EstateGuru Review 2026: Mortgage-Backed, but Defaults Run High

EstateGuru is an online lending platform, run by Estateguru OÜ in Tallinn, where private investors lend money to property developers and owners. Every loan is secured with a mortgage on real estate, and investors earn fixed interest until the borrower repays. It has operated since 2014 and on 21 September 2026 showed €966.7 million lent across 7,998 loans and 160,133 active investors.

For most of its history EstateGuru grew by expanding into new countries: Finland, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Sweden alongside the Baltics. That expansion is where most of its problems came from. Since 2023 it has lent only in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, while it works out the loans left in the other markets.

The short answer to whether it is worth using: the current Baltic lending looks reasonably run, the collateral is real and the disclosure is good, but the default record is among the worst of the established platforms we cover. The live figures and our safety score are on the EstateGuru platform page; the methodology explains how the score is built.

EstateGuru is a crowdfunding marketplace, not a note issuer. When you invest, you enter a loan agreement directly with the borrower — usually a property company — and EstateGuru arranges and services the loan.

What you actually own

You hold a claim against the borrower. The mortgage securing that claim is registered in favour of Estateguru tagatisagent OÜ (registry code 12766368), a separate company that acts as collateral agent on behalf of all lenders in the loan. If the borrower defaults, the collateral agent enforces the mortgage — usually by selling the property at auction or through an insolvency sale — and distributes the proceeds to lenders.

The loans

Most loans are development, bridge or business loans with a short term: the average term of issued loans is 14.0 months. Interest is fixed and usually paid monthly, with principal repaid at the end (bullet) or in instalments. The average loan size is €120,863.

There is no buyback. Nobody — not EstateGuru, not an originator — steps in if a borrower stops paying. Your protection is the property and the time it takes to sell it.

The licensed operating company is Estateguru OÜ (registration code 12558919). It belongs to Estateguru Holding OÜ, which at the end of 2025 was the parent of twelve group companies.

In July 2025 EstateGuru announced that Mihkel Stamm, chief executive for eight years, would step down and that Daniil Aal, previously chief operating officer, would succeed him subject to approval by Finantsinspektsioon. Aal said the priorities were to stay profitable and strengthen the Baltic business. Marko Arro is listed as a management board member in the group's recent annual reports.

The group has shrunk as it retreated to the Baltics: 95 full-time equivalents in 2022, 55 in 2023 and 43 in 2024. Its annual reports since 2018 are published on its website.

You need to be at least 18, have a bank account at a licensed credit institution in the European Economic Area, and not be a resident of the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan.

1. 1Sign up as an investor and follow the instructions in the confirmation email.
2. 2Upload a government-issued ID.
3. 3Complete the anti-money-laundering questions and the appropriateness questionnaire required by the EU crowdfunding regulation. It includes a simulation of your ability to bear losses.
4. 4Transfer euros to your EstateGuru virtual account from an account in your own name.
5. 5Invest manually from €50 per loan, set up Auto Invest, or choose EG Grow from €100.

If you do not pass the appropriateness assessment you are treated as a non-sophisticated investor. You can still invest, but you get a four-day reflection period after each commitment, during which you can withdraw from the loan without penalty.

Before your first investment, open a few current loans and read the LTV, the valuation date, the borrower's history and the repayment schedule. They vary a great deal.

Getting started on EstateGuru is straightforward: verification is done on your phone, funding is a normal euro bank transfer, and ready-made Auto Invest strategies mean you do not have to pick loans one by one.

Signing up

EstateGuru accepts a valid ID card or passport for verification; driving licences and residence permits are not accepted. Its help centre says the check needs a smartphone and the original document, not a webcam or a photo of it. Once the ID, anti-money-laundering details and appropriateness questionnaire are approved, EstateGuru notifies you and the account is ready to fund. It does not state how long approval takes.

Deposits

Funding is by euro bank transfer only, to a virtual account in your name. There is no card or instant open-banking option, but there is also no deposit fee, and transfers from Wise, Revolut or Paysera are accepted.

Setting up Auto Invest

Auto Invest offers three starting points:

• Conservative and Balanced, two preset strategies you can switch on as they are
• Custom, where you set the criteria yourself and can change them at any time

While you choose criteria, the set-up page shows how many past loans would have matched, which makes the effect of each filter easy to see. You can keep investing manually alongside Auto Invest and pause it whenever you like. EG Grow is the simplest option of all: one amount, no filters.

