Yieldstreet (Now Willow Wealth) Review 2026: $208M in Losses and a Rebrand
Yieldstreet (Now Willow Wealth) Review 2026: $208M in Losses and a Rebrand By Jeff Barnes, MBA | Angel Investors Network | Updated May 2026 TL;DR Yieldstreet rebranded to Willow Wealth on October...
Yieldstreet (Now Willow Wealth) Review 2026: $208M in Losses and a Rebrand
By Jeff Barnes, MBA | Angel Investors Network | Updated May 2026
TL;DR
- Yieldstreet rebranded to Willow Wealth on October 22, 2025. Same legal entity. New name.
- A three-part CNBC investigation confirmed $208M+ in investor losses across 30 real estate deals, with a 30% default rate against a 2–8% industry norm.
- The SEC settled an enforcement action against the platform for $1.9M in September 2023. A federal class action settled for $9M in 2025.
- Historical performance data was removed from the website at the time of rebrand.
- The Alternative Income Fund’s quarterly redemptions are currently suspended.
- All-in fees are estimated at 3.3–6.7%, among the highest in the category.
- My verdict: Short-Term Notes aside, this platform has a documented track record problem. Know what you are buying before you wire money to a company that just changed its name.
The Record, Up Front
In December 2025, CNBC published the third installment of its Yieldstreet investigation, confirming $208M in total investor losses across 30 real estate deals. Nine of those 30 deals defaulted outright, a 30% failure rate. The industry norm runs 2–8%. CNBC also reported that 23 of the 30 deals were on an internal company watchlist that was never proactively disclosed to investors.
Six weeks before that report, Yieldstreet became Willow Wealth. The rebranding happened on October 22, 2025, and it coincided with the removal of a decade of performance data from the public website. Boston University finance professor Mark Williams told CNBC: “Their old name had negative value to it, so they’re trying to do a 2.0 to restart things. They’re also making it harder to uncover their poor performance by removing the stats, which is alarming.”
This review covers both names, because they are the same company. Yieldstreet Inc. and Yieldstreet Management LLC remain the registered legal entities. No corporate restructuring occurred. The losses belong to the new brand just as much as the old one.
What Yieldstreet / Willow Wealth Actually Is
Yieldstreet launched in 2015 with a genuine pitch: give accredited investors access to private-market alternative assets that were previously available only to institutions. Art finance, legal finance, marine finance, private credit, real estate, private equity. The asset class diversity was real and unusual for a retail-accessible platform.
The basics today:
- Who can invest: Most offerings require accreditation. The Alternative Income Fund (AIF) is open to non-accredited investors at a $10,000 minimum.
- Individual deal minimums: $10,000–$50,000 depending on structure.
- Asset classes: Real estate, private credit, private equity, short-term notes, structured notes, and new institutional fund access via Goldman Sachs, Carlyle Group, and StepStone Group partnerships (announced December 2025).
- Liquidity: Essentially none on individual deals. Lock-ups of 3–7 years are typical. The AIF had quarterly redemption windows capped at 5% per quarter, but those are currently suspended pending a proposed merger with Mount Logan Capital’s SOFIX fund.
- IRA eligible: Yes, through Equity Trust as custodian.
The platform reported $6B+ in cumulative investments and 500,000+ members as of 2025. Mitchell Caplan, former CEO of E*TRADE, joined as CEO in May 2025. The company has raised approximately $800M in venture funding from Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Greycroft, with a $77M round in July 2025 led by Tarsadia Investments.
The funding is real. The investor interest is real. The losses are also real.
The Track Record: The Real Numbers
Yieldstreet advertises a 9.6% average annualized IRR on matured deals. That number requires a critical qualifier: it excludes active deals and defaulted deals. It counts only the investments that completed and returned capital. When you include the full portfolio, the picture changes materially.
The real estate segment, the platform’s largest by dollar volume, returned an average of -2% annualized from 2015 to 2025. That data point was on the Yieldstreet website as of 2023. It was removed when the company rebranded to Willow Wealth in October 2025.
Here are the named deals with confirmed losses:
- Houston Multi-Family Fund: Complete loss of all $21M of investor capital. The fund was foreclosed after rental revenue could not service the debt. Yieldstreet described it in investor letters as “a full loss of the equity.”
- Nashville 2010 West End Ave.: Approximately $35M in losses. The property sale did not cover the $118.75M senior loan.
- Nashville Stacks on Main: $18.2M in losses. Equity investors lost 100%. The member loan tranche lost up to 60%.
- Portland Multi-Family Debt: $11.6M in losses.
- Tucson Development: $23M in losses.
