Blend has secured a new funding line worth in excess of £50m from an unnamed institutional investor.
The specialist development finance lender will use the funding to add more bridging products to support its property developer base.
“At Blend, we have the appetite to support quality developers in all market conditions,” said Yann Murciano, chief executive of Blend.
Read more: Invest & Fund unveils £100m bank funding line
“We appreciate many developers have faced a challenging market environment over the past 18 months. Consequently, sales have been slow and exits have taken longer than initially expected and planned.
“Many developers we speak to have had their development loan facilities expired and are under increased pressure from their lender who are experiencing lender fatigue.
“We are keen to support those developers by stepping in to help them carry their projects to a point where they can achieve their sales targets instead of having to sell at a discount or accept any offer just to exit.”
The new funding line comes after Blend reported a record quarter of lending. During the last three months of 2023, the platform funded a variety of property development schemes including a conversion of a Grade II listed property into three residential units in Saffron Walden, and the development of 14 apartments in Devon.
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“At Blend, we’ve built a reputation for being a through-the-cycle lender, a lender who understand the development process and the challenges that come with it,” added Murciano.
“So, we’ve built a product that answers the needs of developers, and we are very excited about this new institutional funding line that’ll increase our dry power to continue supporting developers.”
The new institutional funding line will sit alongside Blend’s existing cohort of institutional and family office investors. In April 2022, Blend secured a £120m funding line from a consortium of family offices, which it said it would use to scale its loanbook.
