Proplend Review
Provides the only property P2P lending account that caps loans at 50% of a property's value. Lenders have received £30 million after fees, with just £40,000 in losses.
Proplend's Tranche A, 5-50% LTV Lending Against Property Mostly Receiving Rent has earned an Exceptional 3/3 4thWay PLUS Rating.
These loans have been paying 7.61% interest after lending fees bad debts.
Proplend's other loans (called tranche B and C) are also 3/3 rated and paying 9%-12%.
Visit Proplend* or keep reading the Proplend Review.
What does Proplend do?
Proplend* is for lending in secured property loans in the UK.
Most loans are to landlords of residential properties or commercial properties such as shops, business parks and hotels. These loans are always earning rent for the borrower.
The loans typically last for 36 months. You receive interest every month or quarter, and the borrower pays the money you lent back to you at the end.
Proplend also arranges a little short-term property (bridging) lending.
It went through a multi-year period where it approved too few bridging loans for us to trouble you with in our Proplend Review. Over the past 12 months it’s upped them slightly, so I have now incorporated the latest assessment of those loans into this review.
Proplend has completed some short-term VAT loans with a 100% repayment rate, but it has just approved one of those in the past two years, so I don’t cover them for you here.
Across all its property loans, it’s been paying around 8.21% after costs and bad debts.
When did Proplend start?
Proplend first approved a loan in 2014 and has now completed £265 million in lending.
What interesting or unique points does Proplend have?
There are three items I want to pull out for you where Proplend clearly stands out:
1. Variety means more stable lending
Don’t underestimate the value of spreading your lending across different types of loans.
Over half of P2P lending is property development lending, so it’s useful to have a P2P lending provider that mostly helps you lend against properties that are already fully built and already being rented out.
It means you’re diversifying into a form of lending that, intrinsically – and all else being equal – is lower risk. With Proplend, it’s not even with a particularly large drop in returns compared to typical P2P development lending.
2. The property security protecting lenders is unparalleled
Proplend’s biggest strength is in the security that borrowers offer lenders.
In most of its loans, called tranche A, borrowers are stringently restricted in how much they can borrow compared to the property valuation.
50% is the maximum, leaving a huge amount of room, if a borrower can’t repay and the property needs to be forcibly sold to recover your lent money.
No other P2P lending provider matches this fantastic maximum borrowing limit on any of their lending products, making Proplend truly unique.
More than that, borrowers are usually already earning rent on their properties that more than covers the monthly loan payments. Few P2P lending providers offer this kind of lending.
Lenders who want to take more risk in some of the loans to potentially earn higher interest rates can agree in advance to lend over 50%. You’ll be second or third in the queue when it comes to recovering your money if a loan turns bad.
3. A terrific record in enabling lenders to sell and exit loans early (but do read this section properly!)
Proplend* lenders have always found it easy to exit their loans early – before a borrower repays.
While Proplend won’t always manage to help you exit early, its typical exit times have compared favourably with many other P2P lending and IFISA providers.
My colleagues and I can’t stress enough times that even when you lend through the very best lending accounts from the most competent providers, you must still expect that sometimes your money will get tied in. The natural length of time to be lending is from when borrowers take out the loan until they repay them. You can’t always fight this cycle; sometimes events happen that force you to keep lending and earning interest for a lot longer than you intended.
Proplend review: How good are its loans?
Lenders in Proplend’s “tranche A” loans are protected by real-estate security with a property valuation that’s always at least twice the size of the loan.
That is incredibly good risk coverage, which you might know is called 50% loan-to-value (LTV). The average LTV over the past year has been even better, at 45%, e.g. a £450,000 loan is backed up by a property the borrower owns valued at £1 million.
The properties can be repossessed and forcibly sold, with lenders getting their money back, and the interest you’re owed, before the borrower can take what’s left.
So you can start to lose money from a bad debt in a tranche A loan only if Proplend sells the borrower’s property for less than half its valuation, after costs.
Lenders can lend in riskier tranches offered in some of the same loans to blend the risk-reward balance.
In return for lending rates a few percentage points higher:
- Tranche B means you can lose money if Proplend is unable to get back 65% of the property valuation for you (65% LTV), even after forcibly selling the property. You’ll lose all your money in this tranche if it can only get back half of the property valuation.
