Real estate funding specialist, ASK Partners (ASK), has been named European Small Ticket Lender of 2021 in the Real Estate Capital Europe awards.
The award recognises real estate lenders in the sub-€20m market and four lenders were shortlisted by Real Estate Capital’s editorial team.
The decision then went to a strictly controlled public vote amongst industry players and the publication’s readers, with the winners across all categories announced today.
ASK wrote loans totalling around £415m (€493 million) in capital, spread across 35 loans in 2021 – around double the number of transactions it completed in 2020.
This is representative of significant growth in the smaller ticket lending market. ASK has taken advantage of interesting upward trends in the office and retail markets and pre-planning loans against land whilst institutional lenders have chased bigger tickets in what are perceived to be ‘safer’ sectors such as BTR, industrial and logistics.
Notable loans included a £10.5m loan to an SPV managed by Urbana Partners against a 70,000sqft office building in Solihull, and a £9.5m loan to Future High Street Living to fund the acquisition and planning process for a residential conversion of a former Debenhams store in Staines.
Daniel Austin (pictured), CEO and co-founder of ASK, added: “We are delighted to have won this award, it means a lot to have been voted for by our clients and partners, and industry professionals. We’ve worked hard to meet borrowers’ needs with flexibility and fast turnaround times.
“ASK does not lend exclusively in the small ticket market, having closed two loans around the £30m mark already this year but the boost in the small ticket lending market last year undoubtedly played to our strengths.
“We are very much property people and have always looked at the underlying asset value when writing loans rather than being metric driven.
“There has been a lot of uncertainty around sectors such as retail and offices but a fundamental demand for the built environment remains. This leaves a lot of room for creativity and looking at assets in terms of their different possible uses.”
