Commercial enquiries increase by 44% in the last month - 29.09.2009

Author: Michael Aglony Posted on: 29 September 2009

In the last month we have seen a 44% increase in the number of Commercial enquries to our commercial mortgage packager arm. The largest increase has been in placing traditional mortgages for trading businesses and commercial investments – but we’ve seen more HMOs, limited company Buy to Lets, residential developments and semi-commercial enquiries, too.  We've dealing with commercial mortgages for the past 20 years and none of us have seen an uplift like this before.

So why has this happened? We think this explosion in commercial business is the result of the recent run of house prices increases.  Price rises are encouraging small developers to review projects that were not viable at the beginning of the summer.  Suddenly, developers need to finance the purchase of sites to build properties on so they can have stock ready for sale in the summer of 2010.

The upswing is principally driven by incumbent banks that are unwilling to support new projects.  They’re still trying to bolster their balance sheets, and demonstrate greater liquidity and return on funds.  So as a result borrowers are turning to specialists and luckily we are one! 

Our relationships with the main commercial lenders – including Aldermore – have really come through for us recently.  This is funding that is not accessible to a large number of brokers.  As a result, we’ve been placing a number of complicated deals that our peers haven’t been able to handle - even if we do say so ourselves!