Our recent survey found that 42% of you consider yourselves beginners when it comes to investing – welcome aboard! With that in mind, we’d love to help you start off on the right foot by sharing some of the knowledge our team of property investors has built up over their combined 200 years in the industry.

Here are the 5 key pieces of advice we’d give to any new investor:

Get to Grips with the Vocabulary

You’ll find lots of useful information available on our website for each opportunity, such as loan to values, security charges and valuation reports, to help you decide if the investment is right for you. We try to keep things as simple as possible but there are some terms you may not be familiar with as a new investor – not to worry, as we’ve created this simple guide to help you get started.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

One of the most effective ways to spread your risk is to spread your investment across different opportunities, companies and asset types. We can’t stress how important it is to do this – no investment strategy is 100% safe, but it makes your money less vulnerable in the event of market fluctuations, business and borrower losses. If you prefer a hands-off approach, many platforms have a product that automatically diversifies your cash across a number of investments, such as Kuflink’s Auto-Invest and IF-ISA products.

Keep an Eye on Property Market Trends

Every Kuflink opportunity is secured against UK property, so it’s a great idea to keep track of how the property market is progressing. You don’t need to become an expert overnight – simply keeping up to date with the news should give you enough information, or you can check the regular online reports released by estate agents such as Foxtons or Rightmove.  We’ve even put together an ‘at a glance’ guide to UK property for the year ahead, available here.

Look Beyond the Returns  

Understandably, most of us are looking to earn as much as we can from our investments, and a fantastic headline rate is a great way for companies to attract new investors. However, you need to make sure that you fully understand what security is in place, what credentials the company have and how much risk is involved.

In case you were wondering – Kuflink is FCA Regulated, HMRC Authorised ISA Managers and our CEO sits on the board for the Association of Short Term Lenders. We’re proud to state we have zero losses for our investors to date and will continue to apply our stringent lending criteria to ensure the best chance of keeping this in place!

Do Your Research

Before investing with any platform, it’s good to gather experiences from real people that have tried and tested the company. If you know people that you can talk to, that’s great, but even if not there are online forums, trust pilot reviews and a huge range of trusted bloggers that can all be useful sources of information.