The team at Blend Network, an online peer to peer (P2P) property lending platform, recently shared comments and feedback from one of their lenders.
UK-based Blend Network notes that a platform lender (investor) “Maria,” has spent most of her career working in management roles and the past 15 years focused on the financial services sector, mostly in mortgages. During the summer months of 2019, Maria decided to become self-employed and has since been working as a consultant and non-executive advisor to various banking institutions and building societies.
She noted that she’s fairly new to this “whole investment thing.” Maria explained that she grew up in Glasgow and Newcastle and her family didn’t really discuss money issues. She also mentioned that after 15 years working in the banking sector, she only recently began to think more about money management.
She’s been maintaining long-term savings accounts for her children, and a fixed-term investment in bonds. She’s also got her own account which she opened around 15 years ago. Then, she began investing in peer-to-peer (P2P) property lending with Blend Network, which was the first time where she had to “go and do the investment myself,” Maria noted.
Maria told the Blend Network team:
“I heard about P2P property lending in the financial trade press and met people at various events who were investing, and I actually saw you (Roxana) speak at the Women In Finance summit and we ended up chatting afterwards. You were talking about the fact that women tend to save but not invest…”
She continued:
“My experience of opening the account for the other products that I have, stocks and shares ISA, was that it was actually very difficult to navigate, it was very difficult to know what to set up, some of the language and the terminology was really technical and almost written as if you were a very experienced investor.”
Maria further noted that if you’re not familiar with these technical words and terminology, then it can be challenging to figure out how these investments actually work or are performing. She also mentioned that what got her into P2P property lending and interested in Blend Network was “the fact that you were investing in affordable housing.”
Maria added:
“Housing is really important to our economy and to the financial well-being of the nation, and owning your own property … [can be] a really big thing and being financially secure and financially independent and creating wealth that you can then leave for your kids. So what I found with Blend Network is that because it was property-backed and property was what I was comfortable with, I knew that property is always a good investment over the longer term…”
Maria claims that the Blend Network platform is simple to use, because it’s easy to register and to set up. She confirmed that investment “always involves risk and that you should only invest what you feel comfortable with.”
As reported recently, the Blend Network team stated that they remain focused on funding “highly liquid” properties in “very strong pockets” of the UK property market. They claim that they’ve had a “very strong” Q4 by “funding £2,990,000 in the last quarter of 2020 and by repaying £194,557.08 to our lenders in Q4.”
In an interview with Crowdfund Insider in October 2020, Roxana Mohammadian-Molina, CSO at Blend Network, noted:
“Peer-to-peer (P2P) property lending is a very accessible way to start investing in property. It is a tool that allows anyone to invest in property-secured loans. In our case, anyone can invest from as little as £1,000. P2P property lending originally emerged as a way to democratize investing because it allows a wide range of investors, high net worth investors, family offices, institutional investors and retail investors, to all co-invest in property-secured loans. So, effectively it allows people who only have a few thousand Pounds available to invest along with very sophisticated investors in a syndicated loan.”
In another interview with CI in August 2020, Yann Murciano, CEO at Blend Network, stated:
“Having emerged only a decade ago as a so-called ‘alternative investment product’, it would be fair to say that P2P property lending has now consolidated itself as a fully-fledged asset class in its own right, with a loyal investor base who over the past few years have been slowly but steadily wooed not only by the returns but also by the flexibility that this product offers.”