What commercial finance actually looks like
Commercial lending is a different sport from residential. There’s no high-street comparison site, no published best-buy table, and no automated decisioning that gets you a yes inside an hour. Every case is underwritten on its merits — the property, the income, the borrower, the sector — and the spread of outcomes between lenders for the same deal is genuinely wide. A case that one lender declines outright another will price aggressively. Knowing which is which is the entire value of an experienced commercial broker.
We work across the common shapes:
- Owner-occupier: buying the premises your business operates from. Often financially sound over a long horizon — building equity instead of paying rent — but assessed against your trading accounts, the property’s adaptability, and the security of your sector.
- Investment: buying property to let to a commercial tenant or for mixed-use rental income. Assessed on rental yield, lease length, tenant covenant strength, and asset quality. Long unexpired leases to strong covenants attract sharper pricing.
- Semi-commercial: a residential element above a commercial unit. Often the most poorly served by mainstream lenders and one of the niches where a broker’s lender network pays for itself.
- Specialist sectors: hospitality, leisure, healthcare, light industrial, professional services. Each has lenders who genuinely understand it and lenders who will price for unfamiliarity. Both technically lend; the difference is in the rate.
What a lender is actually looking at
The simplest mental model: lenders want to see the loan repaid comfortably from a sustainable source of income, with the property as solid backup. For an investment that’s the rent the property earns, stressed against rate rises and vacancy. For owner-occupier it’s trading profit, with two or three years of statutory accounts the baseline (sometimes one year, sometimes management accounts, depending on lender).
Around that core they vary widely on: leverage they’ll support, sectors they’ll touch, how strict the debt service cover ratio needs to be, how they read short or unexpired leases, and whether they take a view on the principals personally. Two lenders will look at the same case and offer 60% LTV at 7% vs 70% LTV at 8.5%; the right answer depends on what matters most to you commercially.
How we work the case
A first commercial conversation typically takes 30–45 minutes. We’ll need an outline of the property, the purpose (purchase, refinance, capital raise), the corporate structure, two or three years of accounts (if owner-occupier), and a sense of rental income and tenancy detail (if investment). From that we can usually map the realistic lender shortlist and give you indicative terms within a few working days.
From there we manage the application end to end — packaging, valuation, lender liaison, solicitor coordination, drawdown. You’ll have one point of contact, not a portal, and we’ll tell you in plain language when things are on track and when they need a nudge.