Berkeley Asset Finance has named Tarlochan Garcha as its new CEO

Berkeley Asset Finance aims to 'grow significantly' after hiring new CEO




Berkeley Asset Finance has named Tarlochan Garcha (pictured above) as its new CEO and revealed plans to grow its core bridging business "significantly" in 2020.

Tarlochan joins the lender from The Bridging Group, where he was a managing director. 

Berkeley Asset Finance — which provides bridging finance for the purchase or refurbishment of property — is part of NM Group, which includes Incisive Wealth Management, a company which has £500m of funds under management and is on track to hit £1bn by the end of Q1 2020.

The group includes 19 national law firms, an in-house discretionary fund manager, asset management team, recruitment business and four care homes. 

The group is currently working on other acquisitions, and Tarlochan believes Berkeley Asset Finance benefited greatly from the group, and it “really appealed” to him as the concept mitigated the risk of a single-business model exposed to one sector.

“I decided to join Berkeley Asset Finance for two main reasons,” he said in an exclusive interview with Bridging & Commercial.

The first of which was due to the two heads who run the group.

“Both Nurul [Miah, managing director at NM Group] and Lalou [Tifrit, group operations director at NM Group] are amazingly successful entrepreneurs. 

“They are passionate with lots of energy and have backed me with every facet of the business.

“This includes financial support to taking a long-term view to ensure we have a sustainable business model.”

The second reason was down to the benefits of being part of a much larger group. 

“For example, it helps not only our origination, but also the legal aspect of completing on loans as we have in-house expertise which our brokers appreciate,” he explained. 

“Our Incisive advisers (based nationally) already have significant details of our borrowers, therefore, the whole application process becomes shorter and quicker.”  

While the lender has its own internal funding, it has secured three external funding lines in the past six months.

“Brokers can expect us to make additional funds available as we now want to do more loans across England and Wales.  

“Furthermore, we shall be making some announcements whereby we have agreed some exclusives with our brokers and [will be reaching] out to new brokers as well.”

Since March, Berkeley Asset Finance —which currently consists of a team of nine — has deployed £35m, and its pipeline is said to be “very strong” ahead of next year.

“With this in mind, and given the level of enquiries we are receiving, we see no reason why lending £60m in 2020 cannot be achieved.  

“It should also be noted that £60m has already been allocated for us to lend internally before we utilise any funding line, therefore, we expect to significantly exceed our target of lending £60m [of] new monies in 2020.

“Our core bridging business will grow significantly, and we are ready to scale the business.”

Tarlochan added that it had also launched a new product — from its own law firms and others — where it would offer litigation loans secured against investment properties.  

“We have other bridge products that we will launch in 2020, so watch this space!” 

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