The Intermediary – October 2025 - Flipbook - Page 52
Round-table.
PARTICIPANTS, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
Charles Jabre DLA Architecture
Vishal Dixit Propel Property Finance
James Cooper DLA Architecture
Will Powell Downing
Jack Heath PHINOM Consultancy
Doug Bowley Downing
Dieter Kerschbaumer Arc & Co
Jessica Bird The Intermediary
pricing in time, not just risk. This shifts the burden
onto the borrower.
“The longer it takes, the more it costs,” Heath
explains, “and because of the continuous
monitoring throughout, of not only the planning,
but the additional Gateway steps in the
background, lenders are needing to align their
drawdowns with those steps, which could cause
extra delays in build progress.”
Until Gateway certainty is achieved, a scheme
is not financeable in the conventional sense.
What is emerging instead is a patchwork of hybrid
structures – part bridge, part equity, part belief.
When asked how Downing is approaching such
risk, Powell’s answer is refreshingly candid.
“I’d love to sit here and say we’ve got this magic
product that can just deal with all of this,” he
admits. “But the reality is it’s a spider’s web of
issues that’s very hard to layer a one-size-fits-all
solution over.”
Instead, moving forward needs a careful
balancing act. Bowley notes: “The competency of
the team behind the process is key.” Developers
must plan ahead meticulously and surround
themselves with professionals who understand
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The Intermediary | October 2025
the Gateway framework, “otherwise, they
risk wasting time if their application gets
turned down.”
S U RV I VA L OF T H E F I T T E S T
The changing landscape is forcing out riskaverse players and smaller firms, while
rewarding well-capitalised developers
able to navigate complexity and seize
opportunity amid uncertainty.
Land values, inflated by the boom years of cheap
money, have come crashing into today’s reality of
high build costs and higher interest rates.
Nevertheless, many landowners, still anchored
to 2019 valuations, refuse to accept the correction.
This is clogging up the pipeline at a time when
every viable opportunity counts.
Jabre adds: “Some clients of ours are very risk
averse. When we’re helping them bid on sites, we
get asked to just stick to non-HRB.
“This then would drive a much lower bid sum,
and they would lose on site opportunities and
someone else would outbid them.”
Still, Jabre insists: “We need to also inject some
positivity in a way that it is only going to get better.
There’s no way it’s going to stay like this; It’s to no
one’s advantage.
“We’re telling clients to look at the long term as
the application processing will get faster once the
backlog has subsided.
“The New Building Safety Levy might also help
better funding and resourcing the regulator once
introduced in October 2026.”
However, even reform, Powell says, will not
