London House Exchange - London

Graham F.

Investing in property should....!! Provide a steady stream of income with capital appreciation. However, here you have the opposite: steady declining rental income and zero capital appreciation. In fact, diminishing capital and rent would be more accurate.

Nathan S.

If you're looking to diversify your portfolio with real estate, I would recommend avoiding this service. Constantly suspending and reducing dividends, so using this for passive income is useless.

Likewise I've had a property held with them that's been stuck selling for ages, it's like they took the money and ran.

Wouldn't recommend.

EDIT as of October 2024, another property I hold has had it's dividend suspended. I'd rate half a star if I could.

andrew M.

AVOID!!!! I invested 10K in a flat in Hanwell west London (5 mins walk from the station) 6 years ago..Hanwell is now on the cross rail and has been voted one of the best places to live in the UK with prices up 15%...however according to property parter this equals a loss for the invester on their platform! They include so many hidden fees when it comes to their 5 year exit and then bombard you with jargon about how these fees are actually legit and not hidden at all! A disgracefull company run by a bunch of cowboys. Just look at how they respond to genuine compaints. Its a copy and paste job. Steer well clear of these financial charlitans.

James

I am going to be as fair as I can. I started with Property Partner in 2015, investing the minimum amount every month. It was a different way of investing. I invested small (compared to some people) as I saw Property Partner as untested waters and I didn't know where the platform would go.

There was announcement towards the end of 2018 that the minimum would be increased four fold. This is were my interest ended in Property Partner, I didn't know where the site was going and didn't want to risk losing my money.

I haven't really looked at property partner since then the monthly dividend kept me invested. Due to the small amounts I invested across multiple houses, it was easy to exit if I put the price down to the monthly average. Obviously, exiting in the middle of a global pandemic is bound to impact your returns, I exited quiet easily (due to the small amounts) and made a small loss.

Property Partner was a great test for me. I had a cautious approach and I am glad I did. I think the premise was good however, five years on it was time to go. You have to remember that this is an investment and you will have winners and losers. Just do your homework and see if it is right for you.

David P.

Avoid. Was impressed with the return when I first invested years ago and gradually this has been eroded by numerous “unseen” factors. Worrying for a property company with supposedly professional staff. The latest being the hike in interest rates where the company has been caught out because for some inexplicable reason borrowing wasn’t fixed in a period of historically low rates. Now dividends have been suspended again. So no return for investors but no doubt the increased management fees will still be paid. No new investments have been offered for years. Looks to be a just run for the benefit of the directors now.

Keiran D.

With ever expanding desires to be the next Warren Buffet I took the plunge and opened and account not long after they started. Paid in an initial investment of £150 and played about for a little while, I quickly saw this was a platform for large investments for which I didn't see the benefit. If you have enough to make a 25% deposit on a property somewhere, why not just go and buy your own? Of course unless you cannot get a mortgage that is.

I got bored and quickly forgot about it. Then a couple of years later I logged back in and saw I had accumulated a small dividend, when I say small, no where near the yield they claim or what a yield would be from even a pretty poor performing B2L.

Anyway, when the business model changed, it made it absolutely worthless investing in. My reasons for saying this are- the website became cumbersome and less intuitive, property shares up for sale would never sell and the kicker of it all, property price valuations had no reflection of current market rates. I have seen that shares on properties invested 6 years ago in areas where Crossrail now services have actually dropped in value... Really? REALLY?

The initial idea of this companies pitch was that you're actually purchasing a share of a property. Over time this seems to have changed from investing in bricks and mortar to just buying shares of a company. The former over time, as history proves only goes up. Some will argue this fact, however if you do your research you will see that property prices on average, double every 10-15 years. Even during the last economic down turn in the late 00s, some property values fell, but not by much whilst the majority just stagnated. In the following years almost all properties sky rocketed in relative value.

Long and short of it, if you purchased any shares of a property in the south east 6 years ago, you should expect to see a minimum of 20-25% ROI even in the pandemic. None of these shares I purchased 6 years ago reflect anything near this and currently I'm at a slight loss overall after dividends have been payed. Currently I'm getting 3p per month (2% yield).... To get such a low yield on B2L properties these guys are either letting them out for next to nothing or actually nothing.

If you're looking to invest in something and are considering Property Partner, exercise extreme caution.
If you want to make money below RPI stick it in a bank and leave it, yeah you won't get as much interest... Debatable. However you will be able to access your money any time you like and it won't fall down below it's initial deposit value without YOU spending it.
Someone will make money here but it's highly unlikely to be you.

Michael S.

Same issue as other investors here. These guys were good, but retrospective fee increases have killed the portfolio and resale market.
This reduced the value of all investments on the platform, and whilst PP claim the properties are valued highly, the resale market has plummeted meaning that it is hard to exit the platform without making losses. Property Partner is also outsourcing multiple services to other parties, not a good sign for the site.

Andrew T.

Over the long term, property remains an excellent asset class to invest in long term with both rental yields and capital appreciation making it extremely attractive vs equities, cash or bonds. People have experienced this for decades through BTL investments and many have done very well out of it. However, BTL investors have been increasingly targetted by unfair tax reforms, particularly under George Osborne, and onerous regulation. Therefore there is definitely a place for a platform like this that takes away the admin, diversifies the risk, wraps it in a tax-efficient format and provides secondary liquidity.

The price? Well costs are far higher than they would be if you did it yourself. Not just the obvious ones but the purchase fees in particular are easy to miss but become apparent, particularly when you have flat house price growth. They clearly made a mistake basing their initial business model so much on purchase fees, which made it much harder when they went a time without purchasing property. The introduction of the AUM has damaged their reputation enomously (as seen by other comments on here) but I would far rather that than run the risk of the platform collapsing and a disorderly liquidation.

For me, personally, the price of the model is still worth paying in the long term for the value.

As to the team themselves, they have delivered robust SPV structures, comprehensive information and a great website. They have established themselves as a market leader in property platforms and managed the COVID crisis well, making difficult decisions that I have largely agreed with. Certain areas they could have done better with historically, in particular:
- publishing actual rather than expected costs came too late; they still have a way to go to make these useful, relevant and timely
- they were slow to adjust dividends when they had issues rather than using the opaque central funds; this links to a wider probleem that they were treating this as fixed income investments rather than equity
- valuations have shown themselves to be unreliable when it's come time to sell the properties
- some of the figures are not consistent (eg the realised gains on some charts differ from the realised gains on the tax returns)

All in all, I've given four stars because I think it remains a good business case and they do a good job managing the properties and the platform, notwithstanding the areas for improvement that remain.