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Review of the CrowdProperty, Peer to Business Lending:

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Huge loss of capital for self and wife

My wife and I are not professional investors. We don’t have detailed knowledge and experience of investment in the property market. We started investing when Crowd Property had recently started its platform and promoted itself and the investment projects on line – each one presented in detail. At that time, about 8-9 years ago, great emphasis was given by Crowd Property to its protection of investors’ investments by the first charge on projects taken by Crowd Property on behalf of investors. This important safeguard was, in those days, given more prominence than the statement about risk of the investment. As the number of projects increased, the relative prominence of protection and risk reversed. For the past 3 years or so, the risk of investment has been given the major prominence in a box on the front page. The first charge protection which Crowd Property used to promote is not given the prominence it used to have – may be because there have been, as others have noted, more and more investment failures for which first charge protection has not protected investors. Some projects are still outstanding 4 years after they should have completed. Whilst our early investments delivered good returns more or less on time, we have lost a considerable sum of money in the last 4-5 years – far more than we achieved in interest. Capital has been lost and estimated interest has evaporated. We stopped investing when we saw the much greater prominence given by Crowd Property to the risk warning. Of course, we may have just been unlucky. Or, we relied too much on the first charge protection which has proved to be ineffective. We have just been told by Crowd Property, that unless you are a high net worth individual or a sophisticated investor, then Crowd Property is not for you. This latest “warning” to ordinary people, ie that lending through Crowd Property is not for them, hasn’t come soon enough. How many more ordinary people have lost money via investment in Crowd Property projects? It would appear from reviews on Smart Money People that there are more failed individual investments than might have been expected. Were we, and others, mis-sold those investment opportunities during the period when the risk of investment was claimed to be “balanced” by reference to first charge protection? If our experience is shared with others, then maybe it is something which should be explored further. Reviewed on: 9th August 2025

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