Since the start of 2026, one platform keeps coming up in the questions we receive: FF Forest. The pitch is appealing. Forests in Latvia, a tangible asset, advertised returns of around 18%/yr, interest credited daily, and an early exit available after six months. On paper it looks ideal: something real, something green, something profitable.
The problem is that almost everything published about FF Forest online is either promotional or contradictory. Some sites describe a platform launched in 2020 and licensed under ECSPR. Others describe a company incorporated in 2025 and entirely unregulated. Both cannot be true.
So we did the work ourselves. We analysed 50 FF Forest projects that passed through our scoring engine, examined the actual legal structure of the investment, and checked the regulatory claims against the registers. This article sets out what we found. The conclusion fits in one sentence: FF Forest is not a forestry investment, and that is precisely where the confusion lies.
This is the central point, and it is almost always left out. In conventional real estate crowdfunding, your money finances a third-party developer and the platform acts as intermediary. At FF Forest, that is not the case.
You lend to FF Forest itself, or to a company it wholly owns. That company then buys and manages the forest land. You are not exposed to a portfolio of independent forestry projects: you are exposed to the credit risk of a single, recently created company, for the whole of your investment.
And that loan has two decisive characteristics:
Put plainly, the forest is a sales argument, not a legal security. If the company fails to repay, the tangible asset that persuaded you to invest does not come to you first. That is a difference in kind, not in degree, from a mortgage-backed property loan at ClubFunding or La Première Brique.
Rather than comment on brochures, we aggregated the data from the 50 FF Forest projects processed by our analysis engine between 2025 and September 2026.
| Metric | CrowdPickr measurement |
|---|---|
| Projects analysed | 50 |
| Average advertised yield | 17.1%/yr (range 13.9% to 18.0%) |
| Terms offered | 6, 12, 18 or 24 months |
| Total raised | 6,807,500 euros |
| Minimum ticket | 500 euros (identical on every project) |
| Funding structure | 100% crowdfunded (no documented bank debt or equity) |
| Average CrowdPickr score | 23.3 / 100 |
| Verdict | AVOID on 50 projects out of 50 |
The cumulative amount we measure, 6.81 million euros, closely matches the 6.7 million reported by other observers in June 2026. That is a useful cross-check: the order of magnitude of the raise is consistent across independent sources.
Here is the anomaly that is easiest to verify and the most telling. No FF Forest project runs longer than 24 months, and some are offered over 6 months.
A Latvian forest does not operate on that timescale. In Latvia a full rotation for pine is close to 100 years, and around 80 years for spruce. Even intermediate thinnings, which generate revenue before the final cut, are spaced 10 to 20 years apart. There is no six-month silvicultural cycle. A stand does not gain 8% in biological value over half a year.
The yield paid out therefore cannot come from timber growth. It can only come from one of these: buying and quickly reselling parcels at a substantial gain, immediately felling standing timber that was acquired with the money, or inflows from new investors. The first two are plausible but should be evidenced by sale contracts and valuations. We found none. The third is the pattern every investor should be wary of.
We are not saying FF Forest operates that way. We are saying that nothing in the public documentation rules it out, and that this is exactly what a serious platform should make verifiable.
A genuine forestry investment is easy to describe. You give the area, the municipality, the cadastral parcel number, the dominant species, the age of the stand and the estimated standing volume. This data is public in Latvia.
FF Forest project pages provide no area, no location and no cadastral parcel number. Our engine also records the absence of LTV, asset valuation, equity contribution and harvest sale contract. On our grids that translates mechanically: 0/5 on valuation, 0/4 on equity contribution, 1/10 on commercial strength.
Three red flags fire consistently on recent projects: no verified licence, no formally registered security, and a high yield paid without confirmed collateral.
This is where the claims in circulation become untenable. Some sources present FF Forest as regulated by the FCMC, Latvia's former financial regulator.
The FCMC has not existed since 1 January 2023. It was absorbed into Latvijas Banka, the Latvian central bank, which took over all financial market supervision functions. A company incorporated in 2025 therefore cannot possibly hold an FCMC licence. A claim of that kind is, at best, a communication error.
That leaves ECSPR authorisation, the European crowdfunding service provider status created by Regulation 2020/1503. We did not find FF Forest in the register of authorised providers in Latvia, and we could not verify the status against the European register. Absent confirmation, prudence applies: a licence that cannot be verified should be treated as absent.
