CrowdProperty doubles lending as loanbook hits £20m

CROWDPROPERTY’S loanbook has passed the £20m milestone, doubling its lending since raising almost £1m through crowdfunding to expand the business last year.

The peer-to-peer property lender funded its 47th project this week, taking its loanbook to £20.56m, backing the development of 307 homse.

Across 23 projects, £9.17m has neen returned, including £791,000 of interest.

Of the 24 active loans, none are overdue.

CrowdProperty launched in 2014 but raised £907,467 via Seedrs in November 2017 to expand its proposition.

“Fundamentally, we are solving major pains being experienced on both sides of our marketplace,” Mike Bristow (pictured), chief executive of CrowdProperty, said.

“On the one hand, property professionals are receiving appalling service from traditional funding providers, especially in terms of ease, speed, expertise and access to decision makers, all of which are pivotal to our proposition.

“On the other hand the general public are mostly getting sub-inflation returns on their savings.”

Read more: CrowdProperty appoints Mike Bristow as CEO

He said the platform could offer high returns of around eight per cent due to its low structural costs.

“We don’t have the high cost bases of traditional lenders, which include, for instance, their branch networks, origination costs and legacy IT systems and if we introduce interest rate changes, it is always applied to both sides of the marketplace,” Bristow added.

“We attract high quality funding applications giving our lenders an excellent range of opportunities on first charge secured returns.

“The CrowdProperty Innovative Finance ISA then adds a tax-free cherry on top of the cake.”

Read more: Want to invest in property? Then take a look at these peer-to-peer platforms