LendInvest Clinches Warehouse Funding Line from Macquarie

Property lending platform LendInvest has secured a £40m warehouse funding line from Macquarie.

The £40m will be invested in real estate loans through the platform. The smoke signals suggest that LendInvest may be laying the foundations for a securitisation, which would be the platform’s first. Warehouse funding facilities often precede securitisations. The first securitisation in the UK’s marketplace lending space took place earlier this month, a Deutsche Bank deal comprised of £130m of Funding Circle loans.

With the clinching of the Macquarie line, LendInvest is now raving about the diversity of its capital base – which is comprised of a range of retail and institutional funding. The £40m Macquarie facility is LendInvest’s fourth bank funding line – but its first warehouse line. The size of the facility may be increased over time. The company has seen £230m invested by UK and international institutions to date.

Christian Faes, Co-Founder & CEO of LendInvest, commented:

“LendInvest is creating the most diverse capital base of any mortgage lender in the market which is a key differentiator for our business. By welcoming another significant institution and funding line to our business, we are putting in place the foundations for a very scalable move into longer duration lending and ultimately the mainstream UK mortgage market.”

“Macquarie is a leading global financial institution with a proven deep knowledge of the UK mortgage market. We look forward to working with the Macquarie team as we expand our product range with longer term loans that are attractive to them and other capital markets investors. This warehousing line will assist us as we move towards being able to securitise our assets for institutional investors.”

LendInvest’s funding sources may well become more varied still. We learned in October last year that the platform was mulling over the launch of its own fund structure, one that was rumoured to be similar in style to the Funding Circle SME Income Fund – which raised £150m through an IPO on the London Stock Exchange in November 2015. We’ve not heard much about the LendInvest fund since the breaking of the news.

Of course LendInvest already has a fund structure in play. The platform was originally spun out of the real estate fund Montello Capital, which later merged with its progeny to become LendInvest Capital. Two discretionary funds are currently investing through this vehicle.

LendInvest – which specialises in buy-to-let mortgages and bridging loans – has lent a cumulative total of £626m, with a year-to-date lending volume of £130m. The platform boasts a 3 month market share of 13.85% within the UK’s peer-to-peer lending space, according to the Liberum AltFi Volume Index UK. The platform has raised a little shy of £40m in equity capital over the past year – £22m from Chinese technology company Beijing Kunlun in June 2015, and £17m from tech VC firm Atomico in March of this year.