Devised as a way for users to get involved in the UK residential property market, Property Partner provides a way to invest in individual properties as “company stocks” and then secure a monthly rental income.
In launching the offering, Property Partner has raised £1.5m from its pool of new investors, as well as securing the services of former Royal Bank of Scotland global director of residential investment Robert Weaver as director of property.
To date, Property Partner has three London sites available to invest in. A “one-off transaction fee of two per cent” is charged on purchase of an investment, with an “industry standard rate” of 12.5 per cent (plus VAT) of rental income then charged by Property Partner for advertising, letting and property management.
According to a statement, the platform has funded one property, a house in South London, as par to a beta launch to a “closed group”.
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Daniel Gandesha, CEO of Property Partner, said: “We have the backing of heavyweight angel investors and the VC firm that backed Zoopla. We’ve just recruited Jalin Somaiya from Google, as our COO, and Robert Weaver from RBS. Rob is one of the UK’s leading residential property professionals. He’s managed a fund that held half a billion pounds of residential property and gave the keynote at the RICS conference last year.”
Molten, formerly of Alchemy Capital and now heading up Better Capital, has history when it comes to crowdfunding platform investments. In May 2013 he backed equity crowdfunding platform InvestingZone.
As part of the Property Partner service, investors can offer their property holdings for sale through a designated secondary market. Investors can realise “any capital gains” at any time, and after five years a “market rate” exit value is provided to even those with the least amount of money committed.
Gandesha added: “We set out to make investing in residential property as easy as buying shares. We’ve overcome significant financial, regulatory and technical challenges to make this a reality and the strong demand for our first property reinforces my belief that we have built something investors really want.”
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