Recrowd Review - Italy’s Largest Real Estate Crowdlender, Suspended by the Regulator Since July 2025

Italian real estate lending crowdfunding platform, founded in Milan in 2018 and for several years the largest operator in the Italian segment by cumulative volume. On 31 July 2025 Banca d’Italia suspended Recrowd S.r.l. from providing the service of intermediating the granting of loans. As of 1 September 2026 the suspension banner is still live on the platform, no new campaigns are listed, and Recrowd’s own regulatory disclosure reports a default rate of 37.65% for the 2025 loan cohort with 45.99% forecast for 2026.

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What is Recrowd in 60 seconds

Recrowd is an Italian lending crowdfunding platform for property development. A company that wants to build, renovate or convert a building borrows from the public through the platform, and several hundred small investors each lend a modest amount in exchange for annual interest, historically around 10% gross. Recrowd grew into the largest Italian operator of this kind by cumulative volume, raising EUR 224M across 274 projects since 2019. It obtained a European crowdfunding licence from Consob at the end of 2023.

On 31 July 2025 Banca d’Italia suspended Recrowd from intermediating new loans. Existing loan contracts between investors and borrowers remain valid and the payment accounts continue to work, but the platform cannot launch new campaigns. Thirteen months later the suspension has not been publicly lifted and no new campaign has been published. In parallel, Recrowd’s own regulatory default disclosure shows the loan book deteriorating sharply: from a 9.26% default rate on the 2023 cohort to 32.43% in 2024, 37.65% in 2025, and a forecast 45.99% for 2026.

Strengths

• Recrowd publishes an honest default rate, and it is a bad one. This deserves credit precisely because so many peers do the opposite. Recrowd maintains the default-rate disclosure required by Article 20 of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 and the associated technical standards, and it shows 32.43% for 2024, 37.65% for 2025 and a forecast 45.99% for 2026. The platform also publishes a year-by-year table of capital raised, capital currently in default, capital repaid and interest paid, and a breakdown showing that 31.47% of all repaid capital came back late. Compare this with Bridge Asset, an Italian competitor that Consob suspended in June 2026 after finding it published a 0% default rate while 44 offers worth EUR 13.755M were overdue and unrepaid. Recrowd’s numbers are grim, but a reader can actually see them.

• Existing investor positions were not cancelled by the suspension, and the payment rails kept running. The measure blocks new loan intermediation only. Recrowd’s published notice, reproducing the regulator’s communication, states that offers already published and not concluded remain valid, obligations towards project owners and investors on concluded offers are guaranteed, monitoring of ongoing campaigns and customer assistance remain operational, and the payment accounts remain fully operational. Accounts opened from May 2025 sit with TPPay S.r.l., an Italian e-money institution supervised by Banca d’Italia, which also removes the foreign-intermediary tax reporting obligation that applied under the earlier Lemonway arrangement.

Things to Watch

• A supervisory suspension that has not been resolved in thirteen months. Banca d’Italia suspended Recrowd on 31 July 2025 under Article 30(2)(h) of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503. The reasons were not published and the company was placed under communication constraints. Recrowd states it filed a remediation plan on 30 August 2025 with an implementation deadline of 31 October 2025, and announced a capital restoration and reinforcement operation of approximately EUR 3.3M completed at the end of October 2025. No decision closing the matter has been announced by either side. The suspension notice was still displayed on recrowd.com on 1 September 2026. A suspension is normally the regulator giving a platform a last chance to fix itself; the comparable Italian case of Rendimento Etico went from a 120-day suspension in December 2025 to full revocation of its authorisation by Consob in March 2026. Which way Recrowd resolves is genuinely unknown at the time of writing.

• A separate monetary sanction landed in June 2026, and its legal basis points at the default-rate methodology. Banca d’Italia issued provvedimento n. 181 on 16 June 2026, published 10 July 2026, imposing an administrative fine of EUR 26,000 on Recrowd S.r.l. The document states the findings arose from an inspection conducted between 24 February and 13 May 2025 and describes them as shortcomings in governance, management and risk control. The legal bases cited include Articles 4, 5 and 39(1)(a) of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 and Articles 1 and 2 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/2115, which is the technical standard setting out how a crowdfunding provider must calculate and disclose default rates. CrowdIndex draws no conclusion about what the regulator actually found, because the findings themselves were not published. We note only that the cited legal basis includes the default-rate rules, and that Recrowd’s disclosed default rates jumped from 9.26% to 32.43% between the 2023 and 2024 cohorts.

