Fed up with madly high house prices? Can’t stump up the 25,000 deposit? Well here’s a chance for the excluded to get that fabled foot on the property ladder. For just 1,000 you can jump in, and what’s more in a totally up-to-the-minute way – you can crowdsource a home.

Let’s for a moment put aside the drawbacks (which are legion – for starters it won’t be your home, it’s buy-to-let dressed up in a new way). The House Crowd recently launched as a great new way you can invest small amounts in property via ‘crowdfunding’. It’s about investing together and sharing together. No banks. No expensive mortgage arrangement fees. No credit checks. And no property finder’s fees.

Your money is protected at all times, the website says, although the Financial Services Compensation Scheme won’t bail out anybody in this set-up. It is, according to The House Crowd, effortless and unique.

The idea is that investors club together and invest in distressed or repossessed property which is then refurbished and rented out. The House Crowd says investors will typically receive a fixed return of 6% net, plus 50% of the profit when a property is sold. It doesn’t give any details about the tenants expected to pay these rents and who, one can only assume, will be chucked out when the speculators want to cash in. But it does give examples of rental yields of 11%-14% based on local housing allowance (ie the taxpayer).

The site makes much of the fact it will buy at below market value and give investors an uplift by buying properties priced at around 30,000-40,000 and selling for 70,000-80,000. Founder Frazer Fernhead says: We are excited about this concept and feel it makes great investment returns available to everyone, not just the wealthy.

Fernhead will be familiar to those in the property investment industry. He set up the Armchair Property Investor company in 2005, and in a press release in January 2007 he extolled the virtues of educating first time investors about the profits to be made by investing in property. It added how the company had sold 28 properties in Cyprus in the first two weeks of 2007 and is set to help hundreds more novice investors gain a foothold in the property investment market.

But in the snakes and ladders of property investment, Cyprus in 2007 was hardly the best square to land on. According to the surveyors’ body RICS the country’s property market remains deep in recession. Since 2009, apartment prices are down nearly 20% and the ongoing financial crisis in nearby Greece continues to take its toll on the island.

Neither is the idea of shared investment in property especially new, even if it now comes under the crowdsourcing tag. In 2005, in the final few months before the sub-prime US mortgage disaster took its toll on the world economy, a company called Opromark launched. It said investors could buy and sell shares in individual houses, starting at just 1. Under the scheme, investors would receive a dividend (the rental income) and could sell their shares or buy more through the Opromark market. But nothing much came of it. It was rebranded the Property Investment Market in late 2006 and a year later was suspended after failing to meet new European financial regulations.

Unregulated property investment clubs were perhaps the defining British business of the last decade. Built on a toxic mix of easy money and rampant greed, helped by bonus-hungry bankers who had abandoned all notions of prudent lending, they helped chase up prices across the country, inflating the boom and deepening the bust. Perhaps the best known was Inside Track. which claimed to have created hundreds of property millionaires, which went into administration in 2008. It left many investors nursing losses of up to 500,000.

Rather than being a solution to those unable to get a foot on the property ladder, outfits such as The House Crowd are a throwback to the mindset of the middle of the last decade. Maybe investors (I prefer to call them speculators) will cash in, maybe not. Sadly the great British obesession with making money from nothing by pushing up house prices never really went away, and it probably never will.