P2P property lenders optimistic about market recovery

Peer-to-peer property lenders have said that they remain busy during the lockdown and expect the property market to make a relatively speedy recovery.

The pandemic has effectively frozen parts of the property market, as people can only move home if they are moving to an empty house.

However, P2P property development lender CrowdProperty told Peer2Peer Finance News that it is still funding projects and is still seeing demand from borrowers, as other property lenders pull back from the market.

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“There will be a lag effect to bounce back to normal transaction volumes, but we would expect to see the pent-up demand to kick in and a period of higher than normal transaction volumes,” said Mike Bristow, chief executive of CrowdProperty.

Similarly, bridging and development lender Blend Network has seen very healthy deal flow and reported good appetite from lenders.

Yann Murciano, chief executive of Blend Network, expects a strong V-shaped recovery in the second half of the year, mainly because of the unprecedented size of the rescue packages being thrown at the crisis.

He believes that lockdown restrictions will start to lift from mid-May depending on the size of the building sites.

“At Blend Network, we focus on funding small and medium-sized enterprise developers, so smaller sites and we think those will resume operations from mid-May, although it will be slow at the start,” Murciano said.

Meanwhile, LandlordInvest, which focuses on a different segment of the property market – buy-to-let mortgages – said it is seeing increased enquiries overall. Managing director Filip Karadaghi said that the platform has, so far, been relatively unaffected by borrowers unable to service their loans.

Karadaghi said he expects to see a pick-up in transaction volumes when the lockdown ends.

“We would reasonably expect that people still want to move and buy and sell properties,” he said.

Property development platform CapitalStackers has also seen an uptick in activity in its pipeline.

“We’re assessing potential deals and progressing with those which still represent satisfactory risk,” said Steve Robson, managing director of CapitalStackers.

Read more: How are P2P lenders responding to the coronavirus pandemic?

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