Invest & Fund

27/10/2026

For a decade, Greater Manchester has been the test case for what happens when a city region can direct its own housing money.

On Wednesday, a Prime Minister who used to run it and a Chancellor who promised to move money "into every postcode around Britain" will try to take that model national, and the concept of “Manchesterism” will finally get a test run outside of the M60.

Will these changes impact SME Developers?

Read on to find out!

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For a decade, Greater Manchester has been the test case for what happens when a city region can direct its own housing money. On Wednesday, a Prime Minister who used to run it and a Chancellor who promised to move money "into every postcode around Britain" will try to take

20/10/2026

As Halloween approaches, we're taking a look at some hidden nasties in development appraisals! 🧟

From Knotweed, to ransom strips, from newts and bats to invisible contractors, projects haunted by ghostly-thin contingencies 👻 , we have seen it all...

For brokers and developers, each tale of caution is a lesson in how to get a scheme funded rather than falling victim to the usual jump scares, so read on and don’t have nightmares!

Read more below!

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15/10/2026

On Wednesday 28 October, as Halloween fast approaches, John Healey will deliver his first Budget as Chancellor, bringing in the first fiscal event of Andy Burnham's premiership.

Expect the usual fog beforehand, briefings, kite-flying and think-tank wish lists. Most of it will be noise, but what do we really expect to happen, and will it be scary for SME developers?

Read more below!

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On Wednesday 28 October, John Healey will deliver his first Budget as Chancellor, bringing in the first fiscal event of Andy Burnham's premiership. Expect the usual fog beforehand, briefings, kite-flying and think-tank wish lists. Most of it will be noise, but what do we really expect to happen? For...

06/10/2026

Ask an SME developer why a promising site slipped away (as we often do in passing conversations), and you will often hear the same answer: someone else had already "tied it up".

In this week's blog, we delve into the hidden world of options, conditional contracts, pre-emption rights and promotion agreements that secretly control the UK's land supply, and explore how incoming reforms will help our clients compete with national-scale homebuilders.

Read more below!

29/09/2026

When headline numbers are this noisy, the structure behind a loan matters more than the market narrative.

Read more below!

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Every September the property market has its frantic ‘back-to-school’ moment, and this year the headline writers had their story ready. Asking prices up, plus housebuilding starts up, chuck in Interest rates on hold. Must mean a recovery, surely? Look a little closer and a different picture emerg...

22/09/2026

If you ask most people in finance what A.I. will do for their sector, you will typically hear the same three answers: faster response times to win business, automated processes to run business faster, and stronger, faster data summarisation to accelerate decision-making. Essentially, just levelling up what already exists: putting a better engine in the existing car.

We think there's much more on offer here.

Read more below!

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If you ask most people in finance what A.I. will do for their sector, you will typically hear the same three answers: faster response times to win business, automated underwriting elements to process business faster, and stronger, faster summarisation of data to intensify decision-making. However, a...

15/09/2026

For a growing share of SME schemes, particularly smaller sites, first-time developers, or anything needing genuine speed to completion, non-bank lenders aren't the second choice. They're the primary market.

Read more below!

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For years, the story everyone tells of non-bank lending in UK property development finance has begun and ended as a tale about rate-cycle side effects. Base rates spiked, high-street banks got nervous, specialist lenders filled the gap, and the story goes that once rates come back down, the banks wi...

08/09/2026

In this week's blog, we look at the latest house price data and its potential impact on market-wide lending appetites.

Read more below!

This week's house price data gave us the familiar spectacle of two "official" indices disagreeing, competing over which version of reality to paint. Lloyds, still reporting under their Halifax name, showed UK house prices falling 0.4% year-on-year in August, the first annual drop since November 2023...

02/09/2026

Like it or loathe it, the frontier of A. I. development is based on two fronts: compute power and algorithmic sovereignty, and the compute power story really is a story about buying land.

Is there an unforeseen conflict between the needs of the hyperscalers and the needs of UK homebuilders?

We explore below!

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Last week, Green Party leader Zack Polanski called for a moratorium on new data centre approvals in England, arguing that the sector's water and electricity demands are being waved through under a "critical infrastructure" designation while millions of households sit under drought restrictions. The....

24/08/2026

Somewhere north of 200 blogs now sit in our archive, which is either a badge of honour or a very long charge sheet, depending on how the last few years have actually played out against what we forsaw.

In this week's piece, we look back at some of our calls over the last few years and see what we got right & wrong in relation to what our sector looks like today.

Read more below!

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For almost four years, this blog has been used every week to make a call on something: where rates were heading, whether a piece of planning reform would actually deliver homes, whether a headline in the Telegraph or the Guardian was telling the real story or perhaps a convenient one!