The bridging facilities which the bank provided were each in excess of £5m and are a sign of the growing use of short-term bridging finance for customers with more complex financial requirements.

In each case, customers tended to be experienced property professionals whose existing facilities with High Street lenders required repayment.

The loans undertaken also had a degree of complexity. As is often the case with property portfolios, ownership was spread across several people and groups, including individuals, corporations – both onshore and offshore – and, in one case, a trust.

UTB’s customers required a flexible institution which could both understand their complicated property portfolios and provide a bespoke service, enabling them to restructure, refinance or sell part of the portfolio on an individual basis.

As an experienced lender, used to dealing with complex structures, UTB was able to dedicate the time and resources to each project, bringing the necessary skills to the table to enable these multi-faceted refinances to take place.  

Alan Margolis, Head of Bridging at United Trust Bank said: “There is no rule that short-term bridging loans have to be straightforward or simple. We have now completed several large bridging loans which are far removed from the stereotypical, single property ‘completed in days’ facilities one often reads about.

“The bank and solicitors on both sides required a high degree of professionalism and expertise to ensure that the loans were structured correctly - for some loans, teams of solicitors within a firm were utilised to ensure as swift a completion as possible.

He added: “Our customers will be repaying their loans by way of a combination of the sale of various assets and the refinance of others – what is key is that their bridging loans give them control over how they manage their assets.”