VR Crowd - Risk and return review
VR Crowd - Returns and loss rates
Investment maturity
VR Crowd – Platform statistics 2026
VR Crowd – Pros & Cons
About VR Crowd
What it is
VR-Crowd is a German crowdinvesting platform set up in 2018 and owned by a regional cooperative bank, Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Würzburg eG. Projects come from partner Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken: the bank lends the main loan and the crowd adds a smaller, junior loan on top. By October 2026 the platform had placed €141.3 million in 123 projects, mostly German housing developments, plus business expansions and solar parks. The site is in German only.
How it works
You pick a project and lend from €250, in €50 steps, up to the legal limit of €25,000 per borrower for private investors. There is no auto-invest. Each loan has a fixed rate and a fixed end date, usually one to five years; interest is normally paid once a year and the loan is mostly repaid in one sum at the end. Some member projects are open only to customers of a particular cooperative bank. On 27 October 2026 the projects we could see were all fully funded, with new ones marked as coming soon.
Returns
VR-Crowd publishes no figure for what investors actually earned. It shows only the rate on each project: from 5% on solar and member projects up to 8.25% on a fitness-studio expansion, the highest rate in the book (August 2026); a Würzburg housing project opened in summer 2026 at 7.75%. The home page calculator shows 8% to 10%, above any rate actually offered. German tax of at least 25% is withheld from the interest.
Losses and defaults
The platform publishes no figure for late payments, defaults, losses or recoveries, and it has no statistics page. The only statement is a 2023 press headline on its press page saying that no project had had payment difficulties so far; it has not been updated. One early repayment is on record: the first project, FIT/ONE, raised €1.1 million at 6.75% in 2018 and was repaid. Without published figures, investors cannot see how often money is lost.
What secures your money
Nothing secures your loan. You lend on an unsecured, subordinated basis: the partner bank's own loan comes first, and in a failure you are paid only after other creditors. Under the qualified subordination in the loan terms you cannot even demand payment if paying you would push the borrower into insolvency. There is no buyback, reserve fund or guarantee. The comfort is that a licensed bank checked the project and has its own money in it, but the bank's money ranks ahead of yours. In plain words: if a developer fails, the bank is paid first and you may get nothing back.
Who runs it and its licence
VR-Crowd GmbH (Würzburg, commercial register HRB 16190, share capital €25,000) is registered as a financial investment intermediary under German trade law (§ 34f GewO, register no. D-F-125-Z1ML-94), supervised by the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Munich and Upper Bavaria. It is not a bank and holds no EU crowdfunding licence. Each offer has a short information sheet filed with the German regulator BaFin, which does not check its content. The managing director is Kerstin Amend-Maar.
Fees
Investing is free for investors, from registration to repayment; the borrowers pay the platform. Your only deduction is the tax withheld from interest.
Getting your money out
There is no secondary market, so your money stays in until the loan ends. A loan can in principle be passed to someone else by written notice to the borrower, but no venue exists and a private sale may be below face value. You can cancel within 14 days of subscribing. Your money goes through an escrow account at secupay AG, a licensed payment institution, and repayments come straight back to your own bank account.
Our view
Return: Medium — only the rates on offer are published, up to 8.25% a year; nothing actually earned is shown. Risk: High (higher means more risk) — the platform publishes no figure for defaults or losses, so we start from the middle level and move it one step worse, because platforms with good results usually publish them and these loans are unsecured and rank behind the bank. Risk-return: Low — the rates are similar to those on mortgage-backed platforms, but here the money is unsecured, junior to a bank, locked in until maturity and backed by no performance data.
Regulation
License / Regulation: No BaFin or EU crowdfunding licence. VR-Crowd GmbH (Würzburg, HRB 16190) is registered as a financial investment intermediary under § 34f (1) of the German Trade Regulation Act (GewO), register no. D-F-125-Z1ML-94, with the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Munich and Upper Bavaria as competent authority. The loans are offered as German investment products (Vermögensanlagen) under the crowdfunding exemption; the information sheet is filed with BaFin, which does not check its content. No deposit guarantee or investor compensation scheme applies.
Functionality
For Investors
Useful Information
Partly. VR-Crowd GmbH is a registered financial investment intermediary under German trade law (§ 34f GewO), supervised by the Munich chamber of commerce. It holds no BaFin or EU crowdfunding licence, and BaFin does not check the content of the offer documents.
Not VR-Crowd. Your money goes to an escrow account at secupay AG, a licensed payment institution, and is passed to the borrower once the funding target is reached. Interest and repayments come straight back to your own bank account.
€250 per project, then in €50 steps, up to €25,000 per borrower for private investors.
Projects pay fixed rates from 5% to 8.25% a year, before at least 25% German tax. VR-Crowd publishes no figure for what investors actually earned, nor for late payments, defaults or losses; the only statement is a 2023 press headline that no project had had payment difficulties.
Nothing. The loans are unsecured and subordinated: the partner bank's loan is repaid first, and you cannot demand payment if that would push the borrower into insolvency. There is no buyback, reserve fund or guarantee.
No. There is no secondary market, so your money stays in until the loan ends, usually after one to five years. You can cancel only within 14 days of subscribing.
None. Investing is free from registration to repayment; the borrowers pay the platform. German tax is withheld from the interest.
If a borrower fails, the partner bank and other creditors are paid before you, and you may lose everything you lent. Your loan contract is with the borrower, not with VR-Crowd, so if the platform failed your loans would still exist, but no compensation scheme covers any loss.
Only indirectly. A licensed cooperative bank checks each project and lends its own money alongside you, which is a real sign of confidence. But the bank's loan ranks ahead of yours, so in a failure the bank is repaid first.
