Jessica and Alex recently had a nasty experience. An agency nurse and a secondary school teacher respectively, they had secured a partial advance on a mortgage last year to renovate a delightful but highly dilapidated cottage. Located in an idyllic little village not far from the town where they both worked, they commissioned a home maintenance and construction firm to carry out the work.
To begin with, things went swimmingly. The old roof was replaced and a new one installed, an extension was constructed to expand the kitchen, dining and upstairs spaces. The “shell” of the house was now fully renovated. What remained to be done was the interior: Removing some old partition walls to create larger spaces, and installing other partitions (for example, to create a walk-in wardrobe and new en suite bathrooms in the bedrooms). And, of course, replacing the electrical wiring with a new system and circuit board, plus new plumbing and plastering (Jessica and Alex were confident that they could install their new kitchen themselves).
But suddenly, in mid-summer, the nightmare struck. The building firm went bust. With cold weather drawing in, they were left standing in a shell with an interior that was only partially finished.
The bank would only release the full value of the mortgage when the cottage had been fully completed. Where do a young couple suddenly find £20,000? In fact, Jessica and Alex had £10,000 in reserve. But they were still £10,000 short.
Alex suddenly realised that they had money tied up in a very valuable possession: when his older brother had a substantial lottery win a few years ago, he gifted Alex a splendid Rolex day-date watch, complete with 18 carat gold case and bracelet and a diamond set dial. He began researching pawnbrokers in the hope of raising the additional sum. But both he and Jessica were dismayed by the eyewatering interest rates they all charged.
It was then that they stumbled across an online article in CreditToday featuring peer-to-peer lender Unbolted. What immediately caught their eye was the fact that Unbolted allows consumers to borrow against their personal goods. Not only was it fast (an offer could be made within hours of uploading a picture of the valuable, with money transferred into the borrower’s account just hours after receipt of the asset), the interest rates charged by this p2p lender were incomparably better than the pawnbroker option. In addition, there would be no potentially damaging credit searches to contend with, either: The asset is collateralised by Unbolted as security for the loan. This secured asset loan model renders applicants’ creditworthiness irrelevant to Unbolted’s pool of lenders.
The platform’s expert partners determined that Alex’s watch had a re-sale value of £15,000. Alex and Jessica had a loan of £10,000 in their banks within hours of the Rolex arriving at our London office. We help it in safe storage for six months, on the basis that should the couple be unable to repay the sum at the end of that term, we would auction it, returning anything above our originally agreed amount them.
Alex and Jessica’s nightmare is over: the additional work has now been completed and the bank has released the remaining mortgage sum, allowing them to repay our loan. Alex is once again proudly wearing his Rolex.
