Proplend opens its doors to personal borrowers

By Bridging Loan Directory 1st May 2019

Having already facilitated more than £60m funding to corporate borrowers with no investor losses, Proplend has announced that it’s extending lending criteria with immediate effect to include personal owners of commercial property.

Peer to Peer lending platform Proplend is making its fast, flexible property funding solutions available to individual owners of commercial property, as well as continuing to provide commercial investment finance solutions to corporate vehicles. And Lenders won’t have to wait long to get their piece of the platform’s first personal property loan.

Today’s ‘In Funding’ offering to ‘Lenders’ is a three-year facility, secured by personally owned, mixed use property in West London. At just over 60% loan to value, this latest commercial facility is reflective of the platform’s historical average LTV and like previous term ‘mortgages’ before it, income generated by the property covers the monthly interest payments more than 1.25 times.

Proplend loans are available to invest in manually or via Auto-Lend and via ‘Classic’, pension and ISA accounts and Business Development Manager, Stewart Bruce believes the news will be welcomed by the platforms growing band of ‘Proplenders’ as demand can outstrip supply for smaller, higher rate loans in particular.

“Earlier this week we had the 0-50% LTV portion of a loan entirely filled by our safest Tranche A only auto-invest facility before manual lenders had a chance to invest – the first time we have seen this happen. Thankfully we’ve already been working on a way to bring more loans to the platform to satisfy demand and offer more opportunities for diversification.”

“We’ve received numerous enquiries in the past from individuals looking for funding for their commercial (investment) property and we expect to get many more going forward” added Bruce. “To date we’ve only been able to help when the property is held in an SPV, so it’s an exciting development for Lenders and creditworthy personal borrowers alike that we can start bringing these loans to the platform. It should make a big difference” he enthused.

NACFB patron Proplend is also accepting personal funding requests for its commercial bridging loan product and its other new £5-15m proposition. With a maximum 70% LTV (compared to its usual 75% limit for sub-£5m loans), its large loan facility is available on an additional amortisation basis, as well as Interest Only.