- Tranche C means you can start losing money on that loan if Proplend can’t get back as much as 75% of the property valuation (75% LTV). You’ll lose your entire tranche C loan if it just gets back 65% or less.
Proplend’s loans against tenanted properties
Nine out of every ten Proplend* loans are secured against properties that are earning rent.
Proplend landlord borrowers normally have to be receiving rent that is at least 1.25 times the regular interest payments they make to Proplend lenders.
The combination of rent and real-property security substantially lowers the risks, as it reduces the chances of loans going bad and increases the chances of recovering bad debt.
I think that the risk of losing money in any single Proplend tranche A loan to a property landlord is the lowest of any loans offered by all the P2P lending providers in the UK.
Proplend’s bridging loans
Proplend’s bridging loans have a good record. There are just three currently live, with 39 repaid in full and one bad debt being chased.
Aside from tiering your risks with tranches, these loans otherwise follow the same characteristics of many successful bridging lenders. For example:
- The overall loans-to-value (across all tranches) average around 60%, roughly in line with the wider industry.
- Over a third of borrowers fall pretty late to repay, but ultimately they do repay in full.
Note that when loans are late or turn bad, borrowers are required to pay you interest for the entire time their loan was outstanding, so that you don’t lose out. Unusually, with Proplend, you also get paid substantial penalty interest on top of the standard lending rate. Most P2P lending providers do not pay the penalty interest out to lenders, even though it’s your money on the line and not theirs!
Proplend’s refinanced loans
Proplend* allows some lenders to re-borrow when a loan comes to the end of its term. To do this, borrowers repay the debt to existing lenders by borrowing again through Proplend. This is normal practice and it’s called an “internal refinance”.
Proplend’s refinances are by no means over-abundant. That would have been a possible sign that problem debts were being deliberately kicked down the road.
We now have sufficient history for Proplend to find that loans that are internally refinanced are probably more likely to turn bad, at perhaps 1.5 times the rate of other loans.
While that might sound unattractive, it’s actually a little lower than our expectations.
More importantly, every loan that was refinanced and then became a bad debt has been fully recovered, with lenders paid the interest due, and with no remaining loans in the recovery phase.
I have closely investigated these loans over the years as Proplend’s record has developed. I can now say in late 2025 that the additional risk of lending in Proplend’s refinanced loans is so small that I would lend in them just as readily as its other loans.
Proplend review: lending processes
I have personally interviewed Proplend many times over the years, and I have reviewed its processes, monthly detailed data, supporting documentation and other checks.
Proplend* has consistently maintained high standards and approves few of the loan applications it receives.
Its processes for reviewing borrowers, their properties and their tenants are as we would expect for these kinds of loans.
It uses very simple, but strict, base criteria to ensure that the loans it offers lenders are likely to repay in full and with interest.
Proplend has demonstrated speed and effectiveness when reacting quickly to loans that fall late. These loans have typically been fully repaid within just three months.
Proplend‘s* detailed loan book data shows a wide variety of different types of properties, which is a conscious decision made by Proplend’s team.
That diversity further reduces the risk for lenders. How is that? Well, imagine that, during the pandemic, Proplend had only lent exclusively to landlords that are leasing out office space. Many of those offices are probably now still half empty and the owners of those properties struggling with the transition to home working.
How good are Proplend’s interest rates and bad debts?
Proplend continues to get full repayment of all loans and interest, even on loans where borrowers have problems.
Its results with loans on properties receiving rent are impeccable. Around 120 of these loans have been repaid and nearly 100 are still active and in good standing. There are currently just three bad debts being chased.
On all its loans of all types, Proplend lenders suffered just one small loss in nearly 10 years, in a lower tranche.
All lenders who lent across a basket of loans have made extremely satisfactory returns, even if they were also lending in that one tranche with a loss.
Combined with generous interest rates for lenders averaging greater than 8% after lending fees, I am highly confident that the risks are extremely well contained.
Proplend’s tranche A loans really hit a sweet spot on the risk-reward scale. But its tranche B and C loans are very comfortably in a good interest-rate range too when adjusting for risk, at about 9% to 12%, after fees.
Does Proplend offer a large margin of safety?
