Brickflow has started the year with record momentum, completing £29.22m of lending across 157 residential and mixed-use units in just two weeks. The surge, spanning bridging, development and commercial finance, underlines the platform’s growing role not just as a discovery tool, but as infrastructure for executing UK property finance transactions.
Proptech Media spoke with Brickflow CEO Ian Humphreys to explore how data-led lending is reshaping development finance for SME and mid-size developers in the UK.
“To be fair, it’s all of the above: the bottlenecks, the opacity, and the access. The fundamental issue is information asymmetry. Most developers, even the very experienced ones, are flying blind. They base their financial assumptions on a deal they did a year ago or the half-dozen lenders their broker happens to have a relationship with. But the market moves faster than that. We track 157 lenders and over 200,000 data points every single week because lender appetite is a moving target. One week, a bank is hungry for residential, and the next, they’ve hit their cap, or they’re distracted by external issues, like car finance liabilities, and they effectively shut up shop. Without real-time data, developers are just guessing at their cost of capital, and in this environment, guessing is expensive.”
“What we’re seeing is finance becoming a front-end habit rather than a last-minute hurdle. A well-prepared developer today isn’t just someone with a thick stack of documents. It’s someone who is using our data at the site viability stage before they’ve even made an offer. They’re using the platform to sense-check the cost of capital in two minutes, so they don't waste six months chasing a project that was never fundable to begin with. It’s about moving away from that black box approach where you hope for the best, and moving toward a model where you have a clear, data-led picture of your funding and your exit before you even start.”
“There’s a massive appetite right now for commercial-to-residential conversions. Lenders love projects with existing built infrastructure because it takes some of the risk out of the equation compared to a pure ground-up build in an uncertain labor market. While the high-street banks might be retreating or getting more cautious, the specialist lenders are stepping into the gap. They have the liquidity, and they’re hungry for mid-size schemes in regional hotspots where there is a clear housing need. The problem for the developer is finding them.”
“When it comes to the digital journey, I always think back to my mum. I remember when I was a kid, she used to sit at the kitchen table and ring around half a dozen car insurance providers just to try and get the best price. Nobody does that anymore. It beggars belief that in property finance, people are still ringing around several banks to see who wants to play. The search, the comparison, and the initial viability check should be fully digital and instant. But for the final mile, human input is still critical. Every project and lender has a story. Whether it’s a site quirk or a complex credit background, or knowing a lender's true appetite for certain assets and geographies, it's real-life experience and human-to-human contact that works best. Technology does the heavy lifting so that humans can focus on the actual negotiation and judgment. The debt advisers and their borrowers getting the most from our technology really buy into this hybrid approach.”
“We see the cost of getting it wrong all the time. I know of a borrower who spent six months trying to get a hotel project off the ground with an equity investor, only to realize once they checked the live market on Brickflow that they had underestimated their finance costs by over a million pounds. The deal fell apart because they hadn't completed the necessary checks. On the other hand, we had the FD of a regional housebuilder with a solid network of three lenders he’d used for years. He ran a search on our platform, found a specialist lender he’d never even heard of, and saved four hundred and eighty thousand pounds on that single deal. The 'relationship tax' that borrowers pay is very real and can now be easily avoided.”
“The goal is for Brickflow to be the connective tissue of a broker's and borrower’s daily workflow. We don’t want to be a destination you just visit when you need a loan; we want to be native to the process. We’ve already started this with our LandTech integration, and the vision is that when a developer is looking at a site on a sourcing tool, they can see real-time funding options right there on the screen. It turns a month of manual research into a thirty-second automated check. We’re moving toward a world where checking your finance options is as frictionless as checking your bank balance.”