A ring fenced investment is where a proportion of your investment is financially separated from other investments, without it necessarily being operated as a separate entity. In the case of a UOWN investment, the special purpose vehicle (SPV) acts as a method of protecting or ‘ring fencing’ your investment.

In the UK, a property can only have four people on the title deed. To enable a crowd of people to own a house – ie. to create the crowdfunding model promoted by UOWN - we form a new company (an SPV) every time we buy a property. 

When you invest with UOWN you become a shareholder in the SPV. SPVs can have lots of shareholders, so this means hundreds of people can all own a share in the house. Each SPV owns a single property and is completely separate from UOWN, so if something happens to us the SPV will be unaffected - some people describe this as ‘ring-fencing the investment’.

So in this case, the SPV is a ring-fenced investment, and so is your portion of the SPV. And whatever you do with your portion of the SPV, it doesn’t affect the overall SPV, ie. it is a separate entity and doesn’t affect how the SPV is operated.

Anything that happens to the property or SPV you have invested in, will have no effect on any of your other investments with UOWN, because it is ring fenced. 

This means that you can sell shares in one property but maintain your shares in other properties, and at the same time, because you have withdrawn your shares in a particular property, this doesn’t mean the property is for sale, or that the other shareholders’ shares are in any way changed or devalued.