The Intermediary – February 2026 - Flipbook - Page 30
Q&A
Alternative Bridging Corporation
The Intermediary sits down with James Bloom, director at
Alternative Bridging Corporation, to discuss its revamped
proposition and the outlook for residential development
finance in 2026
With 2026 now well underway, how
would you describe the opportunity
for residential developers and their
brokers?
funding structure recognises those pressures from
the very outset.
What sorts of challenges are
you seeing most often on live
The opportunity is still very much there, and that is
the starting point.
The housing shortage certainly hasn’t eased,
and we see a clear intent across the market to
get more schemes moving and ultimately more
homes delivered.
However, that opportunity now comes with a
sharper focus on delivery.
Developers and brokers are not just asking
whether a scheme stacks up
in principle, but whether
it can withstand
longer timelines
and more cautious
sales conditions.
Planning reform
may help over time,
but in the here and
now, build-costs,
sales-periods and
funding certainty
are still front
of mind.
So, while the
opportunity is real, it
only works if
the
JAMES BLOOM
development schemes?
If you look at live cases, it seems to me that the
themes are fairly consistent acr
across the board. Time
and cost remain the tw
two biggest pressure points,
and they tend to sho
show up in unison rather than
in isolation. Typicall
Typically, it is not that a scheme goes
wrong, but that it tak
takes longer than planned. The
planning process still tak
takes longer than it should,
build programmes can move, or exit-assumptions
may no longer quite fit once practical completion
is reached. When that happens, o
otherwise
strong schemes can ccome under some real strain.
The issue that we see is that man
many traditional
structures are not built with enough tolerance for
that reality, particularl
particularly once the build-phase has
ended.
How did those obser
observations feed
development
into your recent de
finance review?
Those challenges w
were exactly what prompted the
review in the first plac
place. When you step back and
look at where deals ffeel most exposed, it is rarely
during construction itself
itself. More often, it will be
at completion and into eexit. Practical completion
is often treated as a finish line, but it is just a
change in risk. We were seeing schemes perform
well up to that point, only
onl for pressure to appear
because the funding structur
structure became less flexible
just when it was most needed. That disconnect
made it clear that the way development finance
is traditionally structur
structured no longer holds true in
these types of situations.
