Buy2letcars

allunnicks

I am looking at investing in this scheme. Looking to find out how safe/good the scheme is. Any feedback appreciated, I think it was on this forum back at the beginning in 2018 so looking for latest information.  

bigadaj

Nor very I would suggest.

EdGasketTheSecond

Well the reviews look good if they are genuine:

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/buy2letcars.com

Personally I wouldn't invest; could be another pyramid scheme.

bowlhead99

You could search the phrase on the search tool of this forum and find that whenever the company is mentioned, the experienced posters here tell people to avoid it. It is an investment that once bought, you can't sell to anyone else, with risk of 100% loss  - and is not a regulated investment product. They say that if the person taking the vehicle doesn't pay and they can't lease it to somebody else, they will cover 85% of the shortfall - but the 'guarantee' is simply coming from them - a private company, and private companies go out of business all the time. With recessions and pandemics reducing the amount of miles people want to drive or the types of cars people can afford to drive, it's not a great time to lend money to a middleman who hopes to use it to buy and lease out a car to someone in return for riches beyond your wildest dreams. There is a reason they are offering  to pay over 100x the bank base rate on loans made to them, and it is because there's a high risk of failure.

In their FAQ, about what if someone leases the car and then cancels their insurance or lets it run out, and then crashes or has the car stolen, they basically say 'don't worry, we check once a month that they have insurance'.  They don't actually give the answer to the question which is that if the insurance has stopped being valid in the 30 days since they last checked, the car will cease to exist and you won't be able to get your money back unless they can convince the lessor to come up with all the money. And they don't address what happens if the insurance that they checked exists fails to pay out because the driver was drunk or using it for an unauthorised purpose such as doing some uber deliveries when he only bought insurance for social and commuting. There are all kinds of reasons why the car could get totalled without enough compensation. 

In the FAQ about what if the end user fails to make payments, they say they will try to get the car back and re-hire to someone else although may need to change your monthly payments to reflect new hire terms (e.g. they are no longer leasing out a brand new car, so nobody is going to want to pay as much per month); they go on to say they you 'will always receive at least 85% of your initial loan amount back provided buy2letcars is able to pay this amount to you'.  So, provided they are able to pay you, you will lose money on what you gave them, and if they are not able to pay you, they won't pay you.

This has come up on the forum from time to time over the last 5+ years.  There are fewer P2P business around these days as the model is not very secure; people are removing their money from the sector in droves. Even so, there are FCA regulated P2P businesses offering opportunities, so no obvious reason to go with a completely unregulated company with high headline rates for high amount of risk.   

Their headline is that you can get an 11% return, but using the slider tool on their website front page, that's only if you are lending them a hundred grand, which would be a monster commitment for what is essentially a loan to a private company that has never filed any audited financial statements at UK Companies House.  You would be an idiot to do it. Even the 'default' loan size of £14k in the middle of the slider with a target payout of 9% is, as fellow forum user masonic mentioned when this came up five years ago , "too much to invest in a single company like this unless you have half a million or so in investable assets".

If you do have half a million to play around with and have already invested £485k in sensible mainstream investments, then sure, have a bit of a gamble with this, and mentally write it off so you don't get disappointed when the lease fails and they pay you back a small amount of your capital 'as long as they are able'.

EdGasketTheSecond said:

Well the reviews look good if they are genuine:

Personally I wouldn't invest; could be another pyramid scheme.

Yes, the reviews are implausible IMHO - no financial product provider with over 150 reviews has 97% five star, 3% four star, and zero in the three, two and one categories, unless they are buying reviews (or writing them themselves with friends and family) and then disputing and taking down any genuine customer review.

As they are not regulated by the financial conduct authority and don't have sufficient turnover, assets or employee numbers to require their annual filed accounts to be audited (and have not done so voluntarily) they can basically say whatever they like.  A fool and his money are soon parted etc.

jamei305

Car leasing is a low-margin business in which the risk on individual contracts is mitigated by the large volumes involved.

Lending money for three years on a single vehicle where the customer has a poor credit record sounds like a silly thing to do.

Comparing it to buy-to-let property is disingenuous because in this case the value of the asset is guaranteed to fall, so your profits are reliant on the borrower making all the payments.

kangoora

I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole..............

AnotherJoe

Just lost my typing so  as its too much of a pain to redo, I"ll simplify to just dont.

And stop using google or facebook as your way of researching investments because you'll just trawl up more loss making opportunities that might as well be scams except with a scam you realise you've lost your money quicker.

 

Stubod

kangoora said:

..I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole..............

..can I borrow the bargepole when you have finished with it....'nough said...

bowlhead99

Stubod said:

kangoora said:

..I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole..............

..can I borrow the bargepole when you have finished with it....'nough said...

He's already not using the bargepole for the purposes of touching this opportunity. So if he had one, you could probably borrow it immediately; although there is probably no need for you to to borrow it if you are not planning to touch this or other investment opportunities with it... 

Still, perhaps in these troubled times it's good to have a bargepole on hand to enforce social distancing etc.

mazzetti

i wonder how many people even know what a bargepole is...

kipsterno1

mazzetti said:

i wonder how many people even know what a bargepole is...

Is it an Eastern European that pushes to the front of a queue?