Invest & Fund Blog

'Tis the Season

As this is our last weekly blog before Christmas, it's timely to reflect on where the UK peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector stood in 2025 and have a peek at what comes next. In a year dominated by the rise of the great Quangocracy, unaccountable, unelected clever people chipping in their

Reasons to Be Cheerful

In what we absolutely promise is our second and final analysis of this month's budget, and before we move on to a lighter and more joyous festive mood to close out our 2025 run of blogs, we wanted to revisit the outlook presented by the OBR and perhaps paint a

Scheduled Send

As fast as the OBR can press the send button on their report, this week we have decided to fire out an end-of-week briefing of our own, in the first of what will become a two-part exploration of the deeper narratives of this week's extraordinary budget. We asked ourselves: What

Rearranging Deckchairs

Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed offering 50-year mortgages to homebuyers in the United States as part of his housing affordability agenda. On its face, the idea might sound attractive: extend the terms so that monthly payments drop, thereby improving affordability for retail clients, without introducing a

Stability Without Conviction

The Bank of England’s October 2025 Decision Maker Panel (DMP) report provides the UK with a snapshot of how thousands of UK businesses perceive inflation, wages, and uncertainty. While the data covers the economy as a whole, its signals are particularly relevant for the housing and construction sectors, as

Mood

It's perceived that until the cards are turned over on the upcoming budget The Bank of England will continue to be cautious in its decision making, which may have been a sizeable factor in its decision last week to keep the base rate at 4% after a finely balanced vote.

Common People

In this week's blog, we look back to March 2025, when the Government published the Commonhold White Paper, the first step towards fulfilling its manifesto promise to abolish leasehold. The Ministerial Foreword stated: “The government is determined to ensure that commonhold becomes the default tenure…commonhold is not merely an

Defcon 1?

In this week's blog, amid persistent housing shortages, high interest rates, and tightening planning constraints, the UK's housing market finds itself once again at a crossroads, where everyone is looking for answers. The Government's target of 1.5 million new homes within this Parliament seems to have set it up

Opaque

"There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man", whispered Billy Sole in the 1987 movie Predator, the looming threat of being picked off by some monster in the shadows stalking the global economy has been the hot talking point in international financial media this week, with

Selective Opportunity

If you're an SME property developer, you're probably sick and tired of everyone telling you how unbelievably difficult things have been from the comfort of the sidelines, so to try and rebalance things a little here, in this week's blog, we are bucking the trend, and we are calling 2026

Recycling Ideas

In this week's blog, we jump straight in off the back of what the Independent Newspaper has dubbed a "major shake-up to house buying" and examine the latest series of Labour pledges that could have a direct and positive impact on supply-side transactions for our clients and developers. We often

Turf War

"Whatever is popular is wrong", once stated Oscar Wilde. Although it may seem incredibly pretentious to begin a blog on something as dry as the UK Planning system with a quote from one of the country's great wordsmiths, in this week's economic word salad, we are digging our heels in

Reputation

Invest&Fund recently attended the Jersey Finance Private Wealth Management Conference 2025, where the theme of this year's event was 'reputation', highlighting its importance in the modern era, where reputations can be built quickly and lost equally as easily. A.I., social media, communication technology, and independent media, arguably the

Repeats

Housing Secretary Steve Reed stood before industry leaders this week and declared a "call to arms" to "build, baby, build", perhaps a subtle nod to Donald Trump's now infamous "drill, baby, drill" from January this year, and moreover, maybe a nod to the golden 'pre internet' era when American television

Habits

In this week's blog, we begin with a simple question: Could the pension changes on the horizon be a tailwind for P2P lending and IFISA inflows? Could new habits be created within an older generation of savers & investors, flying in the face of the well-worn narratives around risk? We speculate

The Office

In this week's blog, we have picked up on a recent story published in The Guardian newspaper around a national pushback on PDR schemes, stating that dozens of businesses and individuals have presented an open letter to the government demanding an end to "office-to-residential conversions" across England, which their analysis

Institution

One of the topics we have covered extensively over the years is the paradigm shift in the perception of old-fashioned peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, from a quirky experiment to a regulated sector commanding a book value of multiple billions and revenue in the hundreds of millions. So at this point, as

Rent

For this week's blog, we have looked at the August 2025 edition of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) report entitled Private Rental Affordability in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, to assess the ever-widening disparity between UK rents and UK income and have quickly concluded that the UK housing market

Democratising

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go," is a quote attributed to the sublime T.S. Eliot, but could that kind of boldness be utilised in reframing the way we look at institutional grade asset classes in the UK, and

Romano Tours

One of the most frequent questions that arises in passing conversation is comparisons between our asset class and others, in particular housing-based asset classes, such as direct investment into property assets, and holding buy-to-lets. These chats usually include the pros and cons, the yield projections, risk and reward of capital

Partner, not Borrower

Now, anyone with a smattering of sales acumen will tell you that the words 'partners' or 'partnerships' are much more beguiling than 'borrower' or 'client', with their subtle suggestion of a symbiosis of equals. Still, we use that word within our business, not just for aesthetic reasons; it's used as

Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity

We will never fully know if Shakespeare, when setting about writing 'As You Like It', and first coining the poignant musing embedded in this week's blog title, was 1. Thinking about finding deeper meaning in the bittersweet challenges of life, or 2. Thinking about signals for well-positioned property developers to

The Land Must Belong to All Who Toil

In this week's blog, we take a deeper look at some of the different scenarios that could occur should we see the announcement of the much-debated Wealth Tax in this year's Autumn budget. With a possible 2% tax on assets held over £ 10 million being mooted, supporters are quick to

Inertia to Intention.

Banks, like Antelopes, tend to move in herds when reacting to a threat. As the looming threat of liquidity preservation emerges in a falling rate environment, banks, like Antelopes, know that if they want to see another sunrise over the Savannah, they must move quickly. As overall loan demand from

Things We Think and Do Not Say

The UK woke up today to headlines stating that house prices have achieved their most significant monthly fall in more than two years, according to Nationwide survey data, with a 0.8% drop last month, the largest of significance since February 2023. There will be much discussion about why, with