Room with a View – I didn’t know you did that… Real Estate Finance

The Real Estate Finance Team is made up of lawyers from the commercial property, construction and the banking and finance teams.

We have a large Construction Teams and an extensive Planning Team, and the Real Estate Finance Team as a whole work together across the different offices with other areas of the firm (such as the Strategic Land Team and Agricultural Finance Team) to provide a fully rounded service on any real estate finance transaction.

All of the lawyers in the Real Estate Finance Team specialise in advising borrowers and lenders on borrowing / lending against a property asset – be it one that is already built and occupied (an investment property) or one that is being developed (a development property).

The majority of mainstream lenders (Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC) have, for regulatory reasons, a separate property finance panel for real estate finance from their main banking panel(s) and we are on the panels for most of them. In addition, there are a number of challenger lenders that we act for (e.g. OakNorth, Bank Leumi and Metro Bank) that are specifically interested in development finance.

We support borrowers including individuals right through to national property development businesses and deal with loans which relate to a single residential or commercial property, to a portfolio of 150+ properties. We also deal with loans for a mix of residential and commercial purposes.

The team can help with structuring different transactions in a way that manages the competing interests of the various parties in a funding arrangement and their respective attitudes to risk. We work with a number of finance brokers as well as the lenders themselves to match the needs of a wide variety of borrowers to different sources of funding.

How can our Real Estate Finance Team help you?

The firm is an ‘approved’ panel firm for all the major clearing banks who lend on commercial property. We also work together with a wide range of other lenders, who deal with different types of property finance, and we can advise borrowers on possible options as to who to contact in relation to lending. We can also discuss other sources of funding, such as equity investment.

This article is from the summer 2020 issue of Room with a View, our newsletter aimed at professionals within the property industry. To download the latest issue, please visit the newsletter section of our website. Law covered as at June 2020.

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