Update On CrowdProperty Profitability & Cash Set Aside To Fund A Wind-Down

Last week, CrowdProperty published its annual accounts for the 12 months up to March 2025.

Losses potentially up five-fold to £1.5 million

It seems very likely that CrowdProperty made another loss in its corporate year ending in early spring 2025. My best estimate is the losses were in the region of £1.5 million.

That could be as much as five times the losses it incurred the year before.

Nonetheless, its brief accounts still show a very healthy balance sheet, meaning its cash and other assets versus its debts. Potentially, that balance improved by a further three-quarters-of-a-million pounds.

So CrowdProperty doesn't appear to be in any danger of crashing into bankruptcy.

Why have losses seemingly ballooned?

The accounts are abridged, so there's a lot of guesswork involved in reading them and my numbers on its recent results could therefore be off.

Indeed, in a continuation of CrowdProperty's step backwards in transparency, the accounts now contain even less information than they used to.

For example, it no longer produces a written strategic report. The descriptions in that section used to contain extra numbers on its performance, progress and plans.

I had previously hoped this was a temporary reduction in transparency due to the management changing, but this is now the second consecutive set of accounts like this.

I currently have few direct insights into what it plans to do with its P2P lending operations or why losses may have ballooned.

Online lending companies do sometimes deliberately make losses while they overspend to grow their businesses. Staff numbers at CrowdProperty would suggest this is not the case now.

Its accounts show that CrowdProperty director and staff numbers had risen from 48 to 58 in the 12 months to March 2024, but fell back again to 50 over the next 12 months to March 2025. The CEO and two other directors resigned last year, leaving none of the initial team.

This makes it more likely that its worsening bottom line is actually being driven by fewer new loans. CrowdProperty's income is directly tied to the number and size of the loans it approves.

Indeed, through its online lending platform, it arranged more than £100 million in new lending during calendar year 2023, but this halved in 2024 to just over £50 million.

Lending plummeted further thereafter, with barely £5 million lent in the first three months of 2025. (Shortly after that, it stopped sharing its most useful dataset with us, with which we are allowed to do risk analysis.)

CrowdProperty has been looking to do more lending in off-platform agreements with financial institutions. But, with losses seemingly rising sharply, I would think that it hasn't offset its massive decline in online lending through other funding sources.

Has CrowdProperty set aside too little money for a wind-down?

CrowdProperty's accounts reveal that its segregated pot for winding down loans contains £200,000.

While that might sound reassuring, it's a mystery to me why the amount is this low.

The regulator requires providers to hold larger amounts of cash the more outstanding loans they have. Detailed data previously provided by CrowdProperty to 4thWay on lending through its online lending platform shows that the amount in its wind-down pot as of March 2025 should have been greater than £240,000.

That's due to its outstanding loans not yet written off being in excess of £144 million at that time.

While a chunk of that lending will be through financial institutions rather than individuals, I can see no exception in the rules that might reduce the amount they should have ringfenced based on who the investors are.

On the surface, it looks like CrowdProperty might not have appropriately increased the amount of cash it ringfences for lenders' benefit to match its regulatory requirements.

Another possibility is that the data I'm using, which CrowdProperty used to submit to us for risk assessment purposes, had been consistently flawed. Generally speaking, though, CrowdProperty had been providing relatively clean data as far as we can ascertain, especially when corroborating it with other sources.

But perhaps the data incorrectly included a large number of off-platform loans funded by institutions or others.

While CrowdProperty is much more opaque these days, this has told me, at the very least, that 4thWay needs to look to obtain more regular details and data on the segregated pots held by the rest of the P2P lending industry.

Visit CrowdProperty.

Read the 4thWay CrowdProperty Review.

Further reading

CrowdProperty Can Now Buy Lenders Out At Any Time.