Online business marketplace lender ThinCats announced earlier this week that it has partnered with investment platform operator DomaCom for loan deals. This collaboration will reportedly provide a greater scope for exposure to property and loan opportunities.
DomaCom, which will soon be considered as a crowdfunding service, announced on Friday that Australia’s p2p business lending industry has benefited from “tightening” bank lending for SMEs. DomaCom chief executive, Arthur Naoumidis, stated:
“Our link with ThinCats will give advisers the ability to sit on both sides of a property transaction by creating leverage book builds. 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.”
While commenting on the partnership, ThinCats chief executive Sunil Aranha noted DomaCom’s link to the p2p industry would allow its lenders to gain exposure to both properties and loan opportunities. He explained lenders on ThinCats’ platform are currently providing more than $1 million in loans per month, and DomaCom will lift the lending site’s volumes even further. Aranda then shared the loans would be lower risk and have to be positively geared with an initial loan to value ratio of no more than 50%.
“The default rate for the fund borrowing the money is a low 3.5% above the ANZ overnight cash rate – this currently equates to 5.25% per annum. As the cost of the facility is 0.5% of the loan amount, lenders will currently receive 4.75% per annum – an attractive return in this low rate environment.”
He then added:
“This is a wonderful illustration of true disruption, with a crowdfunding 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.”
