Hi Kenny, glad you have taken action with your LTD company! Most people struggle to just start.

Property Partner started well but then increased the fees. This led to a combination of lower returns and additional discounts in the secondary market as investors rushed for the exits. It wasn’t hard to sell your investments, but selling them at the right price was challenging ;) Then COVID happened and rents were interrupted. They are coming back now and prices have started appreciating.

Since then they also sold a few properties that reached their 5-year exit plan for a 5% per annum return.

The portfolio update just came out (March 2022).

So far, personally, I have not sold the investments and viewed the 1% fee as a must-have for the platform to survive. Now they have stronger resources after being acquired.

To your other question, I don’t think the interest rates will have a devastating effect on property crowdfunding. Interest rates work like gravity so sure, it’ll affect all risk assets including property. But at the same time inflation is rampant. The alternative, staying in cash or bonds is also painful. Real estate / hard assets should keep up, theoretically.

Good luck and thanks for reading!

You can find all my PP follow-up posts here.

Firstly congratulations on such a great blog! I’ve only recently stumbled onto your blog and find all the material you have very interesting indeed. It has inspired me to open a second limited company alongside my trading company to invest the excess funds I have.

I have been looking at property partner since I found it here and I wonder how you have been doing on it since 2018 ? Just wondering whether property partner have delivered on their promise of uninterrupted yield payments and how difficult you have found it to ‘sell’ your shares in individual propertied ?

You did mention that you would post updates but I could not find a link to it. Do you think with the increasing base rates that are occurring/looming that it would have a detrimental effect on property investing in this way ?

Thanks for your time!

Property Partner is slowly picking up steam again. I’m expecting a price rebound once they announce the dividends restarting in more properties end of March.

Property partner vs Buy-to-let: It’s a personal choice, Shaky. Property Partner offers a more hands-off approach to property investing but with less transparency compared to a traditional buy-to-let. But it’s more liquid and if you’re doing it through an LTD company the dividends are exempt from corporation tax which is an added bonus.

The mortgage you mentioned makes no difference assuming the same mortgage exists in PP. That’s because house price growth is reflected in the property partner share price too.

Thanks for an update on your investment. I am planning to invest surplus company cash in property but got confusion about choose Property Partner or actual property.

Ex: If I put down £30K in property partner, I can expect around 4-5% return after all fees. (assuming we are in for yield). So, lets say around £1500/year.

If the same cash use to put down as 25% (25K deposit + 5K other expenses) deposit against 100K home. And roughly similar return expected isn’t this will generate around £4 to £5k/year. We are using the mortgage amount we borrowed in our favor. Or I am missing something.

You know what they say, Charlie: The best time to invest was yesterday, the next one is today :) Here is the latest update on Property partner during Coronavirus and one on my Property Partner returns a few months back.

Thanks

That’s a really bad experience, Bill. It goes to show that a very careful due diligence is needed before investing a penny. You’re trusting the platform too, not just the property market to go up. Have you taken things up with the Financial ombudsman? You should be able to.

Similar to how Lendy failed and Ratesetter succeeded, there are different kind of platforms out there. Having met the team behind Property Partner I like their honesty and transparency. Even in hard times, where they decided to increase the fees, they justified it although they lost some trust. Also, it helps that they’re FCA regulated.

Hi Vig,

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Property partner is indeed a great diversifier to my other investments. I quite like the option to invest in multiple properties in a hassle-free way.

Having said that, Property partner fees are now much higher, making it a decent investment only for those willing to invest a large sum. Feel free to read my article, but in short, the large sum threshold is at least £25,000 the way I calculated it, even better if one can invest over £50k in British property. That way the fees are not that bad for the risk/reward proposition.

I have been investing for about a year with them and have made regular contributions over time. Therefore my annualised return is not so easy to calculate (and PP does not provide one). Roughly I estimate it to be 7-8% and I believe after the new fees it’ll be around 6% for me.

I’m not aware of the team behaviour at Lendy but I have met the PP team and I found them decent people trying to run an honest business. Also, I would not compare it to any other peer-to-peer lending platform really when it comes to returns or asset classes. Those are totally different asset classes (consumer lending vs property equity) and the legal structure is also very different.

Let me know your views when/if you end up using them!

Cheers,
Michael

Have you been impacted by this? Has this changed your view of them? It seems very similar behaviour to the team at Lendy and they are not under Administration, tying up investor money.

Thanks
Vig