Crowd-sourcing Investment Flows in Real Estate

As someone who has worked on both the GP and LP sides of real estate development, I am always interested in the nexus -- the point where the deal meets the money. Of course, there are many established and traditional means of joining the deal and the money. They tend to be either very entrepreneurial ie. the classic "friends and family, pass the hat" fund raise; or to be quite structured and institutional.
Is there a new way? A middle ground?
A couple new businesses have risen to the fore with the premise of "crowd-sourcing" real estate deals. Recently, graduate students at the MIT Center for Real Estate, Bonnie Burgett and John MacDonald, submitted a thesis assessing the demand and viability for these websites.
I am on the fence....my biggest concern is the "quality" of the deals being submitted for consideration. Investors, from an individual to the largest PE shops and REITs, want to focus on properly underwritten investments. The promise of digging through thousands of submissions, the majority of them not financially sound nor properly analyzed, would seem to dim interest quickly.
On the other hand, the most interesting deals are often found at ground level and as often by motivated, under-funded sponsors as by anyone else.
Maybe the trade-off of a better risk-adjusted return is digging through countless listings on websites?
Please share your thoughts and comments.
MSB