Yes. All of our loans are secured by a legal charge which is registered against the relevant property. In some cases, we require security over the borrower’s other assets and may even take personal guarantees from key people in the borrower’s business.
We lend to professional property investors and developers with proven track records. Typically these are individual business people or small and medium-sized company owners who are looking for fast and flexible short-term finance to buy, build or refurbish their property projects. A typical borrower may need to secure short-term funding for an investment purchase at auction (where the standard time frame to complete is only 28 days) or development finance to fund a small-scale housing project in an area where new housing is in high demand.
We have one product, Regulated Bridging, which is for homeowner loans, however these are not listed on our self-select platform.
Our in-house team of mortgage underwriters assesses all borrowers’ applications before we agree to lend to them. The team has over 75 years’ sector experience between them which they use to carefully assess both the borrower and the property or development project before a decision is made. The team uses some of the best due diligence and fraud detection systems in the market to conduct comprehensive searches on the applicant.
Approved loans are serviced by the LendInvest team in partnership with a dedicated team at Pepper UK, part of the Pepper Group, a global loan servicing company that manages over £32 billion of assets across its servicing and lending businesses on behalf of 600,000 customers around the world.
All borrowers and their prospective projects are subject to a thorough process of due diligence carried out by our underwriting team to reduce the risk of borrowers failing to repay their loans. For instance, we will assess the borrower’s credit history, professional past and previous property industry experience. We will also undertake a full evaluation of the property and project against which the loan will be made. We instruct independent third party valuers to visit the property and prepare a valuation report, and we assess the local market for liquidity and demand.
Fraud in the UK is a constant threat and one we take very seriously. There are many enquiries, procedures and technologies we use to limit the risk of fraud by the borrower (or his/her solicitor). We also make use of two leading UK fraud detection systems, SIRA and CIFAS. Most major financial institutions in the UK use these systems for a comprehensive and sophisticated defence against fraud.