On 21 October we hosted the first Lendhub Presents at The Groucho Club: a panel discussion on the signals shaping UK property finance as we head into 2027.
The format was deliberate. A small, invited audience of journalists, editors and senior industry professionals. Three themes rather than a long agenda. Everything on the record. Drinks and food afterwards, because the conversations that matter rarely happen while people are sitting in rows.
The panel was chaired by Francesco Prelorenzo, our Investment Director, and brought together four people who see turning points before they reach the data:
- Richard Nordgreen, Managing Director at Lendhub
- Jonathan Vandermolen, Founder and CEO of Vandermolen Real Estate, with more than 200m of sales this financial year and a distressed asset practice acting for lenders, receivers and administrators
- Edward Horn-Smith, Partner at FRP Advisory, who co-founded Arc & Co and has arranged more than 5bn of financing across 2,000 loans
- Graham Wood, CFO of Barwood Capital, managing around 700m of UK real estate on behalf of institutional investors
In the audience, developers, a head of property from a local authority, the NACFB, a senior structured finance voice from Macquarie, and journalists we had spent months building relationships with.
That mix was the point. Lender, adviser, agent, investor, developer, council and press, all in one room, all working on the same problem from different sides of it.
What a room like that is worth in a flat market
It would be easy to host an event like this in a good market. Everyone turns up, everyone agrees, nobody learns anything. This is not that market.
What came out of the discussion was more useful than any forecast. The viability equation is squeezed at every point: planning, land, build costs, finance and sale values all moving the wrong way at once. SMEs now deliver roughly 1 in 10 new builds, down from 4 in 10 in the late 1980s.
Debt, it turns out, is not the bottleneck. There are more than 600 active lenders, two thirds of them non-bank, and banks are competing hard on margin. The gap is mezzanine and equity, where junior capital has been wiped out on failed schemes and liquidity has all but disappeared. That distinction matters. A developer who believes the problem is debt will spend six months solving the wrong thing.
The panel did not agree with each other, and we did not ask them to. On planning committees, Jonathan called the system broken after 30 years of attending them. A local council member, put the counter-argument from the floor, and was careful to offer it as her own view rather than her employer’s, that committee volatility is a cyclical opportunity, because membership changes every four years. Xuan Meng of Cosy Hauz costed the other side of that argument, roughly 12 months of delay, enough to wipe out a scheme's profit entirely.
Nobody won that exchange. Everyone in the room left with a sharper view of it.
Why these moments matter
We work with these people every day. Brokers who know which lenders actually complete. Developers who can tell you what a site really costs to build this year, not last year. Agents who know what is clearing and at what price.
That knowledge usually arrives in fragments, one phone call at a time. An event like this collects it, in one place, on the record, where it can be shared rather than lost.
It also does something harder to measure. It puts Lendhub in the position of convening the conversation rather than commenting on it afterwards. That is a different kind of credibility, and it is not one you can buy.
What happens next
Lendhub Presents is not a one off. It becomes a fixture, and it gets bigger.
The panel discussion is being published in full, with the themes broken out separately, and we will be returning to what was said as the market tests it. The Budget is the first test. There will be others.
After 10 years of a gentle and solid approach to the market, the ambition now is straightforward. Be useful, be candid, and be in the room where the conversation is happening.
