Roma Finance, the bridging and development finance lender, has provided a loan of £1.32m in its largest ever case.

The customer had already purchased an industrial building near Manchester City Centre, and had started converting the building to twenty six luxury apartments when he ran out of money. Roma Finance lent sufficient funds to pay off the incumbent lender and complete the top floor comprising six duplex flats.

Roma met with the customer to look more closely at the transaction and visited the building which is in an up and coming part of the city with easy access to the centre and has plenty of local amenities. This indicated that the flats would be very desirable for buyers working in Manchester so facilitating future sales.

The customer is an experienced developer having completed a number of successful residential and commercial schemes including leisure complexes, spas and gyms. On completion it is estimated the whole site would be worth in excess of £4m. The exit to the loan was already planned for with the quick sale of a number of the flats as soon as they were renovated.

Having considered these factors Roma advanced the £1.32m bridging loan in just fifteen days. Despite the case being higher than Roma’s maximum loan size of £1m, the viability of the case and the experience of the customer meant that it was a case they could lend on.

Meir Peer, Bridging Specialist at Roma Finance, commented: “This was a case where the borrower spotted a tremendous opportunity in a desirable part of Manchester and beat other developers to buy the building and start to renovate it. The loan required was more than our stated criteria, but every case has to be judged on its own merits, and in this situation we decided it was a case worth lending on, with a customer who had delivered quality projects in the past. We managed to provide the funds in just fifteen days using our new and highly streamlined fast track service which is exactly what the customer wanted and he was able to continue seamlessly with the renovations after we paid off his current borrowings.”

The customer commented: “Thank you for doing the deal and for doing it in the time frame you said you would. I am very grateful and I look forward to doing many more deals in the future.”