Now that's real flexibility

Certainty of lending is one prime example, speed of turnaround another.
 
But something else that brokers always want to see, in our experience anyway, is flexibility. Translation: they want to send deals the way of lenders who will somehow find a way to make a deal work, however complex or unwieldy it may appear at first.
 
But sometimes, being flexible enough to make a loan work is only the start. Or at least it should be. Bridging loans can achieve new levels of flexibility altogether when they go granular and really drill down into a specific set of client circumstances.
 
I'll give you an example. A week or so ago we completed on a pretty sizeable deal. Basically, we loaned a substantial chunk of money in the form of an 'acquisition bridge'. 
 
The client was borrowing the money to buy a large number of flats in a recently constructed development. Now normally, lenders would look at the loan application, assess the risk and come up with a rate and an LTV up to which they are prepared to lend.
 
We did this, but we did it slightly differently. Essentially, rather than just look at the transaction as a black-and-white bridging loan, we factored into our risk appetite that a fair chunk of the units the borrower was using the bridge to purchase had already exchanged and therefore the funds would come back relatively quickly.
 
In other words, for us this meant that the real level of risk on the loan was less than what it appeared on the tin, to use 1980s ad speak.
 
As a result, we were able to remodel the loan to reduce the interest rate burden on the borrower, while at the same time stretching the LTV to a higher level than if we had looked purely at the surface of the deal, rather than go granular.
 
The moral of the tale: when you are looking for flexibility, ask yourself if it's more than about just making the loan work. Does it go one further, and tailor the loan in the optimal way to the borrower’s very specific circumstances? Now that’s real flexibility.