The service launched last month and had required a minimum investment of £50,000 but that figure has now been reduced to £10,000. LendInvest said that it was targeting a gap in the residential and commercial mortgage market which existing lenders were unable to fill.
It highlighted research by the Open Data Institute (ODI) which had shown the peer-to-peer had trebled in size since 2010. The ODI also predicted that the market would reach £1bn by the end of 2016.
This research also pointed out that most investment in peer-to-peer services was below £50,000, something which prompted LendInvest to lower its requirements.
LendInvest managing director David Serafini said: “The recent ODI report shows that there is a huge amount of interest in this asset class. There were also a number of really interesting items to come out of the report.
“One of these was that in over 14m loan parts that have traded, only a very small handful of these were for large amounts of money (over £50,000). So whilst the P2P space is growing rapidly and moving into the mainstream, crowdfunding has a way to go for it to become a mainstream investment for High Net Worth and sophisticated investors.”
LendInvest co-founder Christian Faes added: “Since LendInvest launched, we have completed almost £5 million of transactions over numerous deals.
“The real advantage with LendInvest is that investors can start earning a return on their investment straight away – investors don’t have to wait around for months on end, to see if enough investors sign up to do a deal. We have live deals that are funded and there for investors to take loan parts in.”