• Roughly a third of all capital ever raised is currently sitting in unresolved default. Working from Recrowd’s own year-by-year table, our arithmetic gives EUR 71,929,114 across 68 projects currently in unresolved default, against EUR 225,254,620 raised across 274 projects. That is 31.9% of capital and 24.8% of projects (CrowdIndex calculation from Recrowd’s published figures, 1 September 2026; note our sum of the yearly rows comes to EUR 225.25M against the headline figure of EUR 224.02M shown on the same page, a discrepancy of about EUR 1.2M that we cannot explain). The 2024 vintage is the worst: EUR 38,898,035 of the EUR 74,265,561 raised that year is in unresolved default, which is 52.4% of the money and 45.6% of the projects (CrowdIndex calculation). For 2025, EUR 11,481,645 of EUR 33,965,143 raised, or 33.8% of capital and 40.0% of projects (CrowdIndex calculation). These counts exclude projects that defaulted and were later recovered, so they describe live problems, not history.

• There is a disclosed default rate but no disclosed loss rate, and the gap between the two is doing a lot of work. Recrowd’s own footnote to the default table states that a project being formally in default does not necessarily imply a definitive loss for the investor, because some defaulted projects have been recovered and others are still in recovery. That is an accurate statement, but it means the reader is never shown how much capital has actually been written off. We looked specifically for this because French real estate crowdfunding platforms have made a habit of reporting zero definitive losses while a third of the portfolio sits in arrears or in court, on the reasoning that a loss only becomes final once a judge says so. Recrowd is a partial version of the same pattern. Unlike the French platforms it does not hide behind a flattering headline number, because its default disclosure is brutal. But like them, it publishes no final-loss line at all, so a EUR 71.9M unresolved default pile has no stated recovery expectation attached to it. The recovery figures Recrowd does publish, EUR 19,343,302.73 recovered since inception, sit on a sub-page whose data is dated 01/09/2025 and has not been refreshed in a year.

• Nothing has moved in eight months and there is no exit. Recrowd’s own statistics table shows zero for 2026 in every column: nothing raised, nothing newly in default, nothing repaid, no interest paid. The projects page shows only completed campaigns. There is no secondary market, so an investor with money in a delayed project cannot sell out; the position runs until the underlying loan is repaid or the recovery process ends. Real estate development lending is illiquid by construction, and a suspended platform with a stalled book is the scenario where that illiquidity bites hardest.

• Investor sentiment has collapsed and reviewers report that recovery costs were pushed onto them. Trustpilot showed 2.5 out of 5 across 1,764 reviews on 1 September 2026, rated Poor, with 18% one-star and only 11% of negative reviews receiving a company response. This is a sharp deterioration from the largely positive picture Italian review sites described in 2023. Multiple independent reviewers writing between July and August 2026 describe a mass email in which Recrowd announced it would stop covering legal and recovery costs on defaulted projects and would instead charge investors for recovery actions, attributed to corporate reorganisation following the suspension. CrowdIndex has not been able to confirm this on any Recrowd document and treats it as an investor-reported claim rather than an established fact, but it is reported consistently by different reviewers on different dates and, if accurate, removes a safeguard that was previously presented as part of the offering.

