Getting Your Money Back Out: Exits, Secondary Markets and Waiting

The three ways out

P2P lending is not a savings account. Your money sits in loans that run for months or years, and you get it back through one of three mechanisms: the loan repays at maturity, another investor buys your position on a secondary market, or you wait and hope the platform eventually processes your withdrawal request. Each route carries different risks and different timeframes, and the one you rely on determines how liquid your money really is.

Maturity is the cleanest exit. A twelve-month loan ends after twelve months, the borrower repays, and the platform credits your account. You withdraw the principal and interest with no discount and no negotiation. This route works as long as the borrower performs and the platform processes repayments normally. It does not work if the borrower defaults, if the platform freezes withdrawals, or if you need the money before the loan ends.

A secondary market lets you sell a loan position to another investor before maturity. You list the loan, set a price - usually at a small discount to face value - and wait for a buyer. The transaction settles in hours or days if the market is deep, or in weeks if it is thin. Secondary markets exist on eleven of the nineteen platforms we track, but depth and speed vary widely. A market that clears your position in two days during calm times can take two weeks or freeze entirely when credit stress hits.

The third route is hoping. Platforms without a secondary market and with loans that do not repay on schedule leave you waiting for the platform to work through recoveries, restructure the loan book, or process a backlog of withdrawal requests. Reinvest24 froze withdrawals in February 2024 and remains in a de facto wind-down as of early 2026. EstateGuru has roughly sixty percent of its portfolio in recovery. Investors on both platforms are waiting, with no market to sell into and no clarity on when capital will return.

Which platforms have secondary markets and which do not

Mintos, Capitalia, Nectaro, Indemo, Profitus, Twino, PeerBerry, Debitum, Lendermarket, Robocash and Hive5 operate secondary markets as of 2026. PeerBerry launched its market in early 2026 after years without one. Mintos and Twino run the deepest markets, with daily volume measured in hundreds of thousands of euros. Lendermarket and Robocash see lighter trading, and discounts on both platforms can widen to two or three percent during stress. Hive5's market is thinner still, with positions sometimes sitting for weeks before a match.

InRento, Crowdpear, InSoil, EstateGuru, Scramble, Loanch, Reinvest24 and Maclear do not offer secondary markets. InRento publishes lock-up periods of two to four years on each buy-to-let loan before you invest, with no early exit and no ambiguity. Crowdpear and InSoil run development and agricultural loans with terms that stretch eighteen months to three years; you hold to maturity or to the date the developer refinances. Maclear offers SME, real estate and factoring loans with durations between six and twenty-four months, and investors hold until the loan repays or the platform arranges an early buyout - which it did once, in the Vibroedil default, at no loss to investors.

Scramble uses a claims-assignment model that pays out when the underlying e-commerce merchant settles invoices, and there is no mechanism to exit before that happens. Loanch lists consumer loans in Southeast Asia with twelve-to-thirty-six-month terms and no secondary market; the small platform size makes liquidity impossible. EstateGuru's market exists in name but handles almost no volume while the majority of loans sit in recovery. Reinvest24 stopped processing normal withdrawals in February 2024, and its secondary market is effectively closed.

Why liquidity dries up when you need it

A secondary market works when buyers and sellers are balanced - some investors want out, others want in, and the platform matches them at a price. That balance breaks during credit stress. When a large originator fails, when a war disrupts repayments, or when another platform freezes withdrawals and investors panic, everyone wants to sell and nobody wants to buy. Discounts widen from one percent to five or ten percent, and volume collapses because there are no bids at any reasonable price.

Mintos faced this dynamic in 2022 when several large originators - Mogo, IDF Eurohypothek, Kviku - stopped funding new loans or restructured. Investors rushed to sell notes tied to those originators, and discounts on some positions hit fifteen to twenty percent. The market did not freeze entirely, because Mintos is large enough to have constant inflows from new investors, but clearing times stretched from hours to days and some positions never found a buyer. Investors who needed money immediately either accepted steep discounts or waited for loans to mature naturally.