The consequence is concrete. Without ECSP status there is no standardised key investment information sheet, no mandatory reflection period, no fund segregation requirement, no appropriateness test, and no recourse to a regulator in a dispute.
FF Forest was founded in 2025 in Riga. Its founder and sole shareholder, Gunars Udris, was previously co-founder and chief operating officer of Crowdestor.
That history is worth knowing. Crowdestor, a Latvian crowdfunding platform, collapsed leaving, on published estimates, roughly 69% of its loan book in default and in the order of 28 million euros frozen for its investors.
A manager is entitled to start again after a failure, and involvement in an insolvency is not in itself misconduct. But when a new, unregulated platform run by the former number two of a collapsed platform offers 17% returns with no registered security and no published performance data, the precedent stops being an anecdote. It becomes an input to the analysis.
Search for "FF Forest" in English, French or German and you will find a run of enthusiastic reviews. One point deserves flagging: most of these sites are paid by the platform. One states it explicitly, inviting readers to use its affiliate link in exchange for a commission.
That does not automatically invalidate their content, but it explains two things. First the general tone. Second the factual errors in circulation, such as the 2020 founding date or the ECSPR licence presented as settled, repeated from one site to the next without verification.
CrowdPickr receives no affiliate commission from FF Forest and has no commercial relationship with the platform. Our scoring methodology is public and set out on our methodology page.
Our platform grid assesses five dimensions. FF Forest records one of the lowest scores we have ever assigned.
| Criterion | Score | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Regulation | 1 / 8 | Licence claimed but not verifiable in the registers |
| Track record | 0 / 6 | No default, delay or realised return statistics |
| Selection rigour | 0 / 4 | Selection process and credit committee undocumented |
| Financial health | 1 / 4 | No published annual accounts, company under two years old |
| Investor protection | 0 / 3 | No documented segregation, no secondary market |
| Total | 2 / 25 |
For comparison, ClubFunding scores 17.5/25 and Homunity 17/25 on the same grid.
This needs saying plainly, because it is the necessary counterweight to everything above. As at publication, no default or payment delay has been officially reported at FF Forest. Investors posting publicly say they are receiving their interest. The platform is operating.
Our analysis is therefore not about incidents that have occurred. It is about the structure of the risk: an unsecured loan to a single young company, not verifiably regulated, run by a former executive of a collapsed platform, with maturities incompatible with the asset presented and no published performance data. A platform that is paying today tells you nothing about its ability to return capital tomorrow. At Crowdestor, the payments worked right up until they stopped.
FF Forest is not an isolated case in the Baltic forestry sector. The Latvian Forest Development Fund, offered notably through the Debitum platform, faces separate and documented allegations: according to an independent analysis published in 2026, 81% of properties were acquired from five companies linked to a single family network at an average 50% markup, and a gap of roughly 24.6 million euros appears between the inventory declared in the prospectus and the purchase prices recorded at the land registry.
These two files are independent and should not be conflated. Our scores reflect that: the Latvian Forest Development Fund issues we analysed score between 35 and 58/100 depending on the tranche, well above FF Forest's 23.3 average. The common thread lies elsewhere: the Baltic forestry asset has become a sales argument, and opacity around valuations is common in it.
Platform score 2/25. Verdict AVOID on all 50 projects analysed. FF Forest is not a forestry investment: it is an unsecured loan to a Latvian company incorporated in 2025, whose forest land is not pledged to lenders. The 17% average yield compensates single-counterparty credit risk, not a tangible asset that would come to you in a default. Three facts are verifiable and enough to conclude: the FCMC invoked by some sources ceased to exist on 1 January 2023, no ECSPR authorisation is findable in the registers, and no maturity offered exceeds 24 months while the Latvian silvicultural cycle runs to decades. No payment incident has been reported to date, and we say so willingly. It does not change our position: the ratio between available information and risk taken is unfavourable. If you are already invested, watch the capital repayment dates, which are the real test, and do not increase your exposure. For a real-asset allocation, prefer vehicles whose security is registered and whose licence is verifiable.
Sources: CrowdPickr analysis of 50 FF Forest projects scored between 2025 and September 2026; ff-forest.com; Latvijas Banka (integration of the FCMC on 1 January 2023, register of crowdfunding service providers); crowdgest.fr; argent-et-salaire.com; p2pdash.com; rethink-p2p.de for the Latvian Forest Development Fund. Data as of 6 September 2026. This article is an independent analysis and does not constitute investment advice. CrowdPickr receives no compensation from FF Forest.