App and dashboard

EstateGuru has apps for iOS and Android. The App Store listing covers EG Grow, manual investing, Auto Invest and the secondary market, with a real-time portfolio dashboard, an earnings breakdown and push notifications for new projects. Accounts can be protected with two-factor authentication by SMS or Google Authenticator.

Documents and support

The data you need for your tax return can be downloaded from the reporting section of the dashboard. Support runs through the chat messenger on EstateGuru's website, and the help centre is available in English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian.

EstateGuru accepts euros only, by SEPA transfer from an account in your name or your company's name. Transfers through Wise, Revolut and Paysera are also accepted. Payments in other currencies are rejected, and deposits from third-party accounts are not allowed. There is no deposit fee.

Withdrawals go to a bank account in your name that you have registered with EstateGuru. EstateGuru says it processes transfers immediately and that standard SEPA payments usually arrive in 1–2 banking days. Each withdrawal costs a €3 service fee, so it pays to withdraw in larger amounts rather than often.

Only your available balance can be withdrawn. Money in loans comes back when borrowers repay or when you sell claims on the secondary market.

Manual Invest

You choose loans yourself from €50. Each listing shows the borrower, the property, the valuation, the LTV, the interest rate, the term and the security rank. This is the only way to judge each loan properly, and on a platform where default rates have been high, it is worth the time.

Auto Invest

Auto Invest spreads money across new loans that match criteria you set, such as country, LTV, interest rate, term and loan type. It is convenient but invests by the rules you give it, so strict LTV and country filters matter.

EG Grow

EG Grow was launched in the second half of 2025. It pays a fixed 7% a year, monthly, from a diversified pool of at least ten loans that meet stricter criteria: terms of 6 to 18 months, LTV of at most 69%, first-rank mortgages only, and Baltic loans only. The borrowers pay more than 10%; the difference covers EstateGuru's costs, a risk margin and a reserve fund used to keep interest payments going when a borrower is late. The minimum is €100.

Two points to understand before choosing it. First, the reserve fund supports interest payments; it is not a guarantee of principal, and EstateGuru's own page says crowdfunding can lead to complete loss. Second, loans held in EG Grow cannot be sold on the secondary market and stay in place until the borrower repays. EstateGuru reported more than €2.5 million invested through EG Grow by January 2026, and ran an 8% promotional rate from 17 September to 21 October 2026.

EstateGuru's homepage and statistics page show a 9.32% historical return on 21 September 2026. On its vintage table, EstateGuru defines actual return as the weighted average return of the loans repaid in each origination year: 9.46% for 2023, 9.49% for 2024, 9.01% for 2025 and 10.22% so far for 2026.

That is a figure for loans that were repaid, and it is the right way to read it. It tells you what a performing loan earns, not what a typical investor received after defaults. The statistics page gives two other numbers that pull the picture down:

• the average return of recovered loans is 5.14% — loans that defaulted and were later recovered earned about half the headline rate, because interest stops while the property is sold;
• 1.34% of the portfolio has been written off.

What an individual investor earned depends heavily on when and where they lent. Someone who lent in Germany or Finland in 2021–2022 is likely to have money that has earned nothing for years. Someone who lent only in the Baltics since 2023 has had a much better experience: EstateGuru says 97% of the €275 million lent there since 2023 has been repaid or is performing.

Fees also reduce the net return: the AUM fee alone can take close to 1 percentage point a year from a performing portfolio (see below). A 10% interest rate is a price for the risk of lending to a developer, not a forecast of what you will keep. Our risks page covers the general point.

EstateGuru used to be almost free for investors. It has added fees since late 2023. The price list in force from 1 November 2025:

• AUM fee: 0.083% a month of your performing outstanding principal, taken only from actual returns you receive, capped at €100. It applies to investments made after 1 November 2023 and is debited on the 5th of each month. On a performing portfolio, 0.083% a month is roughly 1% a year.
• Secondary market: 1% of the sale amount, paid by the seller; buying is free. EstateGuru cut this from 3% in November 2025.
• Withdrawals: €3 per withdrawal.
• Inactive account fee: up to €10 a month if you have available cash but have made no new investment on the primary or secondary market for 12 months. If your available balance is lower, only that balance is taken. You get a seven-day notice each month to avoid it by investing or withdrawing everything.
• Interest spread: the price list allows EstateGuru to withhold a spread of 0–2% of interest before passing payments to investors.
• Deposits and account: free.

