Real estate investment in Germany has traditionally been the preserve of those with enough capital to buy property outright or access to the kind of institutional financing that retail investors simply don't get. Exporo was founded in Hamburg in 2014 to change the access equation. Its crowdfunding platform lets retail investors participate in real estate projects — commercial and residential — from as little as €500, earning fixed returns on project financing or ongoing yields from stabilised properties. The model sits at the intersection of property finance and digital investing, packaging an asset class that Germans have always trusted into a format that the smartphone generation can engage with. Exporo has funded hundreds of projects across Germany and Europe, becoming one of the largest real estate crowdfunding platforms in the German-speaking market. It navigated the regulatory evolution of the European crowdfunding framework, which created clearer rules for platforms like it and opened the door to cross-border fundraising. In a market where property prices have risen far beyond what most retail investors can access directly, fractional real estate participation is less a novelty and more a structural response to an affordability problem that isn't going away.