Real estate finance security

Achieving the best value from your real estate is essential in today's competitive market and enables you to effectively fund the business of building houses.  

We have a specialist security (securitisation) team who have the experience, track record and passion to deliver your finance-raising projects quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.

Our Housing Finance team is consistently ranked in the first tier for social housing finance by the legal directories. As the largest team of its kind in the UK housing sector specialising in banking and security/securitisation work, we can offer the widest range of experience available for your property due diligence, investment, charging and security projects whatever the size of the portfolio and deliver them within even the shortest of deadlines. We provide a high quality, trusted, solutions based service for our clients making the property due diligence process of raising finance a streamlined, positive experience.

We have a wide client base giving us depth and breadth of insight into this market. This enables us to take a '360' approach to transactions. Our clients range from funder banks, institutional investors and REITs, through to small and mid-size housing associations and specialised organisations as well as some of the modern housing giants of the sector. Whether our clients are looking to refinance, raise bank funding, invest, raise funds through a bond issue or private placement, set up a rolling charge programme to ensure that properties are always ready to charge or uplift the values of existing stock - we have the knowledge, resources and flexibility to help all parties achieve their desired outcomes. 

Many of our client relationships have spanned many decades so clients benefit from our knowledge of the organisation and its property/development history, expectations, processes and how our clients like to communicate with us and what is most important to them.

Between them, the senior members of the Real Estate Finance Security (REFS) team have decades of experience of large scale residential property due diligence and charging properties. We are skilled at early identification of issues which might impact value (such as the efficacy of mortgagee exclusion provisions) and are able to suggest workarounds to problems and ways to uplift values. The more junior members of the team ensure that administrative tasks are run very efficiently which helps limit costs for our clients.
 
We know what is industry standard; we help create the bench marks. We are a member of the influential Property Finance Working Group, working with other professionals in the sector to agree standard drafting and processes to assist in the streamlining of transactions. We also, of course, have access to our market leading colleagues across the firm who can advise on specialist matters should the need arise, such as insolvency, governance, construction, environmental and planning issues.

In brief 

• Extensive experience across all types of residential real estate property due diligence security and charging
• Experts in acting for funders, investors and borrowers
• Experience of large scale charging and other security exercises such as refinancing, syndicate splitting, mergers and transfers of engagement and bond issues as well as direct funding transactions
• A stable, longstanding and knowledgeable team based in all our UK offices
• A leader in the affordable housing sector