Industry comes together for inaugural lunch

By David Craik 23rd November 2022

A new industry discussion group looking at key issues such as property prices and interest rates has just celebrated its inaugural meeting.

The Lenders Lunch Club (LLC), comprising 12 property lenders enjoyed an ‘exuberant lunch’ at the London Aqua Shard last week.

Views were openly shared amongst the group on a diversity of subjects including property prices, expectations for the lending sector in 2023 and beyond, historic effects on the property market such as Brexit, the impact of rising interest rates and best practice for lenders around the new Consumer Duty Act.

“We formed the group to get to know each other, create friendly relations, share knowledge and maybe work together on deals,” said Jason Garrett, CEO of Buzz Capital.

“It was a real pleasure to meet up with such insightful guys who all contributed to such a lively afternoon. You can never stop learning in any business, and I certainly felt I knew more after our lunch than before. The general consensus was that 2023 will be an interesting year.

It was generally thought that property prices may drop but not as much as some of the headlines are saying. Discussing say the Consumer Duty Act is also only going to help us become even better lenders in the future.”

Garrett intends the LLC to meet every six months to discuss points of the day that may affect lending into the property bridging and development sectors. The aim is to expand to 18 members at the next lunch.

Lenders who attended the first get-together were Stewart Barnes (Portman Finance), Scott Marshall (Roma Finance), Sam Howard (Magnet Capital), Tom Brown (Ingenious Real Estate), Shahil Kotecha (Pivot Finance), Sonny Schneider (Schneider Investments), Matt Watson (Tenn Capital), Josh Levy (Ultimate Finance), Callum Ferguson (Clearwell Capital), Yann Murciano (Blend Network), Rob Lankey (GB Bank) and Jason Garrett.