How It Works

1. Register and complete identity verification. Accounts are opened on recrowd.com, which operates in Italian only. Identity verification follows standard Italian anti-money-laundering procedures.
2. Fund the payment account. Accounts opened from May 2025 run through TPPay S.r.l., an Italian e-money institution. Accounts opened earlier sit on the Lemonway wallet, a French institution, which triggers the Italian foreign-asset reporting requirement in the RW section of the tax return.
3. Choose a project. Campaigns were grouped into tiers with different minimums and durations: Relax from EUR 250 over 8 to 16 months, Exclusive from EUR 1,000 over 6 to 24 months, and a premium Elite tier. Published rates on past campaigns ran roughly from 7% to 13% gross. Recrowd charges investors no direct fees; its revenue comes from the borrower side.
4. Wait for the loan to run its term. There is no secondary market, so the position cannot be sold. Investors have a four-day cooling-off right from signature of the contract, with full refund and no cost. Interest is paid net of the 26% Italian withholding tax for resident individuals, deducted at source.
5. Understand what happens on a default. Recrowd classes a loan as in default either when it judges repayment unlikely without enforcing collateral, or when the borrower is more than 90 days past due, after any contractual extension of up to six months. Recrowd is not a party to the loan contract and provides no guarantee that invested capital will be returned. No deposit guarantee scheme and no investor compensation scheme applies.

Note: steps 3 and 4 describe how the platform worked when it was funding new campaigns. Since 31 July 2025 no new campaigns can be launched, and none have appeared since.

Who Recrowd Is For

Nobody should be putting new money into Recrowd today, because it is not possible: the platform is suspended from intermediating new loans and no campaigns are open. The practical readership for this page is investors who already hold positions, and investors comparing Italian real estate crowdlending platforms who want to understand how this segment can go wrong.

For existing investors, the sensible posture is administrative rather than tactical. Download and keep the contractual documentation for every position from the private area while the platform is operational, since the underlying loan contracts are between the investor and the borrowing company and survive whatever happens to the platform. Follow official communications from Recrowd and from Banca d’Italia rather than forum chatter. Expect long timelines: with EUR 71.9M in unresolved default and no secondary market, recovery on a delayed project runs on court and enforcement timescales, not investment timescales.

For anyone building a European real estate crowdlending allocation, Recrowd is a case study rather than a candidate. It was the volume leader in its national market, it held a properly issued European licence, and it still ended up suspended with roughly a third of its capital in trouble. That combination is the argument for spreading capital across several authorised platforms rather than concentrating on whichever one is biggest.

Compared to Alternatives

Recrowd vs. Bridge Asset. Both are Italian real estate crowdlending platforms under supervisory measures, and the contrast between them is instructive on disclosure. Consob suspended Bridge Real Estate S.r.l. for one year in June 2026, finding that it published a default rate of 0% while 44 offers worth EUR 13.755M were overdue and unrepaid out of 102 offers totalling EUR 26.99M, and that nearly all its offers were affected by conflicts of interest. Recrowd’s problems are larger in absolute money but its disclosure runs the other way: it published a 37.65% default rate for 2025 rather than hiding it. An investor reading Recrowd’s statistics page in early 2025 could have seen the 2024 cohort deteriorating. An investor reading Bridge Asset’s could not. Neither platform is investable now.

Recrowd vs. Rendimento Etico. Rendimento Etico is the Italian precedent for how a suspension can end badly. Consob suspended it for 120 days in December 2025 and then revoked its authorisation outright in March 2026 by delibera 23354. Revocation is the terminal state: the platform can no longer operate as a crowdfunding service provider at all. Recrowd is currently at the earlier stage of that path, suspended rather than revoked, with a remediation plan filed and a capital injection completed. Whether it converges on the Rendimento Etico outcome or is reinstated is the single open question on this page.

Recrowd vs. active European real estate lenders. Against platforms still funding campaigns under an intact licence, such as InRento or Profitus in Lithuania under Bank of Lithuania supervision, the comparison is not close on any dimension an investor cares about today. Those platforms are open, publish audited financials, and are not under a supervisory measure. Recrowd’s headline advantage was scale within Italy and a 10.3% average gross return, and neither is available to a new investor now. Where Recrowd remains genuinely useful is as a reference point for judging other Italian platforms: its published year-by-year default table is one of the few places in the Italian market where the real cohort behaviour of development lending is visible.

