a Bloomberg terminal, he went looking for something different. A managing director at his last co-op introduced him to real estate funds and he learned the ropes working luxury-apartment deals. From there he tried renovating and flipping homes, but that turned out to a lot of work for minimal returns.

From there he tried leveraging his limited capital to buy and sell four- and five-unit apartment buildings. “That’s when the light bulb went off, seeing how impossible it was,” he says.

Gopshtein secured $100K in pre-seed funding from angel investors as well as friends and family, a promising start toward his goal of $750K. This first round of funding will put Yieldeasy in a strong position to tap into the $20B/year small balance multifamily segment nationally.

With his classroom learning and co-op experiences in hand, he hit the ground running. “Nothing really prepares you like Drexel,” he says. “Along my co-op journey I met the managing director of this bank, the VP of that bank. One thing leads to another and then these introductions all become super valuable.”

With his business up and running, Gopshtein is looking to expand. He’s building a network of channel partners — lenders, title companies, and so on — in order to build up a seamless, one-stop shop for those looking to buy and sell on the platform.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants who escaped the Soviet Union, Gopshtein marvels at how far he has come.

“My parents left a socialist country in their early twenties with zero understanding of the English language, no money, and no prospects,” he says. “They paved the way for me to get into college, to really take advantage of the capitalist American system. This is a country that rewards hard work like no other country on the globe.”