A complex file. A simple deal.

Deal at a glance

A client came to us with a refinance brief that most of the broker market had already walked away from. The facility — a £776,905 net second-charge bridging loan, secured against their main residential home — had expired. The original purpose of the loan had been an acquisition: a residential development site with planning consent for nine flats. Planning had run into delays earlier in the project; the original facility had quietly run past its term, and now the client needed to restructure before time pressure became a real problem. On paper, the file looked complicated. On the merits, the deal wasn’t.

The complications were genuine. An expired facility. A second-charge position sitting behind a senior lender on the borrower’s main home. A project with a planning delay history in its background. Any one of those, on its own, gives a broker a reason to look at the case twice. All three together, on the same deal, are enough to put most of the market off without ever digging into the underlying detail. Which is exactly what had happened — by the time the case reached us, multiple brokers had declined to engage at all.

But when you actually walked through the deal, the merits were clear. The development was real. Planning was consented. A senior development facility was already in place and construction had progressed. The exit was a sales-led open-market disposal of nine completed residential flats — a clear, evidenced route out, not a hope. The borrower’s case wasn’t “please trust me, this will work”. It was “this is what’s already happened, this is what’s already funded, this is how it gets paid back”. The work for us was matching that genuine merit to a lender whose mandate could see past the file’s surface complications.

The route that worked was a £776,905 net second-charge bridging facility over a 12-month term. Enough to refinance the expired loan, enough to give the client the runway to complete the sales process on the nine flats through open-market disposal, enough to take the time pressure off the wider project. We didn’t need to invent anything new — we needed to find a lender who would read the deal as it actually was, not as the file looked at first glance.

Complex files and risky deals aren’t the same thing. The skill — and frankly the work that earns a broker’s fee — is being able to tell the difference, and being willing to spend the time on cases other brokers won’t. Across bridging and development finance, buy-to-let and the wider specialist book, this is the kind of case we look at hardest. Get in touchif you’ve got one the market has already said no to.