A crowd-funding platform which allows individuals to own and trades shares in residential properties has traded 50m shares in its first year.

Property Partner, which launched exactly a year ago and works with local agents, has almost 5,500 investors who have crowd-funded £19.5m to purchase residential property, with individual investments ranging from £50 to £500,000.

Altogether, they have crowd-funded the purchase of 147 properties.

Two-thirds of investors have bought shares in multiple properties and crowd-funding has been at astonishing speed: a block of 42 flats in Lincolnshire was fully funded in ten minutes, while a property in Hanwell, west London, was fully funded by 5,496 investors in 66 seconds.

The letting and management of the properties is handled on behalf of the investors.

Property Partner, which is regulated by the FCA, is backed financially by a number of companies, including Octopus Investments who were early backers of Zoopla.

Property Partners founder and CEO Dan Gandesha has always made it clear that his company’s ambition is to be to property what the stock exchange is to shares.

He said: “Taken together, the Government’s recent tax and regulatory changes are slowly but surely squeezing the profits of traditional landlords.

“It’s the beginning of the end of buy-to-let as a cottage industry.

“By contrast, these changes further strengthen our appeal as an alternative way for people to invest in high-quality residential property – an asset yes, but also a home.

“We’re making things better for investors, better for tenants and better for the UK’s housing supply.”

He said the business is on track to grow tenfold this year.