A calm and honest look at what BFS is doing to sail a steady ship through the current crisis, how we’re supporting existing and new clients, and what our predictions are for the property sector when things start to settle down. Remember, we are here to #makeithappen so do get in touch if you need any support.
Transcript:
Afternoon everybody
It’s John Hardman here, Head of Sales at Bridging Finance Solutions and I’m just providing you with a short update on how the team at BFS are managing our way through this unprecedented set of circumstances that we’re all facing across the UK that’s causing a huge amount of difficulty to many.
BFS are privately funded. We are continuing to write new business albeit the difficulty with third party agents such as valuers and solicitors is making the process very very slow indeed so the bulk of our work at the moment is in managing our existing book.
We’re trying to make sure that we’re helping out our bridging clients and perhaps, more importantly, property development clients to make sure if there are any bumps in the road, we can be around to assist where we possibly can.
Clearly there is a short term liquidity issue in the market. We’ve seen a few lenders stop lending altogether and pull out of the market which is worrying and upsetting. The reassuring thing from our perspective is we’re trying to just sail a steady ship through this so that when we come out of the other end of this we can continue writing business as normal.
It’s with that in mind that we’re continuing to process new applications from clients. Admittedly, the processes have gotten a whole lot slower over the last two weeks as I’ve already mentioned but the idea is and the desire is that once we get through this difficult period of time that BFS as a business can hit the ground running and start putting money out the door just as we were before this crisis came about us.
As well as the liquidity, we’ve got interest rates at a record low and demand for residential property in the UK is still extremely high. I think if we couple that with the fact that the equity markets are absolutely all over the place across the world at the moment, I think what we’ll find when things settle down is that people do rush into property, rush back to property as effectively a safe haven from the volatility of equity-based investment.
So just to cap off what we’ve discussed there, we’re still open for business at BFS. We’re very much focusing our efforts on helping our existing clients and managing those relationships properly and sensibly.
The team remain open. If you want to contact them to discuss either an existing case, one that’s in the pipeline or something you’ve got new on your desk, we’ll be happy to chat that through. And we’ll try and update you once every week or so just to see what’s been happening in the wider market and also here at BFS.
