Gary founded Redrock Commercial Finance in 2011 primarily to serve the different types of clients applying for bridging loans and development finance.
In recent years, the companies began sharing the same office space and they jointly invested in a market-leading internal infrastructure designed to both speed up the application process for borrowers and to provide finance at more competitive rates and on the best possible terms for clients.
It’s this infrastructure and the relationship Gary and his team have developed with lenders which has allowed the company to provide £300m of funding to Redrock clients in the past decade.
Gary’s career in specialist property finance began 15 years ago. In what he calls a baptism of fire because he was learning his job and helping customers as the storms of the Great Recession began to hang over the property market and the UK economy, he developed a particular skill in structuring complex loans for clients.
“Presenting a bridging loan or a development finance proposal to a lender is much like presenting a business plan to a bank manager,” says Gary. “The numbers have to make sense and it’s the job of me and my team to package a bridging loan or a development finance proposal like a business plan”.
Starting Redrock was a calculated risk for Gary as it is when all employed people decide to go it alone. While he found much to admire in the bridging loan and development finance industry as an employee, he believed that, following the Great Recession, the industry would need to adapt to be able to offer borrowers what they need.
The only way they would adapt, in his opinion, was having someone from the outside putting deals to lenders and strongly making the business case for the borrowers they were representing in a new way. In any business deal, both sides need to win and the true added value of a broker is opening up opportunity for lenders and borrowers showing how they can both benefit from entering a working relationship together
He still finds bridging loans and development finance endlessly fascinating and he loves working on the hardest-to-place deals. His passion outside work, to the sorrow of his neighbours, is that he is an animal on the drums.
Jessica’s working career has always been around property and property finance. A love of property has been in her blood for a long time so a career in the industry was almost pre-ordained.
She was one of the first Redrock people and she’s been in the industry now for eight years, most of those as office manager.
One of her main responsibilities is the “packaging” of a deal. What is deal packaging? We work with lenders across the whole of market and each of those lenders likes the deals we place to them to be structured in a certain way. The underwriters within lenders themselves are very busy people and they genuinely appreciate it when a broker presents a proposal to them in a way which aids their workflow.
Jessica makes sure that proposals are packaged correctly containing all the information and documentation required in a format and in an order preferred by the lender before passing it to Mike, our senior underwriter, for final examination.
Jessica is also in charge with dealing with your solicitors and your lender’s solicitors when a deal is progressing and she’s usually the person who keeps you up to date as the deal transitions from proposal to draw down and completion.
In her spare time, Jessica enjoys socialising and spending time with her family.
Danielle is our senior case manager and her relentless efficiency and her regard for detail in working with both borrowers and lenders provide the backbone to the Redrock business.
She can often be found prepping deals prior to sending them off to lenders on our panel. She’s very much a people person and she greatly enjoys dealing with everyone involved in a bridging loan or a development finance package – the borrower, the lender, the solicitors, and more.
She is great for the atmosphere within the business and she is one of the major factors behind Redrock being an enjoyable, rewarding, and exhausting place to work. In her spare time, she loves discovering other cultures and travelling.
The “deal exit team” is really a joint enterprise by all of the members of our team but Jessica and Danielle are de facto in charge of it.
Every bridging loan or development finance package we arrange for clients has an “exit strategy”. In other words, you must pay back all the funding you have received back by a certain date.
As many of the packages we arrange are for complex property projects or for personal fundraising, we’re aware that many planned exit dates become unachievable because of slippage in the schedule. After your funding has been secured and you have drawn down funds, Jessica or Danielle, will contact you every now and again to find out how you’re getting on.
If it looks like you might miss the exit date and/or you need additional funding because of unforeseen costs on a project, the deal exit team will begin arranging other options (normally the securing of another bridging loan or development finance package). This is to make sure that you are able to fulfil your contractual obligations to your initial lender just in case the obstacle or obstacles you face to meet the deadline are too great.
Worried? Don’t be. The deal exit team are very good at what they do and one in five bridging loans or development funding packages need to be refinanced so you are not alone.
To get in touch with us, please call us on 020 3780 7610 or click here for our contact page.