Invest&Funds’ core mission has always been to empower regional businesses through vital liquidity provision where it’s needed most, directly into the hands of the nation’s smaller home builders. The scale of demand and opportunity in regions such as Yorkshire is extensive and is indeed a key part of the national home-building strategy. With traditional banks lightening their lending criteria, especially for smaller or less established developers, platforms like Invest&Fund provide an accessible and flexible alternative. Our model connects developers directly with investors, streamlining the funding process and enabling projects that might otherwise struggle to secure traditional financing.
There are state-level options in place to support developers across the Yorkshire region, including the Home Building Fund and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, to name a couple; however, many of our clients require a more tailored or bespoke financial solutions to kickstart their vision. It’s a complex market, and we specialise in working closely with our clients to write business that allows them to concentrate just on what matters to them: building businesses and building homes.
Our platform specialises in development loans, typically ranging from £400,000 to £10 million, although they can exceed this amount for the right project. These loans can cover a wide range of projects—from small housing developments to multi-unit schemes. For developers in areas such as Leeds, Sheffield, or rural parts of North and East Yorkshire, this offers a critical lifeline. With Invest&Fund, developers can receive funds faster than from traditional banks, enabling them to act on opportunities more quickly and with greater confidence.
We lend against experience as much as costs and assets. Although that may seem a little esoteric, our niche and success have come from homing in on a gap in the market created by diminished appetites among big banks, driven by their commercial decision-making rather than risk aversion. Somewhere along the way, smaller developers ceased to fill margins in an ever-increasing economy of scale; these are great regional businesses with experienced parties building fantastic homes, but not on a scale that works in the margins of balance sheet-driven, money market lending. Our decentralised model returns to basics, directly assisting these businesses without leaning too far into the risk curve, offering sensible lending at sensible leverage.
Property markets in Yorkshire are diverse, with varying demand and growth rates across regions. Whether it’s a semi-rural scheme in the Yorkshire Dales or an urban regeneration project in Bradford, the needs of each development are unique, and our expertise on the ground and in these communities is also a positive feature of our decentralised model. We have taken the big bank funding model that wasn’t working for a lot of businesses and stripped it back to its component parts, which allows us to be both pragmatic and nimble in our common-sense decision-making, something our local partners continue to rely on as we continue to build out multi-phase, multi-year relationships across the region.
Alan Fletcher
Partnership Director
Invest&Fund