Borrowers pay EstateGuru's arrangement, debt-management and collection fees, including a debt management fee of 8.75% of amounts due in default. These costs come out of the same recovery pool as your principal, so they matter to you even though you do not pay them directly.

For how these fees compare with the other licensed platforms we rate highest, see our P2P lending fees comparison.

Loans run to maturity, typically about 14 months. The way out before then is the secondary market, now called the Trade page. Since September 2024 you can sell individual claims of a loan, set your own price at a discount or premium, and offers stay open for up to seven days. The minimum claim transfer is €50 and the seller pays a 1% fee.

EstateGuru reported more than 191,000 secondary market sales totalling over €26 million by November 2025. For a performing Baltic loan, that makes an early exit realistic, usually at or near par.

It is a different matter for loans in trouble. A claim on a defaulted loan can be listed, but only at whatever discount a buyer demands, and buyers are scarce when the outcome depends on a German or Finnish enforcement process. In practice, money in a defaulted loan is locked until the collateral is sold. EstateGuru's own figures show an average of 10.3 months from default to recovery, and that average includes the quick cases; the slow ones take years.

EG Grow loans cannot be sold at all. Treat EstateGuru as money you will not need for at least the full loan term, and longer if a borrower defaults.

EstateGuru's main selling point is that every loan is backed by real estate and a mortgage held for investors. Most are first-rank mortgages; check the rank on each listing, because a second-rank mortgage recovers only what is left after the first lender.

The average loan-to-value across all loans is 63.36%. EstateGuru says Baltic loans issued in 2023–2025 had a weighted average LTV of 57.8%, and those in Estonia specifically 54.1% by mid-2026. On paper, that leaves a buffer of roughly 40% before investors lose principal.

In practice the buffer has proved thinner. EstateGuru's German recovery update from early 2026 says that a sale at or slightly above 50% of appraised market value "is not necessarily a 'fire sale', but may simply reflect the property's true market clearing price." If a property sells at half its valuation, a loan at 60% LTV loses principal before recovery costs are even counted. Valuations are made at the time of lending, often on the planned value of a finished development, and they can be wrong or out of date by the time of enforcement.

The lesson from EstateGuru's record is not that mortgages are worthless — €70 million of principal has been recovered — but that a mortgage changes how a loss happens and how long it takes. It does not prevent one.

Estateguru OÜ is authorised as a crowdfunding service provider under the EU Crowdfunding Regulation (ECSPR) by Finantsinspektsioon, the Estonian Financial Supervision and Resolution Authority. The authorisation was granted on 8 May 2023 (decision no. 4.1-1/48) and allows EstateGuru to offer loan crowdfunding across the EU. It was the second such authorisation in Estonia. Before that, EstateGuru had been licensed separately in Lithuania, Finland and the United Kingdom.

What the licence gives you

• Client funds are kept separate from EstateGuru's operating funds.
• EstateGuru must assess whether the product is appropriate for you, show key investment information for each loan, and give non-sophisticated investors a four-day reflection period.
• If EstateGuru stopped operating, its help centre says a contractual entity would be appointed to take over servicing of the loans.

What it does not give you

There is no investor compensation scheme and no deposit guarantee. EstateGuru's investor risk statement says your investment "is not in any way comparable to a deposit and is not covered by any deposit and investment insurance instrument or compensation scheme." The ECSPR licence regulates how EstateGuru runs the marketplace; it does not make the loans any less likely to default.

For a platform with a stronger regulatory wrapper, see our Indemo review: Indemo is a MiFID investment firm with €20,000 compensation cover, though for a very different and much less liquid product.

EstateGuru publishes annual reports on its website and states that they are independently audited. The consolidated figures:

• 2022: revenue €8.00 million; loss €5.88 million.
• 2023: revenue €8.37 million; loss of €2.33 million as first reported, restated to €2.83 million in the 2024 report; equity negative at −€1.98 million at year-end.
• 2024: revenue €8.41 million; profit of €104,305; equity €1.63 million; operating cash flow €1.05 million.

