Manual loan sourcing is costing UK property borrowers over £1m in leverage on a single deal
Market research by Brickflow, the UK’s leading specialist property finance comparison platform, reveals that property investors and developers are losing significant leverage on every deal by sourcing finance manually. The report, titled “The UK’s Most Expensive Mistakes”, exposes the wide range of lending terms on offer across the market and how relying on manual loan sourcing can severely restrict cash flow and stall broader property acquisition and project pipelines.
By analysing 300 simulated finance searches across bridging loans, commercial mortgages, and development finance, Brickflow compared how different UK lenders responded to identical borrowing scenarios.
The funding gap at a glance:
- Bridging loans: £250,000 average net loan difference (on a £1.4m purchase)
- Commercial mortgages: £306,000 average net loan difference (on a £1.5m purchase)
- Development finance: £842,000 average net loan difference (on a £3.7m project with a £5.2m GDV)
The pattern holds across every product and every asset class analysed. In bridging, the single lowest gap recorded in the whole dataset was £55,000, while pure residential purchases averaged over £251,000:
- Bridging finance (£1.4m residential purchase, London): The most competitive net loan reached £979,265, while the least competitive dropped to £646,106. That £333,159 gap means one lender was prepared to advance 52% more than another against the same asset.
- Commercial mortgages (£1.5m retail purchase, North West): Net loan offers ranged from £1,125,000 down to £750,000. The £375,000 difference translates directly into a 50% smaller deposit for the borrower who compared the market.
- Development finance (£3.7m residential project, £5.2m GDV, Wales): The most competitive lender advanced £3,371,262 against the least competitive at £2,340,936, a variance of £1,030,326 on an identical scheme. That gap means 94% higher ROCE for the investor who secured the better terms.
The compound effect
The report also models what these gaps mean over time. On the £3.7m development scenario, the lowest deposit required by any lender was £450,000, while the highest was £1.4m on the same deal. Starting with equal equity of £1.4m, an investor securing the most competitive terms could spread that capital across three projects, while an investor accepting the least competitive would commit all of it to one. Repeated over a career, that is the difference between 30 completed projects and 10.
Ian Humphreys, CEO of Brickflow, commented: “Looking at a single lender or a handful of lenders is the industry standard for many borrowers and brokers not using technology. The reality is that this manual approach is costly. Borrowers can tie up hundreds of thousands of pounds in unnecessary equity on every deal by sourcing finance manually. If that capital were freed up and reinvested, the additional property transactions completed each year could be substantial. Manual loan sourcing is holding brokers and their clients back. We built Brickflow to help brokers close more deals for their clients, with less capital tied up in each one.” The full report, including methodology and full data breakdowns, is available here.