A young Wilmington company that offers an online network for real estate investors to exchange information and tips on deals is now turning the trend toward real estate crowdfunding to its users’ advantage.

Connected Investors, a combination social media network and deal marketplace, has gone one step further, launching a site that pulls together information on crowdfunding opportunities, much like search engine Kayak does for online travel booking platforms.

“Rather than being a crowdfunding portal ourselves, we wanted to be an aggregator,” said Ross Hamilton, who founded Connected Investors 10 years ago and now runs an eight-person operation based at tekMountain.

Hamilton said the idea came to him and company CTO Marty Coyne as they saw real estate crowdfunding “exploding before our eyes” and realized that their company’s network of 200,000 investors “is the crowd.” Why not, they thought, give their participants easy access to investment opportunities?

So now, those 200,000 real estate investors, in addition to chatting and exchanging information on deals, can go online to the company’s crowdfunding marketplace and select investments on the basis of such parameters as property location, rate of return and investment amount.

Hamilton said his vision for his evolving investor marketplace is to “cut out the middle man” in real estate and to create a “frictionless” way to connect investors and deals.

The introduction of crowdfunding information, he said, allows smaller investors entrée to the world of real estate investing and gives larger investors an easy way to make smaller investments in a greater variety of properties.