The return to a small profit in 2024 is a real improvement, and equity turned positive. Two cautions. First, KPMG Baltics gave a qualified opinion on the 2024 accounts, because it could not obtain sufficient evidence on how share-option contracts were valued. That is a narrow issue, not a sign of wider problems, but it is still a qualification. Second, the 2025 file published on EstateGuru's website by September 2026 covers only the holding company on its own (a profit of €8,176), not the consolidated group; we could not find consolidated 2025 figures.

EstateGuru also spends its own money on recovering bad loans: €1.7 million in 2025, with monthly recovery-management costs of about €100,000–150,000. That is to its credit, and it is also a drain on a business with revenue of around €8 million.

This is the part of EstateGuru that every investor should read. Its statistics page gives a default rate by year, defined as the number of loans that defaulted during the year divided by the number of non-defaulted loans on 1 January:

• 2020: 6.47%
• 2021: 8.95%
• 2022: 9.13%
• 2023: 27.45%
• 2024: 13.45%
• 2025: 20.14%

These are counts of loans, not amounts, so they do not translate directly into money lost. But a platform where one loan in five defaulted in a single year is not a low-risk platform, whatever the collateral.

Recoveries

On 21 September 2026 the statistics page showed €72.8 million recovered in total, a 38.20% recovered rate for the portfolio, an average of 10.3 months from default to recovery and 1.34% written off. EstateGuru's mid-2026 update gave €70 million of principal recovered to date, including €14.8 million in 2024, €7.5 million in 2025 and €6.3 million in the first half of 2026, with a further €5.3 million under signed agreements. Recoveries slowed in 2025 even though the defaults kept coming.

By market

• Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — the only active markets. EstateGuru says 97% of the €275 million lent there since 2023 is repaid or performing, and that no 2025-originated Latvian loan was in default. In Lithuania, three claims were sold for €5.3 million, with settlement expected in autumn 2026.
• Germany (10.74% of all lending) — active only from 2020 to 2022, with all remaining loans in formal recovery. EstateGuru resolved seven German loans in the twelve months to early 2026 and expects "another year of structured work-out rather than rapid normalisation", with mandatory waits of 4–6 months between legal steps.
• Finland (9.75%) — inactive; EstateGuru describes slow enforcement, oversupply and low liquidity.
• Portugal — inactive, with all loans expected to be repaid by the end of summer 2026.
• Spain and Sweden — closed with all loans repaid and no capital losses.

EstateGuru has acknowledged capital losses in Germany and Finland but does not publish a total amount lost per market. From 2026 it publishes quarterly updates on problem loans in the portfolio view — use them before buying on the secondary market.

1. 1Borrower default. The main risk, and a frequent one: default rates of 13–27% a year since 2023.
2. 2Collateral shortfall. Properties can sell at around half their appraised value in a weak market, and recovery costs come out first.
3. 3Time. Enforcement takes months at best and years in Germany and Finland. Defaulted money earns little or nothing while it waits.
4. 4Liquidity. Performing loans can usually be sold; defaulted ones only at a deep discount, if at all. EG Grow loans cannot be sold.
5. 5Development and cycle risk. Many loans fund construction or refurbishment, which depends on sales prices, costs and interest rates holding up.
6. 6Fees. The AUM fee, €3 withdrawal fee, 1% sale fee and inactivity fee reduce what you keep.
7. 7Platform risk. EstateGuru returned to profit only in 2024, and there is no compensation scheme. Client funds are segregated and a replacement servicer would be appointed, but a failure would slow recoveries further.

These are not bank deposits. Keep individual loans small, prefer lower LTV and first-rank security, and size the whole position for the chance that part of it is locked for years.

This is general information, not tax advice. EstateGuru pays returns gross — it does not deduct tax — and states that the income is taxable investment income. You declare it yourself in your country of tax residence.

The tax data you need, such as interest received, secondary market gains and losses and fees, is available from the reporting section of your account. How defaulted loans, write-offs and secondary market discounts are treated varies a lot between countries: in some, a loss on one loan can be set against interest on others, and in others it cannot. EstateGuru itself recommends a local tax adviser, and so do we.