We regularly look at the performance of all Proplend’s loans, using bank-style stress tests.
Our conservative version of these tests calculates the estimated results during a severe recession and property crash, similar to 2008. Our tests strongly reveal that Proplend* lenders who take the time to spread their money across as different loans have a large margin of safety, even in terrible economic conditions.
The risks look extraordinarily well contained, especially for the interest earned.
That’s why Proplend has earned the top calculated 4thWay PLUS Rating of 3/3 for its tranche A, B or C lending.
You need to take the following precise forecast of losses with a pinch of salt. But, in the worst-case, most awful economic scenario that it could possibly make sense to conjure, it means little more than 2.5% in losses for lenders overall. That’s the equivalent of about 3-4 months’ interest.
Indeed, I think that the interest rates paid to lenders are disproportionately high for the low risks you face.
Its tranche B and C loans have maintained a steady level of risk for many years, reflecting overall potential losses in harsh conditions that would be covered in about a year’s worth of interest. Proplend is more likely to exceed those worst-case expectations, and the rest of the time it will pay out very well.
Read About The 4thWay PLUS Ratings.
How much experience do Proplend’s key people have?
Proplend has long demonstrated the reliability if its key people.
Along with 10 years of internal experience, its two key decision makers, who have to approve all loans passed up to them from their lending team, have plenty of prior experience.
Matt Carson has a history in corporate lending and managing risk.
Theo Theodosiadis brought a lot of experience at board level from companies that invested in property loans. He follows a few people that have had this role at Proplend and builds on the knowledge they have acquired over the years.
They’re both backed up by other experienced people in their team.
Proplend temporarily hired a specialist in VAT lending, who is now gone. Proplend will rely solely on the experience they gained having worked with him to continue to approve these loans, although these are a real rarity.
Proplend’s chairman was head of business banking at NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland for 20 years, and he has substantial property lending experience.
Has Proplend provided enough information to assess the risks?
Proplend* is exceptionally transparent and candid with 4thWay, sharing the documentation and highly detailed data we need to use bank risk-modelling and investing techniques to assess its performance. It provides us with access to its key people and answers our questions.
Not only that, it’s genuinely forthright with individual lenders about any loan problems and mistakes, and it provides a lot of information about loans to help you make lending decisions when you want to choose the loans for yourself.
Is Proplend profitable?
Published accounts indicate that Proplend was gently profitable in 2022 and 2023, after being close in the prior two years – even after the pandemic hit. In 2024, the limited accounts data available suggest it probably lost some money, but is likely still to be in excellent financial condition to keep going for the long run.
Proplend has a unique business and many loyal borrowers and lenders, so success is imminent.
Is Proplend a good investment?
I think Proplend is about as good an investment as you can get. It’s an easy choice for anyone who can afford its high minimum amount for each loan and is able to take the time needed to spread across loans to cover risks.
It will continue to offer lenders highly satisfactory and stable returns.
What lenders say about Proplend
My research into what Proplend* customers think shows very common themes.
A large number of them find Proplend to the best P2P lending provider they use. They like the loans, the results and the simplicity.
Lenders who follow 4thWay tend to be particularly complimentary about how Proplend works behind the scenes to make sure lenders are treated fairly.
The downside is that there are just a few dozen loans per year. For Proplend’s particularly good loans, that’s more than enough to sufficiently spread risks over the course of 6-12 months.
Lenders state that with a bit of patience it’s worth the effort. Although people who need to lend larger sums might find it more trying.
What is Proplend’s minimum lending amount and how many loans can I lend in?
The minimum you can lend in each individual loan is £1,000.
With Proplend’s auto-lend facilities, you can choose the maximum amount that you’d want to lend in any loan. It splits its auto-lend into two different facilities:
- Proplend’s “AutoLend Always On” spreads your money across tranche A loans.
- The alternative facility, “AutoLend Self Select”, is a half-way house. You select loans that you want to lend in – and whichever tranches you want – and Proplend will automatically lend money for you as soon as the loan is confirmed and goes live.
If you want to lend in tranches B and C, or if you want to select tranche A loans yourself rather than be allocated to them, it makes sense to use AutoLend Self Select rather than do it all manually.
That’s because you’re more likely to take part in lending.
Does Proplend have an IFISA?
