Fund your property development project. Compare senior debt, mezzanine, and stretched senior from specialist UK lenders for ground-up builds, conversions, and refurbishments.
Development finance funds property construction or major refurbishment, released in stages against work completed rather than as a single lump sum. A lender typically funds a proportion of land cost up front and then 100% of build costs in arrears, with a monitoring surveyor verifying each stage before the next drawdown. Because you only pay interest on what has actually been drawn, staged funding costs considerably less than borrowing the full facility on day one. It is repaid on sale or refinance once the scheme completes.
| Development finance | Bridging loan | Commercial mortgage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How the money arrives | In stages against work completed | Single advance | Single advance |
| Typical term | Length of the build plus a sales period | One to twenty-four months | Five to twenty-five years |
| Interest charged on | Only what has been drawn | The full facility | The full balance |
| Repaid by | Sale or refinance on completion | Sale or refinance | Monthly instalments over the term |
| Needs a monitoring surveyor | Yes | No | No |
Development finance lenders on the Lendus panel. Several are unregulated by design, because development lending to a company is outside the regulated perimeter.
| Lender | Facility size | Published rate | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atelier Finance | £3m–£40m | BBR+4.99%–BBR+6.99% | No fixed turnaround time is published. Atelier states it offers direct access to decision-makers for faster credit-backed approvals, with a dedicated drawdown team for ongoing project drawdowns. |
| Avamore Capital | £250k–£25m | 0.56%–N/A | Avamore states a bridging loan can typically be obtained within 3 to 4 days, depending on documentation and solicitor responsiveness. Refurbishment finance is often approved within 24 hours, which Avamore contrasts with the multi-week timelines it says are typical elsewhere. |
| CrowdProperty | £200k–£10m | 0.65%–1.1% | Indicative terms within 48 hours; full credit decision within 2 weeks; drawdown from 4 weeks |
| Hampshire Trust Bank | £0k–£35m | Not published | Bridging finance targets 21 days from application to completion, supported by dual legal representation; specialist mortgage and development finance timescales are assessed case by case with a broker |
| Investec | £5k–£100m | Not published | No standard timeline is published. Facilities are arranged through a dedicated relationship banker and underwritten individually, so timescales depend on the complexity and size of the deal rather than an automated same-day decision. |
| LendInvest | £75k–£15m | 0.54%–1.2% | Credit decision within 24–48 hours; legal completion 2–4 weeks |
| Magnet Capital | £500k–£4m | Not published | Decision in principle often within minutes of receiving key project information; stage payments released within 48 hours of a site inspection; typical timeline from sign-up to completion is 6 to 10 weeks |
| OakNorth Bank | Not published | Not published | OakNorth states it typically funds partners within weeks rather than months, and in some cases within days; no fixed guaranteed decision timescale is published |
| Octopus Real Estate | £50k–£100m | 0.55%–0.85%+ | No fixed timeframe is published. Octopus states it delivers fast completions, even on complex cases, with a dedicated case team for large bridging and development loans; exact timescales are confirmed once a case is submitted. |
| Roma Finance | £75k–£3m | Not published | Service level target of a response within 24 hours; Roma Finance states 80% of RomaFLOW bridging cases complete within 28 days, and cites a record bridging completion of 5.5 hours and a record buy-to-let completion of 6 days |
| Together | £50k–£25m | 0.55%–1.5% | Indicative terms within 24 hours; completion 2–4 weeks |
Figures as published by each lender and dated on its own page. Indicative, not offers.
Lenders usually think in terms of loan-to-cost and loan-to-gross-development-value rather than a simple loan-to-value. A common shape is a proportion of the land purchase price up front, then build costs released in arrears against a monitoring surveyor's sign-off. The binding constraint is normally the gross development value, meaning what the finished scheme is worth, not what the land cost.
An independent surveyor appointed by the lender to verify that work claimed has actually been done before each drawdown is released, and to flag cost overruns or programme slippage early. You pay for them. They are the main reason development finance takes longer to administer than a bridging loan, and the main reason lenders are willing to advance against unbuilt value at all.
Most want to see that you have completed schemes of comparable scale and complexity before. First-time developers are not automatically excluded, but they will usually need a lower loan-to-cost, a contractor with a track record, or an experienced project manager attached. The scheme is underwritten on the team as much as the site.
Interest continues to accrue while the facility runs, and most agreements have a hard end date after which default rates apply. Lenders generally prefer to be told early and will often consider an extension where the reason is understood and the exit is still credible. An overrun discovered by the monitoring surveyor rather than disclosed by the borrower is a much harder conversation.
Rates From
6.5% p.a.
LTGDV
Up to 70%
LTC
Up to 90%
Amounts
£150k–£25m+
Compare development finance rates, specialist lenders, no credit check.
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