Fritton: Our underwriting expertise and methods had to evolve with the expansion from single-family residential and small multi-family into small-balance commercial. Underwriting a hotel is going to be a much different process than underwriting a fix-and-flip. When we start talking about NOI, DCSR, and occupancy or lease rates, it is a different type of underwriting, data set and risk model. However, our system is already set up to capture that data, so it is a matter of being able to structure and make sense of that data appropriately so that we are able to gain the core-competencies necessary to play in this market. Our underwriting, like many of our processes and systems, begins with human expertise and experience. We take that, and develop technology to enhance and create efficiencies so that as we move into new markets or new products, we can modify and adjust parameters before we offer loans in a given market, which gives us a baseline to compare to what our underwriting and market teams know.

GlobeSt.com: Are you working across property types as well as geographic markets?

Fritton: We are. At this point, we will do hotels, motels, student housing, mid-size multifamily, large multifamily, office space, retail, and industrial. We are in 24 states currently and expect to be in 30 states by the end of the year. By the end of 2016 our goal is to be actively lending in 45 states. We are going to show 900% growth year-over-year in 2015.

GlobeSt.com: What are the benefits of peer-to-peer lending?

Fritton: Redundancy of capital from thousands of unrelated and individual parties who have a broader risk and pricing profile than the typical 'credit boxes' that we encounter with institutional investors. Our 'crowd' spans the spectrum and includes hedge fund managers, dentists, boomers from enormously varied backgrounds who have worked hard to gain a good amount of capital over their lifetimes and want to put it to work in real estate without the headaches usually associated with active real estate management, or investors seeking the ability to individually choose where they put their money as opposed to a REIT, where that decision is made for them. The crowd gives enormous redundancy, variability and diversity of risk profiles, risk appetites and investment habits. We have an average buy-in of about $33,000, but that number is artificially skewed by our first-time investors who usually invest at the $5000 minimum to 'try us out' as both a product and a service. Most of our smaller properties are selling out in minutes or, at the most, 24 hours. Larger properties can take up to two weeks to sell out, if it is for a high dollar amount. We are funding projects in an average of five to nine days right now, and are working to compress that timeline even more.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about your technology platform, and how it has played an integral roll in your success.

Fritton: We don't consider ourselves to be a financial or real estate company. We consider ourselves to be a technology company. Because we have built our technology infrastructure from scratch and made it modular, it allows us to move into new verticals, new asset classes, new products and new markets very quickly. So, when we transitioned into doing commercial properties, it didn't take us six months or a year to build a system and validate our underwriting. It really only took us about 60 days. We've built technology that consumes bluechip data sources, aggregates and performs predictive and trend analysis and is then passed through our custom pricing and risk models. From there, our staff can investigate each market from the perspective of each of our data sources, compared to our current portfolio performance, and use our scenario development tools to model possible events in each new market. This allows us to compress the time of underwriting significantly and be centralized here in Los Angeles while investing in other markets across the country like New York, New Jersey and the Chicago and Atlanta, and still be able to get a similar performance metric to what most traditional lenders would get by investing in markets that they know intrinsically.

For more information on Patch of Land, please visit www.PatchofLand.com.