Crowd2Fund plans foray into commercial property finance
CROWD2FUND is planning to expand into the property loans market.
The peer-to-peer business lender will provide loans secured against commercial property from a minimum of £100,000, offering investors returns of six to eight per cent.
“These will be asset-backed loans and give more cautious investors an option to be super safe,” Chris Hancock, chief executive of Crowd2Fund, told Peer2Peer Finance News.
“The first project will go live in two weeks.”
It comes after the platform launched a venture debt product last week with rates of 10 to 15 per cent.
Hancock said he believes the platform, which reported a record-breaking first quarter with 4,700 per cent year-on-year growth in the number of deals financed, could reach a 20 per cent profit margin this year due to a focus on technology and automation.
The company reported a loss of £657,692 for the financial year ending 30 April 2016.
“There has been a mind-set among technology companies in the past decade or so [regarding] concerns about achieving scale,” Hancock said.
“We have shown you can build something up with a small team. It is not as difficult in fintech compared with other dotcom firms as we are a commission-based rather than advertising-reliant model.”
Crowd2Fund currently has seven staff in the UK and two offshore, but Hancock said he was planning to grow the business development department to keep up with demand.
Read more: Crowd2Fund to offer P2P white label product