Coposit has elite investors talking

Property tech start-up Coposit has made headlines for helping first-home buyers break into the market, but is now increasingly attracting the attention of high-end investors looking to build a property empire without liquidating their assets, as co-founder and CEO Chris Ferris explains.

When Dean Mackie, the CEO of a prominent Australian real estate company, was about to purchase a luxury property in Byron Bay, he turned to an innovative platform known for quickly unlocking capital without interest or fees. 

Coposit has rapidly developed a name for itself as a way for buyers to enter Australia’s notoriously tough property market with a deposit as low as $10,000. Still, for high-end investors, it offers a different promise: easy access to liquidity if assets are tied up. 

Mackie and his wife, Shiva, discovered it for themselves when buying into Byron Bay’s Secret Garden, an exclusive and elite multi-million-dollar residence developed for those seeking private coastal luxury. 

“When we first heard about Coposit from our agent, we thought it sounded too good to be true, but it proved to be an incredible tool for managing our property purchase,” Mackie says. “It was the ability to make weekly interest-free payments, the flexibility to secure our luxury apartment in Byron Bay, while keeping funds available for other investments and renovations.” 

Coposit is a PropTech innovation that allows investors to select an off-the-plan property to buy into through its platform, then make regular, interest-free payments towards a full deposit on the property of their choice as it’s being constructed.  

In other words, investors don’t have to take out a bridging loan or liquidate other assets. The platform makes its money through commission-based fees from the developer, per sale. 

Coposit’s co-founder and CEO, Chris Ferris, describes it as a “savings plan for a deposit” and says helping investors to build their property portfolios is the ambitious company’s next frontier. 

“High-end property investors often don’t want to take funds out of their business for a deposit or they know they can achieve a better return by staying in the market.”

Chris Ferris

“Smart investors have the deposit, but they often want to use Coposit because they don’t want to take funds out of their business, or they know they can achieve a better return by staying in the market.” 

He uses the following example to illustrate his point: Coposit has properties in Bondi on its platform, starting at $10 million. For a 10% deposit, an investor would need $1m. Instead of liquidating other assets for a $1m deposit, some investors are choosing to begin with a $100,000 deposit and injecting around $13,000 a week into their deposit savings plan. 

“When you tell an investor they can pay $1m today in a traditional sense or they can pay $1m over a two-year period, cost-free, it becomes a unique proposition for them,” the co-founder says. 

The Coposit story

Coposit founders Chris and Daniel Ferris are no strangers to property, having spent much of their youth helping their dad out on construction sites. 

“We’d be working with Dad every school holidays and at the time we hated it, but looking back it was the best experience we had and that’s where our love of property started,” Chris says. 

After university, where Chris studied accounting and Daniel studied construction management, the pair came together again in property development, where they worked for over a decade. 

“During that time, we saw first-hand how difficult it was for people to get into property. Saving for that first deposit was a very restrictive barrier preventing people from getting into the market,” Chris says. 

“Whether it’s buying a first property or a third property, accumulating a sufficient deposit is the hard part.” 

The lightbulb moment happened in 2019 when the Ferris brothers received a rental application from a couple earning $180,000. The couple said they were unable to accumulate a deposit for their own home, as the market goal posts kept shifting as they saved. 

“We said, ‘Look, okay, we hear what you’re saying, happy to accept your rental application, but buy into our next stage with us’. Soon, they started saving $2,500 per month and secured a property within  

24 months. They settled on the property with us and then they just turned around and said to us, ‘that was easy’,” Chris says. 

From 2021, the Coposit model was soon up and running with a 97-apartment project. Chris says 66 out of the 97 apartments were purchased with deposits saved through its Coposit platform. 

Since then, the platform has been on a growth trajectory, and its remit has quickly expanded, Chris says. It has raised $14m in capital and now has projects across the eastern seaboard, with Western Australia its next target market. 

Coposit’s Amazon journey

While Coposit was created to solve a single problem, its founders have loftier ambitions. 

“We’re not Amazon, but we compare the Amazon journey to what we were doing,” Chris says. “Amazon started with books, and then it evolved to Amazon marketplace, and then other products such as the video streaming service Amazon Prime, and it just continues to innovate and evolve. 

“We want to continue to innovate within the platform, continue to build new products and add on to the innovation hub that we’ve already built.” 

The founders’ process involves looking at bottlenecks and barriers in the property purchase process and with its existing stakeholders and finding solutions, Chris says. 

The company is now building solutions to simplify more parts of the property buying journey. From how deposits are collected and managed to how confidence is built between sale and settlement, Coposit’s next wave of innovation is designed to remove friction and make property more accessible than ever. 

“We get our ideas from listening to customers’ pain points and creating innovations that change the market.” 

To find out more, visit coposit.com.au