EstateGuru vs. InRento: Which Platform Is Better?

Two ways to earn interest from property

On supervisory status, nothing separates the two. EstateGuru has held an authorisation as a European crowdfunding service provider from the Estonian regulator Finantsinspektsioon since May 2023, InRento the equivalent licence from the Bank of Lithuania since 10 November 2023 (authorisation code LB002222). The difference lies in where the money that pays you comes from.

EstateGuru funds bridge and development loans. A developer or owner needs capital for twelve or eighteen months, pays interest on it and repays the principal in one go as soon as the property is sold or refinanced with a bank. Your return therefore depends on the project being completed successfully. If the sale stalls, a performing loan turns into a recovery case.

InRento does the opposite. There, an already rented property is financed, and the tenants pay every month. Part of your return comes from that ongoing rental income, a further part from capital appreciation when the property is sold later. As long as the tenants pay, the distributions run, regardless of the state of the sales market.

This difference matters more than any interest rate. A property downturn hits a development project immediately and with full force, because the exit falls away. A rented flat only loses income once tenants move out or the rent stops coming in. One model is cyclical, the other sluggish.

EstateGuru's legacy book is the heart of the decision

The rapid expansion of 2021 and 2022, above all in the German market, left EstateGuru with a stock of non-performing loans that is still being worked through today. The platform reports on it publicly and regularly. In its mid-2026 update of 22 July 2026 it puts recovered capital at €70M across the twelve-year platform history, of which €7.5M in 2025 and €6.3M in the first half of 2026. For Germany it states that ten defaulted loans have been finally wound up so far, with three or four more expected in the current half-year. Demand for the collateral is weak, which also brings capital losses with it.

How much longer this will take is something EstateGuru answers in the same text with a reference to the German market. A survey of 58 institutions active in German property finance, conducted by EY-Parthenon in the first quarter of 2026, found that the banks themselves expect a weak phase lasting until 2028 and a marked improvement only from 2029. German recovery is tied to that environment.

A platform documenting its own problem cases in this much detail is rare in the P2P market. It does not change the fact that a substantial part of the earlier portfolio stays tied up for years.

New lending looks different. Since the ECSP authorisation in 2023, EstateGuru has issued new loans almost exclusively in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; in Portugal only a residual position is running off. Of the €275M financed since 2023, 97% has been repaid or is being serviced as agreed, according to the platform. If you start today, you are therefore not buying the legacy book but a loan book that, on the data visible so far, runs considerably cleaner than what is currently being wound down.

Looking at the balance sheet rewards precision, in both directions. The group Estateguru Holding OÜ posted its first profit in 2024, €104,305 on revenue of €8.41M. The equity of €1.63M, positive again, comes hardly at all from that profit, however, but from a capital increase of €3.99M in the same year. The prior-year figure of minus €2.48M is in turn a restated one, containing an error correction of €500,128. On top of that sits a qualified audit opinion from KPMG Baltics OÜ: the auditor could not follow the valuation of the employee options issued in 2024 and writes explicitly that it cannot judge to what extent the 2024 group profit is misstated as a result (annual report 2024). The direction is right, the number underneath is thinner than it looks.

InRento's record is clean and short

InRento has been active with investor money since November 2020 and reports a default rate of 0% in its own platform statistics, likewise 0% in recovery; overdue interest stands at €14,510 there, put by the platform at 0.02%. The actual annual return comes to 11.59% against an expected 9.36%. A realised return above the projected one is unusual in this market.

The operating company stands on solid ground too. The audited 2025 accounts show UAB Inrento with around €3.0M in revenue, €957,675 in net profit and €1.37M in equity, signed off with an unqualified opinion. It is the third profitable year in a row, which leaves the platform not dependent on ongoing outside funding.

Three things cloud this picture, and you should know them before relying on the reported zero.

The portfolio is tightly concentrated. Just under half of the financed volume sits in Lithuania, a good third in Poland, and a quarter is in hotel projects. Hotels react more sensitively to the economic cycle and to travel behaviour than residential property does. Investing with InRento spreads you across projects, but hardly across markets.

Then there is how a default is counted in the first place. InRento reproduces the ECSP default definition verbatim on its statistics page. Under it, a claim counts as material from €20,000, and where the loan agreement expressly permits the project owner to alter the payment schedule or suspend payments, the postponed payments do not count as overdue as long as the owner stays within those rights. Counting of days past due then starts from the new schedule. The same definition does, however, oblige the platform to analyse the reasons for such changes and to examine whether insolvency is looming. The reported zero is therefore compliant with the rules, but it does not measure the same thing as a rate drawn from several years of recovery practice.

Finally, a look further back is worthwhile. The accounts are open for 2020 to 2025, and only 2022 was out of line: back then the auditor noted a material uncertainty about the company's ability to continue as a going concern, with an accumulated loss of €514,819. Every other year carries an unqualified opinion, and the loss carry-forward has since been cleared. It does show, though, how young the financial stability behind the clean loan record is. How the criteria are weighted is set out in our rating methodology.

What happens when a loan defaults?

Neither platform promises you a buyback. If a borrower defaults, the property alone stands as security, and it has to be realised. Between the missed payment and money returning to your account lies a court or sales process in both cases.

Here EstateGuru has an advantage that looks at first glance like a drawback: you can read up on how it turns out. The platform documents recovery publicly, including the cases where the collateral proved hard to sell. In doing so it also quantifies what this costs it, namely €1.7M of its own capital in 2025 alone for lawyers, enforcement, agents and insolvency administration. That is uncomfortable reading and at the same time the most honest data available on recovery in Baltic property crowdfunding.

At InRento this experience simply does not exist. That is not an accusation but a consequence of the short history and the absence of defaults so far. It does mean, though, that the question of how quickly and at what recovery rate a Lithuanian or Polish mortgage turns into money in the worst case is unanswered for InRento. Reading the zero as a safety promise over-interprets it.

Who is EstateGuru for, who is InRento for?

EstateGuru fits if you want to spread widely. Small amounts per loan and a working auto-invest let you distribute your property budget across many projects without picking each one individually. The precondition is that you separate legacy book from new lending when reading the platform statistics. Anyone who does not either buys a fear that does not match the current loan book, or overlooks how much capital is still tied up there.

InRento fits if you are after predictable ongoing income and are willing to tie up considerably more capital per project. The higher minimum per project makes genuine diversification possible only from a larger portfolio onwards, and without auto-invest you select every project yourself. On top of that comes Lithuanian withholding tax of 15%, which you can reduce to 10% up front with a certificate of residence and credit for the remainder, though that means paperwork before the first interest payment.

For a property allocation you do not have to choose at all. The two models react differently to the same market cycle, and that is precisely where the value of combining them lies. How much weight P2P should carry overall, and why spreading across platforms matters more than spreading within one, is covered in a separate piece on diversification.

In the platform comparison, InRento sits one grade above EstateGuru, and the two arrive there from opposite directions. EstateGuru has the longer track record and the demonstrated recovery experience, but is paying for a mistake it made itself. InRento has a loan record free of defaults so far, whose informative value is limited by how short it is. Which uncertainty you would rather carry, the documented one or the untested one, is the real question behind this comparison.