CrowdHO | Crowdfunding for Housing Climate Transition

CrowdHO aims at exploring the potential of crowdfunding to support private apartment owners to bear the costs of deep retrofit interventions in mixed ownership buildings. The proposal intends to develop a model that integrates more traditional forms of finance (bank loans, third party financing) with crowdfunding instruments (lending, equity or reward), working on four innovation levers: match-funding, citizens awareness, skills upgrading and impact measurement. Main output of the project will be a feasibility study defining the functioning, benefits and risks of the tool that has to respond to the multiple needs coming from the stakeholders involved in the investment pipeline.

The activities therefore will focus on:

financial engineering: the possible configurations of the financing model and the financial and legal constraints for its implementation will be studied, on the basis of the case study of mixed-owned buildings managed by ACER Reggio Emilia;
impact assessment: the project will carry out a study of the socio-economic and environmental impact at regional level resulting from the adoption of the new crowdfunding tool for building retrofit;
communication and training strategies: to overcome the cultural barriers arising from the information asymmetry between experts in the sector and citizens and from the distrust of private owners regarding the possibilities of access to funding, the project will identify the best communication strategies and training priorities for the dissemination of the tool at regional level.