Proplend’s lending products are available as IFISAs at no extra cost:
| IFISA details | Description |
| Open to new lenders | Yes |
| Lenders can lend right away (if loans are available) | Yes |
| Minimum opening deposit for new ISA contributions | £0 |
| Minimum lending amount (if different to above) | £1,000 per loan |
| Interest rates the same as non-IFISA accounts | Yes |
| Additional fees for lending through an IFISA | £0 |
| Transfers from or to other ISAs | Description |
| Minimum transfer-in amount | £1 |
| Transfer-in fee | £0, unless you transfer in less than £50 (and then Proplend passes on its bank charges) |
| Transfer-out fee | £0 |
| Partial transfers from other ISAs allowed | Yes |
| Partial transfers to other ISAs allowed | Yes |
| Extra features | Description |
| Lenders with ordinary accounts can automatically divert repayments and interest to their IFISA | No |
| Flexible ISA (you can withdraw money and re-deposit it in the same tax year without losing your ISA allowances) | Yes |
Can I sell Proplend loans to exit early?
Yes, although you can’t sell loans that are in arrears and you can’t sell if there’s just one month to go.
You sell your loan at face value and you also sell any interest that has accrued to you since the last interest payment. That means if you’re selling £1,000 and £50 interest on that loan is currently owed to you by the borrower, you will sell to another lender for £1,050.
When you successfully sell loan parts, you pay 0.5% of the total you receive to Proplend as your early exit fee to Proplend. That’s the equivalent of paying back about 1.5 months’ interest.
On the other side of the deal, when buying second-hand loan parts from existing lenders, you pay no fees to Proplend.
Historically, lenders have usually been able to sell within 24 hours, because the loans are popular.
What more do you need to know?
Proplend shows its rates with a lending fee included
When Proplend mentions an interest rate, you should presume it has not yet deducted its fee from that rate unless it specifically tells you that its after fees or net of fees.
That’s because it usually displays the so-called “gross” rate. E.g. if it states a 9% interest rate, it will take 1/10th of that (10%), so that you can actually expect to get 9 * 90% = 8.1%.
In a calculator, that’s 9 x 0.9 = 8.1.
That 8.1% rate is called the net lending rate.
4thWay is the opposite: we always use the net rate – the rate after fees that lenders actually get – unless we clearly state otherwise.
More information – but only if you want!
I’d say that you’ve read everything important above already. Well done for getting through it.
But I have added some more information for those of you who are particularly into understanding, or even optimising for, what’s known as “cash drag”.
Cash drag is an inevitable cost to you that is part of most investing, including most stock-market, bond, share ISA or pension investment funds you probably are in. And it’s also in P2P lending.
Cash drag means that some of your money at any one time is being held as cash, not invested, and therefore it’s “dragging” down your overall investment or lending returns.
Potential cash drag at Proplend could be split into three causes: 1) when you put new money into the account to lend, 2) when you’ve received interest payments from borrowers and 3) when borrowers have repaid their actual loans to you.
I review all three causes of cash drag below. Frankly, the sections below are indulgently long for something that has such a small impact on your overall returns, so only read it if you’re especially interested.
If you’re dropping out here, thank you for reading the Proplend Review! Visit Proplend*.
The cost of patience when you’re putting new money into your lending account
You don’t have to pile a huge amount of money into your account and leave it there until enough loans come along, of course.
But let’s say that you’ve transferred some of your cash in to get into your first loans and now you’re waiting.
When your money is in your Proplend account but not being lent, you don’t earn interest. If it takes you half-a-month to lend, say, £1,000, it’s like losing £1.75 in interest that you would have earned in the top one-year cash ISA.
But, after that, when the money is lent out, you’ll probably earn around £80 over the following 11.5 months. That’s about double what the cash ISA would pay you in a year.
So I think you just need a little patience if you end up in that situation.
Proplend shows you if loans are available or upcoming once you’ve signed up, so that will help you decide about how much to put into your account to begin with.
If you have to wait to re-lend the interest payments you receive, it does not reduce your expected returns
You might sometimes find that borrowers pay you interest that you’re not able to re-lend right away, even if there are loans available.
That’s because the interest receipts building in your Proplend account need to add up to the minimum lending amount of £1,000 before you can lend it again. (Unless you top up the account with more new money.)
