Landbay cracks the £100m mark

Sharp uptick in growth since late last year sees the platform top the milestone.

The platform has seen a sharp uptick in growth since late last year.

P2P mortgage specialist Landbay has joined the nine-figure club. The platform, launched in 2014, has jumped from around £60m in cumulative lending in September 2017 to £100m today. It claims to have sustained zero defaults or arrears to date.

Landbay is a fully authorised platform specialising in buy-to-let mortgages. The platform has flagged that Prudential Regulation Authority reforms and the gradual removal of mortgage tax relief has prompted many landlords and their brokers to look to specialist mortgages lenders to guide them through the changes. This may well be a factor in the platform’s growth.

Another possible factor is its Innovative Finance ISA. Landbay is an early mover in the IFISA market, having launched the wrapper in early 2017. Now into its second ISA season, the platform’s CEO John Goodall (pictured) has recently been trumpeting his platform’s IFISA product as a rare source of stable, inflation-busting returns. Certain industry commentators have called 2018 a crunch year for the IFISA.

Goodall described the past six months as a “step change” for his business, after four years spent establishing a strong foundation.

“Lenders have been falling over themselves to help landlords and their brokers navigate an increasingly complex buy-to-let market, but it is the specialist lenders that have taken it in their stride,” he said.  

“If doubling our total lending volumes in the past six months isn’t proof enough that the specialist lending model is well suited to the current climate, then the fact that traditional lenders have been propped up by the Bank of England’s Term Funding Scheme should be. As the scheme comes to an end and mainstream lenders can no longer rely on this source of cheap capital our proposition will become yet more competitive. I look forward to running with the opportunity this brings.”