Disruptive partnership forms between two Australian platforms

ThinCats Australia has joined forces with DomaCom, a soon to list real estate equity investment platform.

The partnership will involve using ThinCats loans in order to gear properties on the DomaCom platform. This may be the first time that a peer-to-peer lending company and real estate equity investment platform have collaborated in this way. DomaCom chief executive Arthur Naoumidis said that the tie-up will give advisers the ability to sit on both sides of a property transaction by creating “leveraged book builds”. These loans will be positively geared, with an initial loan to value ratio of no more than 50 per cent.

DomaCom is building up towards a landmark listing on the ASX. The listing will target gross proceeds of between AU$5m and AU$23.71m, giving the company an indicative market cap of between AU$80.6m and AU$93.6m. 

The ThinCats partnership may also open up future investment opportunities for investors across the two platforms. Naoumidis said: “This also provides the 350 lenders on the ThinCats platform the opportunity to gain exposure to property assets and the ability to lend funds at an attractive interest rate with a lower risk profile.”

Naoumidis expects to see strong interest in the first of these facilities. Investors in the deal will receive an interest rate of 4.75 per cent per annum, which he sees as an attractive return in a low interest rate environment.

ThinCats boss Sunil Aranha says that lenders on the platform are now funding over $1m in loans per month, and that the DomaCom partnership will lift these volumes “even further”. He continued: “This is a wonderful illustration of true disruption, with a crowd funding platform and peer-to-peer lending platform working together to enable [self-managed superannuation funds] to benefit from gains associated with property ownership whilst earning attractive fixed income returns.”