For example, anyone lending less than £50,000 should expect to take more than three months for the interest to grow sufficiently to re-lend.
Does this mean you’ll earn less than the advertised rate on your loans? No, it doesn’t.
Let’s say it’s the 1st of January and you lend £1,000 at 8.1% (what Proplend calls 9% before fees). This means that, at the end of the year, you’d expect to earn £81.
But that’s the amount you earn without re-lending your monthly or quarterly interest payments.
Because Proplend shows you the simple interest rates, not the compound interest rates, meaning the rate presumes that you won’t re-lend the interest you receive all year long.
In short, if you just manage to re-lend interest once per year, you’ll be earning the amount of interest you’d expect based on the actual rate. If it’s 7% after fees then you’ll have earned £70 per £1,000 12 months later. At 10% after fees you’ll have been paid £100.
Even if it took you longer than a year to get lend interest you’ve been paid, the impact on your overall returns is likely to be very small. Probably just one or two tenths of a percentage point.
Plus, if you re-lend your interest more than once per year, you’ll actually earn a higher rate of interest than the advertised rate, because you’ll be compounding it.
The cost of a delay in re-lending loans paid back to you
Let’s look at the cost to you, as and when borrowers repay loans, if you find that multiple times throughout the year you’re waiting to re-lend the money you got back.
I think it’s very unlikely to add up to as much as one percentage point less interest than you expected to earn on all the money you have in Proplend.
Put another way, if all your Proplend money had been in a cash ISA instead, you wouldn’t even have earned 0.5% in that time.
Bear in mind that while any money is unlent, your risk of losing that money also comes down to close to zero. Your money is only fully at risk while it is earning interest.
Here’s a tip for those of you with far too much time on your hands
When you have too much cash in your Proplend accounts, some lenders withdraw it and earn higher interest elsewhere, while waiting for the next Proplend opportunity.
In the IFISA, that’s not so easy, but still doable. At least one lender using the Proplend IFISA figured out the solution. (If the following steps are too much work for you, rest assured this hard-core method likely won’t improve your overall returns all that much.)
1. The lender was earning over £100 interest per month. He elected for Proplend to pay out the interest to his bank account automatically.
2. Since Proplend’s ISA is “flexible”, it means you’re allowed to take money out and put it back in during the same tax year without losing any of the current year’s ISA allowance. So, before a tax year ends, he’s earned over £1,000 in interest that he returns to the ISA.
3. Lenders get an email reminder from Proplend towards the end of the tax year.
Doubly well done on finishing this bonus material. Thanks for reading!
Independent opinion: 4thWay will help you to identify your options and narrow down your choices. We suggest what you could do, but we won't tell you what to do or where to lend; the decision is yours. We are responsible for the accuracy and quality of the information we provide, but not for any decision you make based on it. The material is for general information and education purposes only.
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The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and not held by 4thWay. 4thWay is not regulated by ESMA or the FCA. All the specialists and researchers who conduct research and write articles for 4thWay are subject to 4thWay's Editorial Code of Practice. For more, please see 4thWay's terms and conditions.
The 4thWay® PLUS Ratings are calculations developed by professional risk modellers (someone who models risks for the banks), experienced investors and a debt specialist from one of the major consultancy firms. They measure the interest you earn against the risk of suffering losses from borrowers being unable to repay their loans in scenarios up to a serious recession and a major property crash. The ratings assume you spread your money across hundreds or thousands of loans, and continue lending until all your loans are repaid. They assume you lend across 6-12 rated P2P lending accounts or IFISAs, and measure your overall performance across all of them, not against individual performances.
The 4thWay PLUS Ratings are calculated using objective criteria that can be measured and improved on over time, although no rating system is perfect. Read more about the 4thWay® PLUS Ratings.
*Commission, fees and impartial research: our service is free to you. 4thWay shows dozens of P2P lending accounts in our accurate comparison tables and we add new ones as they make it through our listing process. We receive compensation from Proplend and other P2P lending companies not mentioned above either when you click through from our website and open accounts with them, or to cover the costs of conducting our calculated stress tests and ratings assessments. We vigorously ensure that this doesn't affect our editorial independence. Read How we earn money fairly with your help.
