Pooled Real Estate Investments

One type of a real estate investment is where you have a company that collects investment from a group of investors and pools those funds together to buy a piece of real estate. They typically pay a small % like 8% per year for say 5 years and then at the end of the 5 yrs they will sell the property and split the profits with the pool of investors usually around 50/50 or 60/40. There are quite a few of these companies out there. I know of one company in Canada who is buying up homes in the Phoenix area hoping that the housing market will recover in the next 5 yrs.