Commercial property one of most popular bridging searches

Commercial property one of most popular bridging searches

Commercial property was in the top five searches for bridging in July for the first time since 2018, according to Knowledge Bank's monthly criteria tracker.

Other search highlights include 'maximum LTV for bridging', 'regulated bridging' and 'second charge loan'.

'Capital raising' and 'semi-commercial property' were in the top five searches for commercial.

Nicola Firth, chief executive of Knowledge Bank, said: “Our tracker reveals a few shifts this month with interest-only making an appearance in residential searches for the first time this year, most likely as a result of a several new products and criteria changes to this sector.

"To remember criteria changes across all the different fields that a broker has to search is impossible. Even the best help desks would struggle to update this many changes to a spreadsheet in six months, without a team of people working on it full time.

"Knowledge Bank is in the fortunate position that it is updated by the lenders rather than staff in a club or network or the brokers themselves.

“It is clear, brokers not using the systems are either spending a lot of their time chasing down the answers or possibly not always giving the best advice they could, as they are not fully aware of what all of the options were at the time the advice was being given.

“From a compliance perspective, the latter is an extremely frightening prospect!”

Knowledge Bank holds over 91,000 criteria from over 200 lenders, with almost 30,000 changes to mortgage lending criteria reported in the first half of 2019.