LOS ANGELES—Patch of Land is expanding from its single-family residential focus into small-commercial properties in the $1 million to $10 million range. The peer-to-peer lending platform was motivated to make this transition because of the underserved small value commercial real estate market. This is a natural evolution for the company, which has already developed sophisticated software and data analysis for its residential and small multifamily business. As a result, Patch of Land, which is more tech company than commercial real estate company, needed only 60 days to make the move into commercial assets. To find out about the market trends behind this transition and the benefits of peer-to-peer lending, we sat down with the company's co-founder and CEO Jason Fritton for an exclusive interview.

GlobeSt.com: What are the market conditions behind your decision to expand from a more residential focus into a commercial focus?

Jason Fritton: Realistically, this was part of our inevitable evolution. We built this company because we thought that the fundamental bones of real estate were being ignored. We built our niche off of the huge market in single-family residential and small multifamily, but the fact is that in the $1 million to $10 million range, commercial real estate in general is either underserved or un-served. At this point, hundreds-of-billions of dollars every year are invested into commercial real estate, yet smaller commercial real estate developers still have difficulty finding fast, transparent, and consistent access to capital. While refining our residential product and technology, we were swamped with commercial applications and just couldn't ignore that opportunity. After having brought on experienced and highly successful commercial real estate expertise, we already have $400 million in the pipeline after just a couple of months of moving into this new vertical.