their business, or to put them in a position to subsequently secure cheaper High Street lending. Part of our service includes visiting every single borrower in person, before lending, so we can thoroughly understand their business and they have a known person to contact in future. We don’t have an arbitrary age restriction on our lending and as a result, we’ve refinanced several borrowers where their age has prevented the High Street continuing to lend, despite a 40year+ unblemished track record with that bank. Some of our more interesting loans have included several renewable energy projects, where the borrower wanted to own the entire asset, rather than just receiving rent from the land used. These include a £4 million ur main product is a variable-rate, interest only, commercial loan secured on agricultural or rural land and buildings in England, Wales and Scotland. We have financed a wide range of businesses and look to find solutions where others might not. As such, we are able to consider multiple assets for security, as well as looking at a borrower’s entire income, rather than limiting ourselves to the on-farm income. In one instance, seven different income streams were used to support a borrower’s case: on-farm income from a small beef herd, conventional contract farming, buy-to-let income, a council hedge cutting contract, PAYE as a parttime fireman, dividends from the family (non-farming) business and their spouse’s PAYE income as a primary school teacher. This makes for a complex credit committee proposal, but also allows us to fund many first-rate borrowers who would otherwise not be able to secure reasonably priced loans. Our average loan size is approximately £1 million, which coincidentally is our 60% LTV limit applied to the average value of a farm in the UK. However, the range runs from £100k up to £5 million at the moment, and our largest loan to date was £7 million, with the ability to go up to £10 million. While our loans are more expensive than the High Street, we’re not trying to replicate their business model, but rather find solutions for a borrower to either create and release value from “Land prices are holding up well and where we’ve had sight of exit valuations, these have almost all been ahead of the Red Book valuation, helped by a relative scarcity of land being sold.” Bank i ng & F i nanc i a l Se r v i ce s 52 Finance Monthly.
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