Landbay Launches Rental Index

High growth P2P platform Landbay is launching a rental index in order to spur on investment in the UK buy-to-let space.

The Landbay Rental Index, powered by MIAC, will go live later this month. The purpose of the index is to provide advanced insight into buy-to-let investment by monitoring rental prices and market trends across the country. The index will be fuelled by a “unique blend” of local data and bedroom number analysis – which Landbay is touting as the key distinguishing feature.

MIAC is a leading provider of mortgage asset analytics, and will bring valuable experience in data modeling to the index. The index itself will marry granular insight with macro-economic commentary, in an effort to produce the most consummate indicator of trends within the buy-to-let space to date. Rental trends will be reported by region, county, London boroughs and beyond. Rents will also be analysed based on the number of bedrooms in a property. Analysis of the findings will be conducted by both Landbay and MIAC, with plain input data sourced from Zoopla. An estimated 100,000 individual property data points will be loaded into the index each month.

Landbay rival LendInvest – which has lent £390m to date, according to the Liberum AltFi Volume Index UK – launched its own buy-to-let index in October 2014 (the LIBTLI). This was then pitched as the UK’s most comprehensive buy-to-let index, harnessing over a million data points from Zoopla and the UK Land Registry. Landbay’s attempts to follow suit will only add to the volume of information available to investors in the rapidly growing P2P buy-to-let space.

Landbay CEO John Goodall has always been a strong proponent of sector transparency, as evidenced by his decision to make Landbay’s full loan book (complete with interest rate paid by the borrower) publicly available at an early stage in the platform’s development. If successfully executed, Landbay’s new index should allow lenders the chance to make more informed investment decisions when allocating funds to the platform. Starting at some point in September, the Landbay Rental Index will be published on a monthly basis going forward.

Mr. Goodall offered his thoughts:

“The ability to offer new and highly developed data insights into the buy-to-let and wider property market is very exciting for us. Our P2P mortgage lending platform was developed using the latest innovations in financial technology, so data and insight are already in our DNA.  We’re confident our partnership with MIAC will give answers to what is driving prices and trends in the private rented sector. Being able to see how rental trends differ by number of bedrooms will be useful in a very practical way, particularly for those looking to invest in buy-to-let. We hope this tool will prove a useful guide to buy-to-let investors, and stimulate a discussion amongst industry commentators.

“The UK property market is fluid and complicated. To really pinpoint what is happening we need local and bedroom number data. With this index we’ll truly find out who and where is pulling the levers in the rental market.”