Property professionals spend months stress-testing GDVs, interrogating build costs, scrutinising rental yields and haggling over rates. Then pick a lender based on a broker relationship, a previous deal, or whoever offers the first loan. And that can be a costly mistake.
At Brickflow, we ran 100s of searches across bridging, commercial mortgages and development finance so we could analyse how lenders respond to the same deal.
The gap between the most and least aggressive lender, in terms of leverage, on an identical deal runs to hundreds of thousands of pounds. On development finance, it tops £1m.
Not searching the market and working with the wrong lender is one of the UK’s most expensive mistakes, costing property investors in colossal amounts, without even knowing it.
This article looks at the Brickflow research to reveal exactly how much is at steak when borrowers rely on manual loan sourcing or using a broker who isn't tech-enabled.
Using Brickflow platform data from 2026, we created loan scenarios based on average deal values. Our numbers were:
By running each of these scenarios through Brickflow’s loan search, we could see the gaps between leverage being offered by lenders on the same deal.
We varied aspects of the deal such as location or asset type and compiled data on 100s of loan searches to gain a broad market view, and truly understand how much borrowers are leaving on the table in net loan.
The Findings
On bridging finance, the average gap between highest and lowest net loan is £250,000. On commercial mortgages, £306,000. On development finance, £842,000, with the largest single gap exceeding £1m on a residential scheme.
Not one asset class returned a consistently tight market.
The lowest gaps we saw overall in any particular deal type were refurbishment bridging loans (light to heavy refurbs), where lenders appear to have more aligned risk assessments, but even there the average gap is £172k between the highest and lowest leverage deals.
Whatever the property investment type, not searching across the full market will leave borrowers short and demonstrates the long-term effect on a property investment or development career.
Low rates frequently come with lower LTVs (Loan to Value) and higher deposits. A slightly higher rate with meaningfully higher leverage can often deliver a better deal, because it means less capital input, better ROCE (Return on Capital Employed), and more flexibility to deploy elsewhere.
Capital is a property investors’ most valuable asset, and a higher leveraged loan enables it to be spread further, across multiple projects, helping to scale sooner.
Leverage isn't the only variable in a finance decision, and there will be times when lower rates and borrowing cost is the right priority. But for most property professionals, most of the time, net loan is the number that has the biggest impact on investment power and career trajectory — which is exactly what this research set out to demonstrate.
Whatever your criteria, the only way to find the lender who best fits your deal is to search the whole market. Even loans with lower leverage and lower rates carry significant variances in total borrowing costs.
Find out if you’re a rate chaser in our quiz ‘What Type of Borrower Are You?
A single deal with the wrong lender isn't just a single bad outcome. The effect carries on to the next deal, and every deal after that.
Looking only at the very basic level of equity spread and investment ability (not taking into account return on capital and compounding return increases), we used our development finance scenario and calculated the impact to a property developer’s career.
In our £3.7m scenario, the lowest deposit required by one lender was £450,000. The highest, on the same deal, was nearly £1.4m. That's a £950,000 difference in capital requirement.
Two developers, same project, same equity pot of £1.4m. The only difference is who they borrowed from.
Same deal. Same starting point. Vastly different trajectories.
Run that pattern across a career and the opportunity cost is not just hundreds of thousands; it’s a potential 20 extra developments that never happened for Developer B. That’s utterly career-choking, and it’s not because of bad deals, bad sites, or bad timing. It’s because of one habit: not searching the market.
Image originally published in The UK's Most Expensive Mistake.
Over 160 lenders operate in the UK commercial real estate market. Most brokers have relationships with a fraction of them. Borrowers going direct have access to one.
Manual loan sourcing — a few calls, a trusted contact, a gut feeling — covers a tiny slice of available lender appetite. The lender who offers the most competitive terms on your specific deal, location, and asset type might just be the lender that no-one called.
Brickflow searches the full market instantly. The data we gathered for our research was generated by doing exactly that — every lender, same deal, real-time results based on 200,000+ lender data points (updated weekly), no guesswork.
Download the full report for the complete data breakdown across all three finance types, including asset-by-asset analysis and the methodology behind the numbers.
Leverage the power of technology and use Brickflow's instant finance calculators to avoid losing out on hundreds of thousands in leverage and spread your capital across multiple projects simultaneously: