Our 10-year celebration coincided with our 100th loan which we completed last month, and is now our biggest loan to date — a £3.8m stretch senior loan to convert a two-storey office building into 27 one- and two-bedroom apartments for a repeat client in Birmingham.

We made the decision to stretch to the higher loan size because we support those repeat clients who have a track record of development delivery; it strengthens relationships and makes good business sense.

My career started in investment banking but in the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC), like many others I found myself working in an incredibly risk adverse environment having to battle newly imposed obstacles that made getting business done almost impossible.

I could see a gap in the market for a better approach and was frustrated by the level of bureaucracy that occurs in a large corporate.

When the high street banks stopped lending to SME developers post GFC, I saw an opportunity to plug the gap in funding and do it in a way that was more relationship driven. 

In the early days, strong market conditions supported the business; we were initially self-funded with some friends and family co-investment, then we raised funds from several P2P and bond platforms.

The past decade has been a huge learning curve with each misstep providing valuable learning opportunities and requiring us to find ways to get better at selecting the right projects and anticipating and managing the hurdles.

In 2020 we secured a funding line from a large institutional investor which gave us access to a very deep pool of funding, allowing us to invest significantly in technology, grow the team, and launch a stretch senior product.

•   Hilltop launches real estate funding and management platform
•   Clearwell Capital completes its 100th loan
•   Clearwell secures 12-month extension for Fasanara Capital funding line

More recently external forces — including Brexit, Covid and inflation — have brought their own challenges, such as increased caution across the markets, a slowdown in residential development, and a more volatile housing market, but it has also provided an opportunity for us to readdress our approach.

As a team, we have reviewed our expertise and projects, and where and how we can add the most value. By focusing on supporting repeat clients and building strong, long-term relationships, we are confident we can be successful even in a slowing market.

Over the years I have learnt to ignore the headlines and follow the data. Media reports of ‘house prices at their worst since 2019’   and ‘recession on its way’  have been frequent but are often based on cherry-picked data; looking at the underlying numbers will often present a far more stable environment, but that does not sell newspapers.

We are currently going through another round of negative headlines that read ‘the worst since’. It is true that at the margin, higher interest rates  will negatively affect the housing market. But Bank of England data suggests that interest rates are predicted to fall in 18 months’ time, when a new project funded today will be selling completed units, therefore driving down mortgage costs. The data that sits behind the headlines is what informs our decisions.

We have always been comfortable with our lending levels and remain committed to supporting experienced developers complete their projects.

Clearwell Capital has never been in a stronger position; today we are a team of nine and we have just completed our biggest loan to date.

We are positive about the future despite what the papers may say.