PeerBerry's experience during the war in Ukraine illustrates the same pattern. When Russia invaded in February 2022, PeerBerry had EUR 51 million in Ukrainian loans, and investors flooded the secondary market trying to exit. The platform suspended the market for weeks, then reopened it with strict limits on how many loans one investor could sell per day. Over the following year, PeerBerry repaid the Ukrainian book in full by collecting from originators and using its own reserves, but during the crisis the secondary market offered no exit at all.

The mechanism is structural. Secondary markets are thinnest exactly when you need them because credit shocks move all investors in the same direction. Planning an exit around the assumption that the market will always be there is planning to lose money or get stuck.

InRento lock-ups and the honest approach

InRento sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. The platform lends against buy-to-let property in Lithuania, and every loan carries a lock-up period stated upfront - two years, three years, four years, depending on the deal. You invest knowing you will not see the capital back until the lock-up ends, because there is no secondary market and the platform makes no promise of liquidity. The yield - roughly 11.8 percent as of late 2025 - compensates for that illiquidity, and the platform has recorded zero capital losses in five years of operation.

The lock-up model is honest. You know the term, you accept it, and you size your position accordingly. Investors who put money into a four-year InRento loan and then complain they cannot get it out in year two have not read the terms. The model fails only if the platform itself fails or if the underlying property market collapses and loans do not repay at maturity, neither of which has happened yet.

Contrast that with platforms that list loan durations - twelve months, twenty-four months - and then imply the secondary market will let you out early if you change your mind. The implication is not a promise, and when the market thins out or closes, investors who believed they had liquidity discover they do not. InRento's approach removes the illusion. You are lending for four years, and four years is what you will wait.

Holding to maturity as the base case

The safest way to plan a P2P exit is to assume you will hold every loan to maturity and size your positions so that waiting is not a problem. Check the average loan duration on the platform - if it is two years, plan on two years. Do not invest money you will need in the next twelve months, and do not invest money you will need in the next twenty-four months if the platform runs long-duration loans. Where a secondary market exists, treat it as a bonus that might work in calm times and might not work when credit tightens.

On platforms with auto-invest, you can manage liquidity by turning off reinvestment and letting the portfolio run down naturally. As loans repay, the platform credits your account, and you withdraw the proceeds. The process takes as long as the weighted average remaining term of your loans - typically six to eighteen months if you turn off reinvestment at a random point in time. It is slower than a secondary market sale but faster than waiting out a two-year lock-up, and it works regardless of market depth.

Platforms that honour buyback guarantees offer a faster route in theory, because the originator repurchases any loan that goes more than sixty days overdue. In practice, buyback works only if the originator stays solvent and if the platform enforces the obligation. Robocash and Lendermarket have honoured buyback continuously since they launched, but both are concentrated in their own lending groups - Robocash lends to its own subsidiaries, Lendermarket sources almost entirely from Creditstar. If the originator fails, the buyback guarantee fails with it, and you fall back to holding defaulted loans through recovery.

What this means for your portfolio

Build liquidity into your asset allocation from the start. Hold a portion of your overall savings in instant-access accounts or money-market funds, and treat P2P as the illiquid sleeve. Within P2P, diversify across platforms with different exit structures: some with deep secondary markets like Mintos, some with shallow markets like Robocash, some with no market at all like Maclear or InRento. That way a liquidity shock on one platform does not force you to sell elsewhere at a loss.

Watch the average loan duration on each platform and adjust your exposure accordingly. Platforms that run six-to-twelve-month consumer loans turn over faster than platforms that run twenty-four-to-thirty-six-month real estate bridge loans. Faster turnover means you can exit by stopping reinvestment and waiting a few months; slower turnover means you need either a working secondary market or a genuine long-term time horizon.

Do not rely on withdrawal processing times listed on a platform's FAQ. Those times - often quoted as "1-3 business days" - apply only when there is cash sitting idle in your account. If your capital is invested in loans, the time to withdraw depends on how you get the loans off your books, and that can range from hours to years. The FAQ describes the last step, not the whole process.