The House Crowd looks further north to boost loan opportunities
THE HOUSE Crowd has launched in Scotland as part of a range of changes to boost its lending.
The peer-to-peer property platform, which focuses on lending towards property projects mainly around northern areas such as Manchester and Liverpool, said the number of loans on the platform had fallen due to a tightening of criteria and a glut of poor applications.
Frazer Fearnhead (pictured), founder of The House Crowd, said this was being addressed by increasing marketing activity and expanding the introducer network to bring in more enquiries.
The platform has also entered the Scottish market, where Fearnhead said there has already been a “sharp increase” in enquiries.
He said processes and personnel were also being put in place to expand its offering to third-party small developers.
Fearnhead added that the platform, which launched an auto-invest option earlier this year to work alongside its manual offering, receives 80 enquiries a month from borrowers and around half fit the criteria.
He explained that around 15 are dismissed after reviewing applications and loan offers are made on the rest subject to a surveyor valuation.
“A fair number either fall off the radar at this stage or the valuation rules them out,” Fearnhead said.
“We have by now whittled the original 70-80 applications down to about 14 that then undergo our comprehensive due diligence process.
“Typically, that process will discover un-resolvable issues in about half of those remaining. We are, therefore, left in a typical month with around eight deals.
“In that last few months the amount that we have received at the top of the funnel have been of poorer quality than usual and therefore reduced the number that we are able to offer, but we are taking action to counteract this.”
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