- New York deal: Investors contributed $15M. Yieldstreet sold its position for $1.
Justin Klish, a 46-year-old investor from Miami, put $400,000 into Yieldstreet real estate deals and lost $300,000 in the Nashville projects. He told CNBC he felt “duped” and filed a complaint with the SEC. His situation was not unique. An investor survey conducted by The Real Estate Crowdfunding Review found that only 6.67% of surveyed investors would recommend Yieldstreet, while 73.33% said they would not. The platform holds a 1.5/5 rating on Trustpilot.
One anonymous BBB reviewer with seven Yieldstreet investments described five of them as “way underwater” and called out “zero accountability” while the platform collected fees on deals it presented as acceptable risk.
One product has performed. Short-Term Notes with 3–9 month maturities have a clean record of paying out on time per platform disclosures. If you are looking at Yieldstreet for short-duration, liquid-ish exposure, that is the only product with a reliable track record. Everything else carries documented execution risk.
The SEC Enforcement Action
On September 12, 2023, the SEC settled an administrative action against Yieldstreet Inc. and Yieldstreet Management LLC. The case is Release 33-11230.
The facts: In September 2019, Yieldstreet offered a $14.5M securities offering backed by a ship scheduled for deconstruction. Before that offering went live, Yieldstreet personnel already knew that ships securing other loans to the same borrower group were either already deconstructed or could not be located. That information was not disclosed. The borrower group defaulted, stole the deconstruction proceeds, and all six maritime offerings to the same group totaling approximately $87M failed. Total marine finance losses reached $89M.
The settlement: $1M civil penalty, $896,450 in disgorgement, and approximately $50,000 in prejudgment interest. Yieldstreet did not admit or deny wrongdoing. A separate federal class action settled for $9M in 2025, covering the same marine loan losses ($6.2M in cash plus approximately $2.75M in fee waivers).
Osman Nawaz, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Complex Financial Instruments Unit, was direct in the SEC press release: “YieldStreet aims to unlock the complex alternative investments market for retail investors but failed to disclose glaring red flags it had about the security of the collateral backing this offering. As this case shows, we are committed to ensuring that investors in any asset class, including ‘alternative’ asset classes, receive complete and accurate disclosures about those investments.”
The SEC did not say this was an isolated lapse. The CNBC reporting that followed, covering the real estate defaults, documented the same pattern: internal knowledge of deal problems not proactively shared with investors.
The Rebrand: What Changed and What Didn’t
On October 22, 2025, Yieldstreet became Willow Wealth. Here is what actually changed:
- The name, logo, and website domain.
- CEO: Mitchell Caplan replaced the founding team’s leadership in May 2025.
- Product additions: Partnerships with Goldman Sachs, Carlyle Group, and StepStone Group to distribute institutional private credit funds at $10,000 minimums.
- Historical performance data: Removed from the public website at rebrand.
Here is what did not change:
- The legal entity: Yieldstreet Inc. and Yieldstreet Management LLC remain the registered names.
- The existing investor portfolios: Every investor in a defaulted or watchlisted deal remains in that deal under the same terms.
- The BPDN note structure: Investors in Borrower Payment Dependent Notes are unsecured creditors of Yieldstreet Inc. itself in a bankruptcy scenario, not direct holders of underlying assets. This is a structural risk that predates the rebrand and survives it.
- The AIF redemption suspension: The Alternative Income Fund ($1.6B AUM) remains unable to process quarterly redemptions pending the proposed merger with Mount Logan Capital’s SOFIX fund.
The institutional fund pivot with Goldman, Carlyle, and StepStone is a real development worth watching. Whether it represents improved underwriting discipline or simply a new distribution channel with an additional fee layer is a question that cannot be answered yet. The new products are too recent to have a track record.
What can be said now: investors putting money into Willow Wealth in 2026 are investing with an entity whose decade-long track record in real estate was -2% annualized before that record was deleted from the website.
Fee Structure Analysis
Fees at Yieldstreet/Willow Wealth are disclosed per offering, which means investors have to read each individual Operating Agreement or Note Supplement to know what they are paying. There is no single headline number. Here is what the structure looks like:
- Individual offerings: 0%–2.5% annual management fee. Most real estate and private credit deals run 1%–2% annually on unreturned capital.
- Alternative Income Fund: 1.0% management plus up to 0.5% administrative expense annually.
- Yieldstreet 360 managed portfolios: 1.25% advisory plus approximately 0.175% in fund expenses.
- Flat annual expenses: $150 in year one and $70/year thereafter for SPV structures. $100 in year one and $30/year thereafter for BPDN structures.
