Case Study: Development Finance - £1.36M

Here's a new development finance loan from Mint Bridging in Chelmsford, Essex. It's a great case study!

Mint Bridging recently had a loan redeem with a developer that was in the middle of an extensive project of three residential barns. The borrower, who mainly develops locally, has an extensive career in development, alongside a history of barn conversions for residential purposes. While acknowledging that the scope for three barn overhauls, in one project, would heighten awareness to lending given the borrower’s extensive history, they did not have any issues attracting finance.

The borrower originally obtained finance from another lender, which they found to be cumbersome and unresponsive when trying to gain access to funds to move the project along. This, combined with an unforeseen bat infestation in one of the partial-completed barns, meant they required a flexible lender to step in, and take the scheme forward.

Mint were approached as the borrower wasn’t happy with their lender’s current working relationship, who deemed to be slow. The lender was not providing an efficient service throughout the project. As such, when the client was looking to refinance, it seemed an ideal opportunity to find a bridging lender that specialised in development finance. Having loaned cash to numerous barn projects throughout the UK, and given the client’s successful track record, Mint’s underwriters had terms quickly in place and valuers on-site, to get this particular loan ready for drawdown.

We were able to refinance the deal and provided a loan with a total value of £1.36M, for the completion of the two remaining barns over a term of 12 months. Given the exit of the loan was pertinent to the resale of the properties, we built additional months into the finance deal. This made the last leg journey stress free for the client, and we predicted they’d complete the barn conversion by their new end date.

With our management team working rigorously with the client, they completed the project ahead of schedule, namely within five months of the first drawdown. How Mint structured the loan greatly helped the client to incur no exit fees or penalties. Due to the high standard of the development, the two remaining barn conversions were off the market prior to the build completion. This meant that when the project finished effectively, so did their loan with Mint.

Left images are before. Right images are after development: