Sun - Crunch hit rich turn to pawn

Pawn industry gets a boost from the woes of City slickers

City A.M. 27 October 2009

Another company redrawing the lines of the pawnbroking business, and seeing the City as one of its main sources of business, is Borro, the UK’s first online pawnbroker. It has flourished since opening for business last year, and the online nature of the business hasn’t prevented it from operating near the top end of the market, with average loans of around £1,000. As well as its stock in trade of jewellery and watches, it has made loans against cars including Aston Martins and Ferraris, as well as art by the likes of Henry Moore and, once again, Banksy. While its business is principally online, Borro has a City consultancy in Chancery Lane where clients can get items valued by its experts.

"60 per cent of our customers have never done this before,” says Paul Aitken, Borro’s managing director. “Attitudes to pawnbroking are changing, and will carry on changing."

Read the original article on City AM

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The resale or secondhand price is how much you would sell an item for today, not how much it would cost to replace. All items depreciate as soon as they are bought. This depreciation covers retail mark up, rent and all other costs involved in selling the item to you.

We want to lend as much as possible as we are a lending business, so to give the best possible valuation, we only use experts such as Glass"s Car Guides, Bonhams auction house and National Association of Goldsmith qualified jewellery experts. Typically, the resale value of an item will be between 40% and 60% of its new cost.

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