The all-in estimated total, per TheRealEstateCrowdfundingReview.com: 3.3%–6.7%. That is among the highest in the alternative investment platform space. Advertised target returns are stated net of platform fees but gross of taxes, which matters when comparing projections to realized outcomes.
The new institutional fund partnerships with Goldman, Carlyle, and StepStone reportedly carry even higher fees than legacy offerings. The platform disclosed this in its own materials.
Fees this high demand exceptional returns to justify. Yieldstreet’s real estate returns have not delivered that. On the Short-Term Notes, fees are 0%, which is one reason that product appears to be the platform’s most functional offering.
How It Compares to Fundrise and CrowdStreet
Two platforms are the natural comparisons for most investors considering Yieldstreet:
Fundrise
Fundrise is open to non-accredited investors with a $10 minimum. Fees are 0.85% asset management plus 0.15% advisory, 1% total. That is one-third to one-sixth of Yieldstreet’s all-in cost. Fundrise focuses solely on real estate eREITs and eFunds. Its returns have ranged from 5% to 23% annually depending on the year, with weaker performance in 2022–2024. No major regulatory actions. For investors who want real estate exposure without accreditation requirements and at minimal fee drag, Fundrise is the straightforward choice. See our full Fundrise review for details.
CrowdStreet
CrowdStreet requires accreditation and a $25,000 minimum. It focuses exclusively on commercial real estate. There is no platform fee. Individual deals run 0%–2.5%. CrowdStreet reports a 12.9% average IRR on completed deals, a figure derived from a methodology that includes all completed transactions. CrowdStreet had its own sponsor vetting problem in 2023 (Nightingale Properties fraud), so it is not without risk. But its completed-deal return record is stronger than Yieldstreet’s on the numbers available. For accredited investors who want commercial real estate specifically, CrowdStreet is the more defensible choice. Our CrowdStreet review covers what to look for in sponsor due diligence.
| Platform | Min. Investment | Accreditation | All-In Fees | Reported IRR | Regulatory Issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Willow Wealth (Yieldstreet) | $10,000 | Most offerings: Yes | ~3.3%–6.7% | 9.6% (matured only) / RE: -2% | $1.9M SEC fine (2023) / $9M class action (2025) |
| Fundrise | $10 | No | ~1% | 5%–23% (varies by year) | None major |
| CrowdStreet | $25,000 | Yes | 0%–2.5% (deal-level) | 12.9% (completed deals) | Nightingale sponsor fraud (2023) |
For a broader comparison across alternative investment platforms, see our guide to the best real estate crowdfunding platforms and our due diligence checklist for alternative platforms.
Jeff’s Verdict: Who This Is and Isn’t For
Yieldstreet built real infrastructure. It brought alternative asset classes to retail-accessible price points. Those are genuine accomplishments. But a 30% real estate default rate is not a bad luck story. It is an underwriting story. The CNBC investigation found that 23 of 30 real estate deals were on an internal watchlist that investors never saw. The SEC found that the company knew about collateral problems before a 2019 offering and did not disclose them. These are not isolated incidents.
A new name does not change a decade of results. Investors in 2026 are looking at a platform that removed its own track record from public view at the moment it became most damaging.
Who might consider this platform: Accredited investors with $500,000+ in liquid assets, a 7+ year time horizon, genuine comfort with total loss of any allocated position, and a specific interest in private-market diversification that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Short-Term Notes are the only product with a clean execution record. The new Goldman/Carlyle/StepStone institutional fund access is worth monitoring, but it has no track record yet and carries higher fees than the legacy products.
Who should not use this platform: Anyone who needs access to their capital within five years. Anyone investing more than they can afford to lose in full. Anyone who found this review by searching “Willow Wealth review” without realizing it is the same company as Yieldstreet. Primary wealth builders who need reliable returns. And anyone considering putting AIF capital in now, given that redemptions are suspended with no confirmed timeline.
The institutional pivot may represent a genuine turn. Mitchell Caplan is a capable executive. The new partnerships are credible names. But credible partners attached to an entity with $208M in confirmed losses and a deleted track record require more than a rebrand to earn trust. They require demonstrated results over time. Check back in 2028.
Disclosure
Jeff Barnes is a contributing editor at Angel Investors Network. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Jeff holds no position in Yieldstreet, Willow Wealth, Fundrise, or CrowdStreet. Angel Investors Network may receive affiliate compensation from platforms linked here; that does not influence editorial content or ratings. Alternative investments involve substantial risk, including total loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult a registered investment adviser before making investment decisions. Data references primary sources including SEC enforcement documents, CNBC investigative reporting, and platform disclosures current as of publication.
Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.
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About the Author
Jeff Barnes, MBA