Development finance brokers: the questions that separate one from a lead form

Development finance is the one product where searching for a broker rather than a lender is the rational first move, because there is no shelf price to compare. Two lenders looking at the same site will size the facility differently, roll up interest differently and take a different view of your contractor. This page is about how to tell a broker who has placed a scheme like yours from one that will forward your details and hope. CapExpand is a broker with 51 development lenders inside a panel of 200+.

Why this product uses brokers at all

Because the facility is assembled rather than selected. A scheme has a purchase price, a build cost, an end value and a timetable, and a development facility has to be stitched to all four at once, with the interest that accrues while nothing is being sold folded into the total. Move any one of those numbers and the lender that fits changes. That is a matching problem, and matching problems are what a panel is for.

It also explains why the market is full of introducers who are not brokers. Passing a site to a lender is easy; knowing which three of 51 will look at a conversion with a first-time developer and a regional contractor is not. The development finance guide sets out the mechanics of drawdown and monitoring; this page is about choosing who arranges it.

What the panel prices at

Published spans across our panel's development products, checked September 2026. They are facts about the panel on a date, not offers, and no scheme is quoted from them. The width is the point: a broker quoting you a single number before a valuation has been done is quoting the top of the range or the bottom, and either way it is a guess.

Read the two loan-to figures together rather than separately. A lender offering a high percentage of cost and a low percentage of end value will still cap you at whichever binds first, and on a scheme with a thin margin that is almost always the end value. Arrangement and exit fees and the monitoring surveyor sit outside the rate entirely.

The experience question

Every development lender asks about track record, and the answer they want is not really about you. 16 of our lenders will consider a first-time developer at September 2026, and what carries those cases is the professional team: a main contractor who has built the same thing before, a quantity surveyor, and a fixed-price contract rather than a schedule of rates. Assemble that before you approach anyone and the conversation changes.

The second route in is equity you did not have to find in cash. 27 lenders will lend against planning gain, so a site bought without consent and since granted it can carry part of its own deposit. The valuer decides how much of that uplift counts, not the lender and not you, which is why the valuation is the milestone to plan around.

Four questions to ask a broker

First, how many development lenders they hold and what the split looks like by scheme size, because a panel that is deep on £20m schemes tells you nothing about a four-unit conversion. Second, which lenders they have actually drawn down with this year, which is a different and much shorter list than the panel. Third, who pays them and at what point, in writing. Fourth, what they think will go wrong with your scheme: a broker who has placed schemes like yours will name the valuation, the contractor or the exit within a minute, and one who says it all looks fine has not read it.

What a broker costs

We are paid by the lender on drawdown and charge you nothing. Client fees are more common in this product than in others and are legitimate where they are set out in writing before you commit, but a fee payable before a scheme has been placed anywhere is a different thing, and worth declining. For property-secured lending we work with UK limited companies and LLPs only, for business and commercial purposes.

What we need to say something useful

The site address, what consent exists and when it was granted, the purchase price or current book value, a build cost with a source, an end value with a source, and who is building it. With those six things a shortlist takes an afternoon. Without the build cost and the end value, nobody can tell you anything except a range, and any broker who quotes you a rate before seeing them is not quoting your scheme.

Sources and method

The loan-to-cost and loan-to-GDV spans are counted from our own platform extract on the date shown. The links below cover the parts of a scheme that sit outside our data: how a monitoring surveyor is expected to work, what planning consent means, and how to verify the firm you are dealing with.

1. RICS, valuation and monitoring surveyor standards
2. FCA Register: verify a broker, its permissions and its principal
3. British Business Bank, Small Business Finance Markets
4. GOV.UK, planning permission and the planning system
5. NACFB, commercial finance broker standards