A year of growth and change for Commercial Lending

It’s hard to believe we’re more than halfway through 2022 already. We’ve certainly been busy and made some significant changes since we re-entered the commercial real estate market at the start of the year. Managing director of commercial lending, Kevin Beevers, explains what's changed since the beginning of the year.

Building on success

It’s fair to say we’ve been tightly focused on pure residential development for the past few years, but if we’ve learnt anything, it’s that we know we need to adapt and change if we want to thrive. We’ve spent time talking and listening to our clients and we’ve acted on changes in the commercial property market to expand our product offering and our team, to deliver even more of what our clients want.

We’ve re-entered the commercial market knowing more investors are now spreading their portfolios over a varied range of properties. In response we’ve broadened the criteria on one of our development finance products and created a brand new investment finance product to incorporate lending on alternative residential asset classes. We've designed it to help serially active, proven investors buy, manage, refinance or add value to commercial real estate assets such as office buildings, industrial, retail, leisure and mixed-use buildings. 

Expanding our product range

We’re dedicated to being a specialist lender and being there to help our clients in the moments that truly matter. As such, we recently launched three new solutions aimed at providing additional financial support for experienced developers throughout the various stages of the property development cycle.

In June, we introduced our new Stretch Senior finance option providing experienced developers with the opportunity to access additional leverage alongside a Hodge development facility, and most recently, we launched two new bridging finance options. Our Acquisition Bridge provides short term funding for new and existing customers to assist in the acquisition of land or buildings, or where equity release is required, prior to converting to longer term development finance. The second option is a Sales Bridge which further enhances our development finance offering. It’s available to customers who have an existing Hodge development facility in place and allows them to release much needed equity towards the end of a project. We’re also developing a third bridging option for clients looking to carry out property refurbishment or repurpose projects, which will be available in September.

Adding experience

Alongside the expansion of our product offering, we’ve also grown the team and made some fantastic appointments to help deliver on our plans and support more customers in achieving their property development and investment goals.

We’ve welcomed Stuart Benge and Andy Buss as senior business development managers to support clients in the commercial investment space. David Hales has also joined us as senior development finance manager who’ll focus on supporting clients in the property development sector. Finally, Jon Hankins has joined our Portfolio Management team as senior relationship manager to help support commercial customers with their development and investment finance requirements.

We believe the delivery of our criteria changes and new products, coupled with the significant growth of the Commercial Lending team, demonstrates our commitment to meeting the evolving needs of brokers and borrowers and providing exactly what they’re looking for via flexible and tailored solutions, supported by an expert and personal service.

We hope everyone has a great summer and we look forward to supporting many new and existing clients with lending requirements across the full real estate spectrum, throughout the remainder of the year and beyond.