Funding Circle to Move into the Property Market?

One of the reasons why Northern Rock ran into trouble was that it made loans on commercial properties based on valuations which at the time were OK, but as the economy faltered the value of the developments collapsed. Several other building societies, or ex-building societies, also hit this problem. In Ireland a couple of years after the crash, there was at least one builder attempting to sell houses on the basis of "buy one, get one free". Indeed, the main basis of the crash was American lending institutions selling on loans to other institutions with inflated house valuations and optimistic borrower risk assessments.