Assetz Capital resumes retail development lending
Assetz Capital has restarted retail lending across all cohorts of loans, having resumed development lending.
Chief executive Stuart Law (pictured) said that in August the peer-to-peer property lending platform resumed retail lending in both the access and manual accounts for bridging finance and commercial mortgages. It has now restarted development lending in both accounts too.
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“What’s changed is it’s also development as well,” Law said.
“We were doing bridging and commercial mortgages to fill the accounts but now this week are going ahead with development as well.
“We’re back to being active on everything, bridging and commercial, and originating developments for retail as well in both the access and manual accounts.
“It will take a while for developments to come through but development lending has officially restarted in the access and manual accounts.
“It’s just something we’d already done, it’s not dependant on the recovery loan scheme, that’s just one of the funding lines we have. We’re back to business as usual and just need to get volumes back up on the retail side, we have quite a lot of loans that have gone through this month.”
Law said that Assetz Capital is likely to keep the queue into the access account in place for a while but said that it is “shrinking and has good visibility that it is being used up”.
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“By doing that we increase contributions to the provisional fund,” he said.
“It has worked well through the pandemic.
“We intend to grow the account but have a bit of a queue for people to come in for future funding.”
Law predicted a huge rise in alternative finance lending as bank lending is predicted to contract following participation in state-backed lending schemes and said consumers should look to invest in P2P due to ongoing inflation.
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“There is plenty of demand,” he said.
“The banks are trying to undo massive amounts of bounce back loan and coronavirus business interruption loan scheme lending and we in alternative finance will definitely get the benefit from that in the coming years.
“I think we will see a very substantial lack of appetite from banks, particular high street banks, to fund small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business so the outlook for alternative finance to fund SMEs looks very strong.
“People should be looking at investments and we’re here for the investors that want to move out of savings. We’re giving retail lenders a way to do it.”