How we find loans for you to invest in

Hend Abdel Salam, Business Development Manager - Lending

At Southern Cross Partners, we’re proud to be a locally owned business. We’re a tight team of industry experts, who believe in values like honesty, loyalty and trust.

When I first started at Southern Cross Partners I worked directly with investors, offering investments backed by a tangible security - property. The investment team offers flexible investment options that are transparent and steady.

But early last year, I moved to our specialist lending side of our business. The is the arm of the business that finds lending opportunities. When I look at loan applications, I’m always thinking about what our investors would like to invest in. As a specialist lender, we pick up where the banks give up. We offer short term, flexible lending solutions that get everyday people from A-to-B.

There are no impersonal algorithms here. Instead we put faces to numbers and people at the heart of everything we do. Being 100% independent also means we have the freedom to work in ways that work best for us and our clients – together.

We take the time to get to know the people we’re lending to and understand individual circumstances. We work with a small group of mortgage advisors and the vast majority of our loan applications come through advisors we’ve worked with before.

When mortgage advisors bring us loan applications, I have my eyes on four things:

• A clear exit. We need to know how a person is going exit their loan with us, at a set time. Ultimately, it’s about making sure people can repay their loans at the end of their lending term.
• Realistic repayments. We’re looking to see if the person taking out the loan can easily make their repayments with us.
• Loan to value ratio. The difference between what a property is valued at and how much we are lending gives us a buffer in case the property needs to be sold unexpectedly. So this is a crucial element we assess for and we tend to be more conservative than the banks on this front.
• Valuation. There are a few ways we can value a property. Sometimes we’ll have an independent valuer involved and other times we’ve got enough data from the sale of similar properties. But what’s most important is that we can explain to our investors how we decided on the valuation.