Commercial brokers need clearer answers, not longer product lists
Jonathan Rubins considers the case for simplifying commercial mortgage products while retaining flexibility for complex cases.
Commercial mortgage brokers have a remarkable amount of choice available to them, which is obviously a good thing. But I do sometimes look at the sheer range of products on offer and wonder whether we have slightly confused brokers by giving them more options instead of making their job easier.
Some commercial mortgage ranges are so complicated that, by the time you have established which product applies and worked through the criteria, you could be forgiven for wondering whether all that choice has really helped you very much.
I am being slightly unfair, obviously, because commercial property itself can be complicated and lenders need enough flexibility to deal with that. But I’m not sure the product needs to be complicated as well.
Choice has to be useful
There’s certainly plenty of lending appetite out there. Bayes Business School found that £52.7bn of new commercial real estate lending was completed in 2025, up 29% year-on-year, while new lending from non-bank lenders rose by 51%.
Those are fairly substantial numbers, and they suggest that the problem for brokers is probably not finding a lender somewhere in the market that wants to lend. The harder part can be working out which lender actually wants this property and this borrower, and how quickly you can establish whether the case has somewhere to go.
That’s why I think there is a fair question to be asked about what we mean by choice. Another product only adds something useful if a broker can understand where it fits and whether it is worth pursuing for their client.
The product should not be doing all the work
There is a propensity in commercial lending to try to account for every possible scenario within the product range itself. I understand why lenders do it, but eventually you can end up with something so convoluted that, as a broker, you’re not quite sure what the lender can and cannot do.
That seems the wrong way round. I would rather have a relatively straightforward product and then have experienced people behind it who are prepared to look properly at the case that comes in.
That doesn’t mean that every case is going to fit, nor does it mean underwriting should become less rigorous. It simply means the difficult bit is dealt with by the lender rather than being handed back to the broker.
So why launch another commercial mortgage proposition?
There’s an obvious question here, given that we have just launched Alternative Commercial Mortgages. If I think the market already has plenty of products, why add another one?
But that is precisely the point. We didn’t start with the view that the market desperately needed another commercial mortgage product; we looked at what was available and thought there was room to make the process simpler for brokers.
That thinking has shaped Alternative Commercial Mortgages. This bespoke product provides commercial-term lending across commercial, semi-commercial and residential buy-to-let properties, with terms from five to 30 years and lending up to 75% loan-to-value (LTV). But we have deliberately tried to carve away some of the complexity that can come with commercial lending.
Brokers can use the portal to manage the application, while still having a regionally based business development manager (BDM) working with them through to drawdown. That’s quite deliberate because technology should make the straightforward parts easier, without getting in the way when a case requires some judgement.
Commercial lending can be complicated without making it complicated
Nobody is going to make commercial property completely straightforward, and I would be slightly suspicious of anyone who claimed they could. Different properties and borrowers require judgement, which is part of the reason specialist lenders exist in the first place.
What we can do is stop adding complexity where it serves no particular purpose. A broker should not need to become an expert in the internal workings of a lender before they can establish whether that lender might want their case.
There is already plenty of choice in commercial mortgages, and that competition is good. The opportunity now is to make that choice more useful.
Jonathan Rubins is director and chief commercial officer at Alternative Bridging Corporation
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