Bottom line on competitors. The Italian real estate crowdlending segment produced, within roughly a year, one suspension of the volume leader, one suspension of a competitor for publishing a false 0% default rate, one revoked authorisation and one voluntary liquidation. That is a segment-level signal, not a run of bad luck at individual firms. Anyone allocating to Italian property crowdlending should size positions on the assumption that platform-level disruption is a normal event rather than a tail risk.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Recrowd closed or bankrupt? No. Recrowd has not been declared bankrupt and the company continues to operate. It was suspended by Banca d’Italia on 31 July 2025 from providing the service of intermediating the granting of loans, which means it cannot launch new campaigns. Existing loan contracts remain valid and the payment accounts continue to work. As of 1 September 2026 no decision lifting or converting the suspension has been made public.

Why was Recrowd suspended, and was it fined? The reasons for the July 2025 suspension were not published by Banca d’Italia, and the company was subject to communication constraints. Separately, Banca d’Italia issued a fine of EUR 26,000 on 16 June 2026, published on 10 July 2026. That document says the findings came from an inspection carried out between 24 February and 13 May 2025 and describes them as shortcomings in governance, management and risk control. The specific findings themselves were not published.

Who actually regulates Recrowd, Consob or Banca d’Italia? Both, for different purposes. Italy split the responsibilities under the European crowdfunding regulation by supervisory objective. Consob authorises non-bank platform operators, and it issued Recrowd’s authorisation by delibera 22906 on 29 November 2023 after consulting Banca d’Italia. Banca d’Italia authorises banks and payment institutions acting as crowdfunding providers, and retains its own supervisory competence over governance and risk control for authorised providers. The 2025 suspension and the 2026 fine came from Banca d’Italia under that competence. Describing Recrowd as regulated by only one of the two would be misleading.

Will I get my money back? That depends on the individual projects, not on the platform. The loan contracts are between the investor and the borrowing company and remain valid. Recrowd is not a party to them and provides no guarantee that capital will be returned. There is no deposit guarantee scheme and no investor compensation scheme covering these investments. Recrowd’s published figures show EUR 142.6M of capital and EUR 19.4M of interest returned to investors since 2019, alongside EUR 71.9M currently in unresolved default. Anyone holding a position should keep all contractual documentation and follow official communications.

Does Recrowd really have a 37.65% default rate? That is Recrowd’s own figure, published in the default-rate disclosure required by the European crowdfunding regulation, for the twelve-month cohort ending 31 December 2025. The equivalent figures are 9.26% for 2023, 32.43% for 2024, and a forecast of 45.99% for 2026. Recrowd notes that a project in default has not necessarily produced a definitive loss, because some defaulted projects have been recovered and others are still in recovery. It does not publish a separate figure for capital definitively written off.

Can I sell my position to get out early? No. Recrowd has no secondary market, so positions run until the underlying loan is repaid or the recovery process concludes. With no new campaigns since July 2025 and zero movement recorded in the 2026 statistics, existing positions should be assumed illiquid for an indefinite period.

Bottom Line

Recrowd was the largest real estate crowdlender in Italy by cumulative volume, properly licensed under the European crowdfunding regulation, and it is now suspended by its supervisor with roughly a third of the capital it ever raised sitting in unresolved default. That combination is the whole lesson. A European licence certifies that requirements were met on the day it was granted; it does not survive an inspection that finds otherwise, and it does not underwrite the loan book.

The one thing Recrowd has done consistently well is publish the bad news. Its default disclosure showing 32.43% for 2024 and 37.65% for 2025 is more candid than what several of its still-operating peers put on their own statistics pages, and it is the reason this card can quote real cohort numbers at all. That does not make it investable. New investment is impossible while the suspension stands, and existing investors face an illiquid book with no published expectation of how much of the EUR 71.9M in default will come back. Until Banca d’Italia publicly resolves the suspension one way or the other, CrowdIndex’s position is to avoid.

Affiliate disclosure. CrowdIndex earns a commission when readers sign up to some platforms through links on this site. Recrowd is not an affiliate partner and this page contains no referral link. Recrowd’s placement on CrowdIndex is based on the editorial criteria documented on our Methodology page. We last reviewed this article on September 1, 2026.

Risk warning. Crowdlending carries the risk of partial or total loss of capital. Nothing on this page is investment advice or a final judgement on the companies named, whose status should always be checked against current official sources. Past returns do not indicate future results.