The platform will be the first peer-to-peer lending platform in the UK that is focussed on loans that are secured against residential and commercial property.
The LendInvest platform allows investors to circumvent the banks and lend directly to borrowers, secured against residential and commercial property.
It provides investors with superior risk adjusted returns, and provides borrowers with access to capital.
Whilst the LendInvest platform is only in soft-launch, there have already been a number of deals that have been done on the platform, totalling over £3.5m.
The LendInvest platform is growing rapidly, and is adding new loan transactions to the site daily.
LendInvest has been founded by Christian Faes and Ian Thomas, who are principals of Montello Capital Partners, which is one of the leading short term real estate lenders based in London.
Faes is from a legal background having practised as a lawyer in the City with Clifford Chance and then in-house legal counsel with Deutsche Bank.
Thomas is a qualified chartered surveyor, who prior to Montello held senior positions with SEGRO and Ballymore Property Group.
The two co-founders have recently recruited David Serafini who has come on as managing director for the business.
Serafini has held a number of positions in the City, and was previously an ex-IT analyst with the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Serafini said: “In an environment where investors get next to zero return for cash in the bank, it is understandable that sophisticated investors are looking at sound alternative investments.
“LendInvest allows investors to invest in loans that are secured against real estate, and to obtain superior returns.
“There are a number of peer-to-peer platforms that are out there, but this is the only platform in the UK that is for originating and funding new residential and commercial loans, and acts as an after-market for trading completed loans.
“Amazingly, LendInvest is offering a higher return to investors for deals secured against real estate, than what most P2P platforms are offering for unsecured personal loans!”
Faes said: “This is a first for the UK in the real estate peer-to-peer lending space.
“There are a number of platforms looking at lending against real estate, but none that come with the hands-on lending experience that the principals of LendInvest have.
“Through the association with Montello, LendInvest is able to incorporate some of the most sophisticated fraud detection and underwriting processes in the market, and essentially makes these available to investors.
“Over the course of the last year we have quietly been working behind the scenes, building our online platform, and working with a select group of investors that have now already traded a number of loans on the system.
“If you were to log onto some of the other websites that are flirting with the concept of real estate crowd funding, you generally find one or two loans against properties in very poor areas, coupled with a borrower that wants unrealistically cheap funding.
“Some crowdfunding websites that are offering loans against property, are actually providing a double-whammy of generally being a poor return against a poor asset.
“Through Montello’s deal-flow generation, we are able to choose from some £100m a month of loan applications.”
