What should BLD be writing about right now?

One story worth telling: the exit is getting harder, and the data shows it before the defaults do. Buyer demand has weakened right across the market. RICS puts new buyer enquiries at a net -28% in July, Rightmove has demand down 7% on the year, and Zoopla has sales agreed running 9% below last year. For bridging that matters more than for most, because a bridge is underwritten on a confident exit: a sale or a refinance that assumes the buyers are there. Thin demand stretches exit timelines and softens the values those exits lean on, and it bites hardest on flats, where four in five now fail to sell within six months. The underreported trend is not lender appetite. It is exit risk in a market where the end buyer has quietly gone missing. Worth a piece on how brokers are stress-testing the exit, not just the entry.

BLD should examine bridging as completion-day liquidity for business restructures, not just acquisitions or refurbishments. My largest facility was £5.3 million for one day, funding a Capital Account Restructure before a property business incorporated. The owners borrowed from an independent lender, lent the money to their company and the company repaid the bridge that day, leaving it owing them through directors’ loan accounts. The questions are how lenders price one-day exposure, which legal controls secure the exit and why conventional finance is unsuitable. In July, the First-tier Tribunal held that, for DOTAS purposes, these steps were neither contrived nor abnormal.