The Financial Conduct Authority – the UK body that regulates financial companies – has issued a warning that scammers are now operating in peer-to-peer. It writes, in its usually over-cautious way, that it “believes” that a company calling itself “Zopa Loans Reviews” is pretending to…
Wellesley & Co.*, a property bridging and development loans P2P lending website, is now reporting its first bad debt, although recovery prospects look good. Wellesley & Co., has matched money from individual lenders like you and me to borrowers in nearly 200 large property loans…
This is the first article in a new series for 4thWay®, covering investment on the edges of P2P lending. That means alternative ways to invest in the P2P lending sector without lending directly to borrowers yourself. These might either help you spread your risks, manage…
Adapted from 4thWay co-founder Neil Faulkner’s new book on P2P lending strategy, read why it is that you should question everything when investing. Part of the reason you’re reading this website is that you’re a natural sceptic. It’s your job as an investor – for…
With bond interest rates plummeting to near zero, it is only a matter of time before a lot of people lost money, as was explained in yesterday’s FT article Bond market fireworks flash warning signals. When bond interest rates drop, it means people are paying too…
For most peer-to-peer lending companies, a bad debt amounting to a mere 0.15% is not noteworthy. But it’s different for Lending Works. Because this is the first time it has suffered at least one bad loan. Prior to now, its 16-month record of nearly 2,000 loans had…
This is just a brief note to say that, this weekend, Wellesley & Co. has slightly dropped the interest rate on its 30-day notice account, which it calls its Easy Access account, from 3.66% to 3.55%. We wrote about Wellesley & Co’s other interest rate…
This article was updated on 2 May, to explain an additional interest rate change made by Wellesley on that day. Property P2P lending website Wellesley & Co. has increased interest rates on all its deals as of today, 1 May. Except for one deal which went…
Research by Cambridge University shows the UK is now storming ahead of its European neighbours in its acceptance and use of alternative finance, with the market swelling to £1.9bn in 2014. Although this growth is great, its speed, together with the newness of the sector,…
CrowdProperty took five months to get its first deal completed, but just five weeks to do its second. Clearly, it’s speeding up. New P2P lending websites can offer interesting opportunities. The interest rates tend to be higher, so if you can satisfy yourself that the…
It’s not always easy to spread your money across hundreds of P2P property loans, because the deals are bigger and fewer in number. To counter for that, you have the extra protection of being able to repossess and sell the property if the borrower can’t repay. That…
Until more P2P lending websites have a longer record, searching for patterns to improve loan selection is not possible at most of them. But there’s one way to select loans that I think will work everywhere. Keen investors like to scour through past loans to…
Zopa latest: Speed of getting money on loan: up Proportion of loans accepted: up Riskier borrowers: up Interest rates: stable Zopa has taken steps to help get lenders’ money on loan faster and to stabilise rates, and set a scene which could lead to…
Proplend has now launched a “secondary market”, which is where you can buy and sell existing loan parts. Previously, with Proplend, you could just lend your money at the start of a new loan and there was no secondary market where you could sell it…
Welcome back to the third course of my 4th way. For my returning readers you’ll know that I began to look at the idea of venturing into P2P lending in Follow Me As I Learn to P2P. When I had reduced my selection down to…
Sometimes I read in the financial pages what some commentators are saying on P2P lending and I’m quite unimpressed. The general message seems to be that if you dip your toe in with a small investment, you’ll learn quickly that it’s safe, and then you can go all…
Last Friday I chaired a panel show for the first time. It was the property peer-to-peer lending panel at the Property Investor Show in ExCeL, London, and there were a lot of great questions from the audience. The panel were representing P2P lending websites that do…
Buying buy-to-let properties is a very different investment to lending to buy-to-let investors. But both are great investment opportunities in very different ways. Landbay is a P2P lending websites that offers loans to landlords with tenanted residential properties. 4thWay® rates it as one of the safest P2P…
In the past year, SIPPclub has been working with a number of the P2P platforms to enable them to accept SIPP money. This is good news, for it enables you to earn your interest tax free. Compared to lending money personally, the effect of earning…
Zopa lenders have so far lent £800 million and this week their grand total interest earned hit £50 million. That’s since Zopa launched in 2005. But over one-third of that interest has been paid to lenders in the past year alone, as Zopa grows rapidly…
