Each Syndikat project is a Haus-GmbH with €25,000 share capital — nowhere near enough to buy a house — topped up by Direktkredite: private subordinated loans (Nachrangdarlehen) from friends, movement supporters and strangers, typically at 0–3 %, which banks treat as an equity substitute because of the qualifizierter Rangrücktritt. This, not commercial crowdfunding, is the dominant grassroots capital channel in Germany.
- Who lends: anyone, from €500 upwards in practice; no platform, no intermediary. The project publishes its own Direktkreditinfo and signs a contract per lender.
- Where in the stack: roughly the 30–45 % tranche between senior bank debt and the GmbH’s own capital. It is not legally equity — it is debt that ranks behind the bank.
- Regulatory frame — the reason the terms look the way they do: VermAnlG §2 Bagatellgrenze, §2a Schwarmfinanzierung, GewO §34f, and the KWG Einlagengeschäft risk. See direktkredit-recht for the actual thresholds; get them wrong and you owe a Prospekt or, worse, run an unlicensed deposit business.
Related
- syndikat-haus-gmbh — the borrower entity that raises the Direktkredite
- direktkredit-recht — VermAnlG / KWG / GewO rules that shape the offer
- gls-bank-financing — the senior bank tranche stacked above
- crowdinvesting-ecsp — the regulated platform alternative
- saxony-frl-familienwohnen — the household-gated route this model sidesteps
Detail
- Scale (syndikat.org, fetched 2026-09-10): 215 Hausprojekte im Bestand plus 15 im Aufbau.
- Solidartransfer: every project pays 10 ct/m² Nutzfläche/month to the Mietshäuser Syndikat GmbH for Beratung und Werbung, plus 0–80 ct/m²/month as a stille Beteiligung in the Solidarfonds GmbH, rising annually by 0.5 % of the previous year’s Nettokaltmiete. ~170 projects paid in ≈€450,000 (2022) and ≈€500,000 (2023); the 2024 plan allocated €186,000 as stakes in ~15 new Haus-GmbHs, €200,000 as loans to ~10 projects and €90,000 for infrastructure and taxes. Members of the earliest projects paid 25 ct/m²/month from 1992 to 2002.
- Resolved (was an open question in this wiki): commercial crowd platforms are a real but marginal channel — see crowdinvesting-ecsp.