This year has seen the Blue Skies Bridging Road Show visit Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and London in a bid to bring a bridging lesson to brokers nationwide.
Now it has returned to the big city in the final stop of 2010, to give an intensive morning lesson to broker attendees in how bridging finance can be used to ensure smooth property and business transactions.
Filing into the plush conference suite of the Radisson Edwardian hotel on Bloomsbury Street, central London, introducers were handed teas, coffees and, most importantly, their Cheval Club Cards.
“What are these?” Andrew Hosford from Voltaire Finance asked. “Do they let us put drinks on the Cheval account?”
Well, not quite. In fact, as Gareth Lewis, Cheval's national sales and marketing manager, explained during his presentation, this card enables Blue Skies attendees to get exclusive interest rates on bridging deals, as well as a bonus fee payable on completion and entry into a quarterly prize draw.
In addition to the benefits of the Cheval Club membership, Gareth’s presentation’s covered everything from today’s criteria and recent case studies to the different ways in which bridging finance can be utilised.
Brokers enthused about the informative and interesting morning over lunch, as the Cheval team held off on the sandwiches to talk directly to brokers and compare stories about the current climate.
One broker attending, Avtar Thethy, said he found the seminar ‘excellent’, adding: “It was a real eye-opener, I used to do a lot of business with Cheval, before the market fizzled out, but now it looks like it is back and I’m keen to get involved once again and look at doing more bridging.”
Gavin Diamond, Head of Finance at Cheval, summed up the series of Blue Skies Seminars, saying: “We’ve been pleased with the level of interest shown in the seminars, I think it’s been clear from having done them just how necessary it’s been to actually get brokers to understand the ways in which, particularly in the current economic climate, bridging’s role to play in getting deals done.
"I think a lot of brokers were maybe still thinking of bridging in the ‘classic bridge sense’ i.e., buying a new property before selling the old one, they didn’t often realise how effective bridging can be in situations where the mainstream banks are just not lending."
If you missed meeting Cheval at the Blue Skies Bridging Road Show, the team will be attending the Mortgage Business Expo on Wednesday the 10th and Thursday the 11th of November. Come find them on the Bridging and Commercial stand G5.
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