Property investing, of a sort, for those with just a $1000 a spare

Sunday, 25 May 2025

A new peer-to-peer mortgage lending platform is opening up property investment to aspiring investors who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars.

Go Lend, which was launched in December, offers regular retail investors the ability to invest in property-secured, short-term loans that generate fixed returns starting at 8%.

It is a peer-to-peer model similar to that used by mortgage lenders Southern Cross and Squirrel Mortgages, and it is licensed by the Financial Markets Authority.

But the new platform’s difference is that retail investors are able to buy portions of mortgage loans down to as small as $1000.

Go Lend chief executive Luke Jackson said he and his co-founders wanted to create an environment where more people could participate in fixed term property investments without needing a minimum of $50,000.

“The minimum sums required in this space are often large: I saw one recently that was a million dollars. And that excludes many people from participating.

“When we looked at what was available for smaller retail investors who might be saving for a holiday or a car or a house deposit of their own, there wasn’t really any online portal - apart from maybe Sharesies - that they could use as a saving platform.”

The Go Lend platform offers investors a selection of mortgage loans to choose from. Investors select a loan aligned with their financial goals, and receive monthly interest payouts and automated settlements.

The loans on offer all come from the network of mortgage advisers built up by Jackson’s short-term lending business, Arrow Finance, now rebranded as Go Lend, he said.

“They will be loans that don’t fit the typical vanilla mold that banks tend to want because they are a bit more complex. But we pick loans that have a conservative loan-to-value ratio, usually around 30%.

“And they are all pre-funded and underwritten by us, because we understand people want to act pretty quickly at loan drawdown time. We want to give our advisers and their clients the certainty they need.”

Jackson, who has a background in non-bank lending at Resimac and Southern Cross, said the platform had attracted over 20,000 visitors in its first three months, and he was happy with the take up rate to date.

Any newly launched brand interested people, but they had started to see an increase in investors as people grew more aware of what the brand enabled, he said.

“We want to get it to a point where scale really tips in, and we can go back out to the mortgage market and attract more loans and speed it all up, so investors can have access to more new loans.”

New customers had asked why the platform had better returns than other competitors, and a large part of it was due to the use of advanced AI and automation, he said.

“Our technology allows us to deliver better returns by cutting unnecessary costs. We’ve slashed the human staff cost out of our expense model, and this translates to maximum customer gains.”

Jackson said the plan was to keep working on the platform and evolving it as investor numbers grew, but the next stage would be to survey the investors and see what they wanted the platform to deliver.

In the past, there have been other efforts to open up property investing to more New Zealanders, but they have tended to revolve around crowdfunding models, and have not been successful.