Mixed-use development secures £38M of structured capital.

A mixed-use development, residential over retail, in a growth corridor with planning secured and anchor tenants in negotiation. The sponsor had completed smaller schemes but was stepping up in scale, and the step up was the problem.

At this size, lenders underwrite the sponsor as much as the scheme. Without a track record at £38M, senior lenders offered leverage too low to make the project work, and the funding gap between what banks would lend and what the sponsor could contribute looked unbridgeable.

The capital stack was restructured rather than forced: a senior facility sized to what lenders would genuinely support, with a mezzanine layer bridging the gap, priced against the scheme profit rather than the sponsor balance sheet.

The senior debt was placed with a lender relationship inside the network that had funded this corridor before. The mezzanine came from a private capital partner that specialises in backing sponsors making exactly this step up in scale.

The £38M structure closed across both layers. The sponsor contributed what it actually had rather than what a single lender demanded, and construction began within the planning window.