EstateGuru Referral Code

What EstateGuru's referral actually pays you

You share a personal referral link from your account, EstateGuru's own terms still call it your EGU code, and a friend registers through it. From the moment they sign up, both of you earn 0.5% cashback on any Manual Invest or Auto Invest purchase they make on the primary market during their first 90 days. Verified on EstateGuru's referral page and its Referral Terms and Conditions on 28 August 2026: if your friend also invests at least €500 in that same 90-day window, both of you additionally receive a €15 investment credit. This corrects an older uncertainty: EstateGuru's current terms state plainly that both of you get the credit, not one side or the other.

Two details change what that reward is worth in practice. First, the cashback and credit apply only to primary market investing, EG Grow, EstateGuru's separate fixed-payout product, is explicitly excluded. Second, the credit is an investment credit, not cash: EstateGuru's terms say it cannot be withdrawn unless it is first put into a project on the primary market, so it behaves as free capital to invest, not a bank payout.

What you are lending against, and who's on the hook for it

EstateGuru is not a savings account. When you invest, you are funding a short-term bridge loan to a property developer or owner, secured by a mortgage over real estate. New loans are issued only in EstateGuru's active markets, currently Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, so that is where fresh exposure actually comes from today. Your return depends on that borrower repaying on schedule, and if they do not, on EstateGuru's ability to enforce the mortgage, sell the collateral and pass the proceeds back to you, a process with a timeline of its own.

The platform's regulatory footing differs by country, and it is worth reading precisely rather than as one blanket licence. Estateguru OÜ, the Estonian entity, holds a European crowdfunding service provider licence and is supervised by Finantsinspektsioon. Estateguru Lietuva UAB is included in the Bank of Lithuania's Public List of Operators of Concentrated Financing Platforms. Estateguru Finland Oy is registered as a crowdfunding intermediary and supervised by Finanssivalvonta. None of these statuses is deposit insurance, and EstateGuru does not represent them as one. Your capital sits behind whichever property secures your specific loan, and its safety depends on that property's value holding up and on how quickly a court, bailiff or bankruptcy process lets EstateGuru realise it if the borrower stops paying.

What investing here costs, including the fee that's easy to miss

Checked against EstateGuru's price list, in force from 1 November 2025 and re-checked 28 August 2026: EstateGuru charges an assets under management fee of 0.083% of your outstanding performing principal, capped at €100, taken from your actual returns, plus a portal operator's service fee of €3. The interest spread, the gap between what a borrower pays and what you actually earn, runs 0 to 2%. If you sell a loan on the secondary market before it matures, EstateGuru takes 1% of the transaction amount from the seller, there is no separate buyer fee.

The cost worth knowing before you open an account rather than after: EstateGuru charges €10 a month on an inactive account. That is not a hypothetical, if your account sits with an uninvested balance and no activity, this fee erodes it directly, month after month, in a way none of the referral terms mention.

Claiming the cashback and credit, step by step

The sequence, as EstateGuru's own pages describe it:

• Find your personal referral link (your EGU code) inside your EstateGuru account.
• Share it with a friend, who registers a new EstateGuru account through that link.
• Both of you start earning the ongoing cashback the moment your friend makes a primary market investment, for any purchase made within their first 90 days.
• If your friend's total primary market investment in that window reaches the qualifying threshold, the additional investment credit is added automatically to both accounts, ready to be put into a project rather than withdrawn.

What you are taking on: capital at risk, stated plainly

Every euro your friend invests to unlock these rewards is capital lent against a specific property, and it can be partly or fully lost if that property turns out to be worth less than the loan when EstateGuru finally sells it, after legal costs, holding costs and time have taken their share. The rewards described above are fixed incentives on top of that exposure. They do not reduce the amount at risk, and they are paid regardless of whether the underlying loan ultimately performs.

How much risk that represents has shifted over the past few years, not stayed constant, which is exactly why the numbers behind it are worth checking in EstateGuru's own statistics before you or a friend commit money.

Weighing it up: pros, cons, and who this suits

What EstateGuru does well: every loan is secured against a specific, named property rather than an unsecured promise, it publishes loan-level and portfolio-level statistics down to individual defaulted projects, it is registered or licensed with a regulator in each of the three EU countries it operates through, and its referral program treats both sides of an invite equally rather than favouring the person who shared the link.

What is genuinely a problem, or will disappoint some readers: the EU-mandated default rate on EstateGuru's own book, the share of loans defaulting in a year against those still performing at the start of it, rose from 9.13% in 2022 to 27.45% in 2023, and stood at 20.14% in 2025, well above the 2020 and 2021 figures. Recovering money from a defaulted, property-backed loan is genuinely slow, sometimes stretching well past a year, as the next section sets out with named examples. The €10 monthly inactive-account fee catches uninvested balances by surprise, and the referral credit cannot be cashed out, only reinvested.

This suits an investor who understands that a mortgage behind a loan is protection against a total loss, not protection against a slow, partial one, who is comfortable with money being tied up well beyond a loan's original term if recovery is needed, and who has read EstateGuru's own market-by-market recovery data rather than assuming property security means a quick resolution. It does not suit someone who might need the invested amount back on a specific date, who cannot tolerate a materially delayed or reduced payout, or who wants the kind of protection a domestic bank deposit carries under a national deposit guarantee scheme, a different, government-backed product that EstateGuru does not provide.

When a property-backed loan defaults: how long recovery really takes

EstateGuru's own statistics, updated 28 August 2026, put the average time from a loan defaulting to being recovered at 10.1 months. That figure only covers loans that have finished the recovery process. The 3.14% of the funded portfolio still marked "in recovery" is not included, and by definition those are the slower, unresolved cases, so treat 10.1 months as a floor for a typical case rather than a worst case.

EstateGuru's mid-2026 recovery update, published 22 July 2026, shows why the timeline varies so much by country. In Germany, now an inactive market where EstateGuru only recovers existing loans rather than issuing new ones, the post describes mandatory waiting periods of four to six months between individual legal steps, since collateral there is sold through bailiffs and bankruptcy trustees under a court system EstateGuru itself calls extremely bureaucratic and overburdened. In Latvia, the same update states that roughly half of the country's outstanding problem loans relate to a single stalled project, the Salaspils development, identified by loan numbers LV0650 and LV2357, where recovery is being drawn out specifically by the borrower's obstruction rather than a weak property market. Estonia, by contrast, added no significant new defaulted loans in the first half of 2026, a sign that recovery speed depends heavily on which country and even which project you end up exposed to, not on the platform overall.

Across the platform's 12-year history, EstateGuru reports having recovered €70 million in principal from defaulted loans, including €7.5 million in 2025 and €6.3 million in the first half of 2026, with a further €5.3 million expected under agreements already signed. Its own portfolio statistics separately publish a figure it labels "recovered rate (portfolio)" of 37.59%, alongside 1.10% of the total portfolio written off outright, though EstateGuru does not spell out exactly what the recovered-rate figure is measured against. None of that is a reason to assume a defaulted loan resolves quickly. It is a reason to expect that, if one of your loans defaults, getting your money back is realistic but can take considerably longer than the loan's original term, and materially longer again if it lands in a market like Germany or a project with an uncooperative borrower.

EstateGuru referral code FAQ