Yacht (and vehicle) P2P Pawn Broking

Best of luck with the promotion.  Let's all hope it produces some more borrowers.

On a related point...

I was looking at the Lendy Marine website, and in particular the form a potential borrower completes to find out how much they could borrow.  For a boat with no outstanding financing, the loan available is half the boat's valuation.  That's 50% LTV, and it's what I would expect based on what we've been told here so far. 

If the boat does have an outstanding debt, however, the web page suggests the loan available is half the owner's equity.  So a boat valued at £70k with remaining financing of £30k shows a loan available of £20k.

Is that correct?  Allowing a further £20k loan would bring the total debt up to £50k, and that's a LTV of 71%.  Presuming Lendy would end up with a subordinate/second charge on the boat, the security position of the Lendy loan is a lot poorer than the apparent LTV might suggest.  In order not to exceed the desired 50% LTV, the total lending on a £70k boat should be limited to £35k, which ought to mean the borrower in this example should be offered a Lendy loan of no more than £5k.

Would Lendy actually be willing to lend a further £20k on a boat valued at £70k that had £30k of existing financing?  If not, then the web page loan size estimator needs to be revised.

Finally, since I've not seen any mention of other loans in the description of any of the SS loans made so far I've assumed there weren't any, and that the Lendy loan was the only debt secured by the boat value.  Is that a reasonable assumption for me to have made?  Can SS please confirm that none of these boats have any loans outstanding other than the Lendy loans?  Presuming that is the case, can we have SS's assurance that if a boat does have a prior loan secured on it this will be made clear to potential SS lenders?

Thank you.

Thanks for the reassurance.

It sounds like you're doing the right thing, so the only problem is the website page that indicates the owner of a £70k boat with remaining financing of £30k could borrow £20k from Lendy.  That's something for the website developers to deal with.

Fraudulent borrowers: we request copies of owners certificates, bills of sale, registry transcripts, boat keys, ID and proof of address from borrower. We also liase closely with the marina or boatyard regarding the boat who are usually aware who the owner is also.

Existing finance: We check marine registries for recorded marine mortgages, we also require borrowers to sign a 'Declaration of no liens' against the boat as part of the borrowing documentation. We also check interest in the boat with the major marine finance providers.

Source of deal: We do not rely on Borro for our only source of deals, they have provided c.5% of written business to date.

Backup plan: If one director gets run over by a bus (or an office!) the other director would still be able to run the business. We are currently putting in place a Trust to cover the eventuality of the demise of both directors to insure all investments are returned correctly.

HMRC is a 'potential' creditor of any business. however I can confirm that at present HMRC is not a creditor of Lendy Ltd.

All perfectly reasonable, Mike, and it certainly would increase lender confidence.  I question, however, whether investor confidence needs increasing - you saw how fast today's loan was covered.  There seems to be no shortage of lenders with adequate confidence as far as I can see.

I'd be happy enough to see it working as you suggest, but I'm equally happy as things are, because (as with FS) I have to trust that the valuations are as stated anyway and regardless of how closely I scrutinise the documents I'm not, in truth, any the wiser really afterwards.  In any case, our funds are only loosely, and indeed artificially, linked with the boats/cars themselves - we are making loans to Lendy who have undertaken to pay us a fixed return.  The valuations of items are just there to reassure us that they will have money coming in from which to pay us, so if we don't like the look of anything in particular then it's almost irrelevant.  What is more relevant is the likely term of the loan, because that does relate to the likely timing of the return of our funds, and that IS made available at the same time as the loan.

We don't get that sort of valuation from FS at all, and given that we are making loans directly on those items and stand to lose if they don't realise something close to the estimated value in the case of default, surely we should be a good deal more worried about that shouldn't we?

The site is also blocked by Chrome with message: "Reported Phishing Website Ahead!"

I've examined the site using Internet Explorer and can find no reason why it should be blocked.

I get the same message but the site looks ok when you get there.
He also seems to be listed on a range of surveyor lists so I suspect Chrome may have got it wrong.

app.webinspector.com/public/reports/19904744

Suspicious connections.

www.chris-temple-surveys.co.uk/modules/mod_ext_superfish_menu/assets/css/superfish.css

www.chris-temple-surveys.co.uk/modules/mod_ext_superfish_menu/assets/js/hoverIntent.js

www.chris-temple-surveys.co.uk/modules/mod_ext_superfish_menu/assets/js/superfish.js