LendInvest’s non-profit Property Development Academy goes nationwide

By Bridging Loan Directory 28th March 2017

LendInvest, the UK’s leading online property finance lender, is launching the LendInvest Property Development Academy in four more key cities around the country following overwhelming demand for its London & Southeast courses.

In addition to three more courses for London & Southeast candidates this year, the Academy has expanded to:

Northern England: Manchester, 25 – 26 May
Scotland: Edinburgh, 22 – 23 June
Midlands: Birmingham, 7 – 8 September
Southwest England: Bristol, 9 – 10 November

While London courses are filled for the rest of 2017, applications are now open for all regional dates.

Christian Faes, Co-Founder & CEO of LendInvest, commented:

“There are no quick fixes to our national housing crisis, but by equipping more developers with sensible advice and tools to both get started on and complete their projects, we can empower the small-scale housebuilding sector to do more to deliver more homes onto UK streets.”

All courses are carefully tailored to resonate with common issues facing developers in their respective regions. All modules are taught by industry specialists from the local area who will drawn on locally relevant case studies and anecdotal evidence.

The LendInvest Property Development Academy was launched in September 2016 as a non-profit initiative to improve the skills of aspiring property developers whose projects can help to solve Britain’s major housing crisis. The first Academy course was ten times oversubscribed and the Academy has received over 300 quality applications from around the country.

The programme was established in collaboration with academics from the University of Reading and is supported by the Home Builders Federation. Selected attendees are taken through a series of modules designed to cover the lifetime of a development project – from evaluating sites and applying for planning, to appointing contractors and selling the end result.

Faes added:

“The response to our London & Southeast Academy courses has been incredible and prompted us to accelerate plans to rollout nationwide. A key to the success so far has been the quality of the speakers the Academy attracts. They are experts not only in their field but in their local region too. It’s important to our attendees that they hear from people that understand the problems they might be facing that are typical of their specific area. While overcoming planning may be a significant challenge in one region, opening up greenbelt land may create the worst hold-ups in another.”

Previous Academy courses have welcomed key industry figures as speakers including Tom Bloxham MBE, founder of property development firm Urban Splash, Pat McAllister, Professor of Real Estate at the University of Reading, and Kirsty Barnes, Partner and Head of Banking and Finance at Gowling WLG.

Tom Bloxham MBE, Founder of UrbanSplash and a past Academy speaker, commented:

“The Academy is a great initiative in an industry that’s crying out for better education and more help for would-be developers. Perhaps if a course like this had existed when I first started out, I’d have avoided some of the many mistakes I made as I learned on the job.”