I went heavy into crowdfunding using the portals over the past year and have a portfolio across the county at $5k or $10k a pop (there have been 2 defaults and 2 extensions to be fair that most likely means I will not be paid back all the money in the time I was supposed to and may lose up to a certain amount of my principal). I then went and did some loans myself here locally, but it honestly was a lot of work sourcing and evaluating deals.
I then called up local hard money lending companies and have now invested in their private lender program. The returns are worse than in crowdfunding and you have concentration of local economy risk, however I like the risk reward there better than crowdfunding. The local hard money lender I am with structures my investment as a loan to their lending entity (unsecured), but then has an underlying property where my source of funds went to that serve as collateral for the loan if the hard money lending company doesn't pay me. So it would basically require the hard money lender (who has about $30 million in loans) to go out of business AND the underlying property not having enough equity cushion in it vis a vis my loan for me to lose principal.
