LONDON, UK. September 11th, 2026 – New research from Brickflow, the UK’s leading specialist property finance comparison platform, suggests that investors and developers may be tying up substantial amounts of capital unnecessarily when they source property finance without comparing the wider lending market.
The report, titled “The UK’s Most Expensive Mistakes“, highlights the significant differences in lending terms available across the market and shows how relying on manual loan sourcing can constrain cash flow and limit the ability to pursue further property acquisitions and development projects.
Brickflow analysed 300 simulated finance searches covering bridging loans, commercial mortgages, and development finance, comparing lender responses to identical borrowing scenarios.
The research found that on a £1.4m purchase, there was an average £250,000 difference in net lending between manually sourcing finance and using a comparison platform. For a £1.5m commercial mortgage purchase, the difference increased to £306,000, while development finance showed a gap of £842,000 on a £3.7m project with a £5.2m GDV.
The findings were consistent across all products and asset classes examined. Within bridging finance, the smallest gap recorded across the dataset was £55,000, while pure residential purchases showed an average difference of more than £251,000.
For bridging finance on a £1.4m residential purchase in London, the strongest net loan offer reached £979,265, compared with £646,106 from the least competitive lender. The £333,159 difference means one lender was willing to advance 52% more than another against the same property.
For commercial mortgages, based on a £1.5m retail purchase in the North West, net loan offers varied from £1,125,000 to £750,000. This £375,000 gap equates to a 50% reduction in the deposit required from the borrower who secured the more competitive finance.
In development finance, for a £3.7m residential project with a £5.2m GDV in Wales, the most competitive lender offered £3,371,262, compared with £2,340,936 from the least competitive lender. The resulting £1,030,326 difference was recorded against an identical development scheme and equates to 94% higher ROCE for the investor who obtained the stronger terms.
The report also examines the impact of these differences over time. In the £3.7m development scenario, the lowest deposit required was £450,000, while the highest was £1.4m for the same deal. With £1.4m of equity available, an investor securing the most competitive terms could allocate that capital across three projects, while one accepting the least competitive terms would use the entire amount on a single project. Repeated over a career, this could represent the difference between completing 30 projects and 10.
Ian Humphreys, CEO of Brickflow, said: “Looking at a single lender or a handful of lenders is the industry standard for many borrowers and brokers not using technology. The reality is that this manual approach is costly. Borrowers can tie up hundreds of thousands of pounds in unnecessary equity on every deal by sourcing finance manually.
“If that capital were freed up and reinvested, the additional property transactions completed each year could be substantial. Manual loan sourcing is holding brokers and their clients back. We built Brickflow to help brokers close more deals for their clients, with less capital tied up in each one.”
The full report, including methodology and detailed data breakdowns, is available here.
