Mortgages for Business reports 44% increase in Commercial mortgages enquiries - 29.09.2009

Mortgages for Business, the commercial and buy to let mortgage broker and packager, says enquiries to its commercial mortgage packager arm increased by 44% between August and September.

Steve Olejnik, Head of Sales said:  “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.  Mortgages for Business have been dealing with commercial mortgages for the past 20 years and none of us have seen an uplift like this before.”

David Whittaker MD said: “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 borrowers are turning to specialists like us.“

“Furthermore, 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.”