Is demand for development exit finance rising? The H1 2026 read

We track 13 independent signals, each against its own year-earlier comparator, and count how many point in each direction. There are no weights and no composite score: the count is the read. "Rising" means the signal implies more schemes will need exit or extension finance, whichever way the underlying number moved.

Ageing stock is one half of the picture. The other is whether new loans are exiting on time. Reading each registration year as a cohort and counting releases within fixed windows, 24.9% of specialist charges registered in 2024 were released within 18 months, against 19.7% for 2023 and 16.1% for 2019 (Companies House charge register, Construction Capital analysis, 2024 cohort). Within 12 months the figure was 13.9%. The newest lending is working faster than any cohort before it.

Fewer than half of any cohort is released within 36 months on the register, which is why the median time to release cannot be stated: it lies beyond the observation window for every year. The 2021 and 2022 cohorts, written into the post-pandemic cost surge, are the ones still carrying stock.

A development exit is repaid by sales. Land Registry registered 81,523 new-build transactions in England and Wales in the 4 quarters to 2025 Q2 (HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, Construction Capital analysis, 4 quarters to 2025 Q2), down 9.5% on a year earlier and down 37.5% on 2022. New-build's share of all sales fell from 12.8% to 8.6%. The series stops at 2025 Q2 because new-build registrations trail completion by a year or more; the later quarters are not weak, they are unregistered.

Pricing has held. The median new-build house sold at a 24.5% premium to the median existing house in 2025 Q2 (HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, Construction Capital analysis, 2025 Q2), wider than the 20.0% a year earlier. Developers are selling fewer units, not cheaper ones, which is consistent with stock being held rather than cleared.

Regional cuts use the property postcodes named in the charge, which covers 43.5% of specialist charges and 64.9% of the development-like book. Cells below 30 observations are suppressed. Rightmove regions are shown side by side where two fold into one lending-monitor region.

The south is where selling times have lengthened most and where new-build registrations have fallen furthest; the north has held its selling times. Aged specialist stock has risen in every region since 2022.

• Populations: specialist development lenders (9,905 charges since records began) and a development-like book that adds mixed-tier bank and bridging charges passing this rule: specialist tier, or mixed-tier charge whose borrower carries SIC 41100/41202, or whose particulars contain development keywords (development, land at, land on the, site at, building agreement), or whose borrower carries SIC 68100 and was incorporated within 12 months of the charge and carries no buy-to-let SIC (68201/68202/68209). Of 377,103 mixed-tier charges, 54,748 pass it. The unfiltered mixed tier is dominated by buy-to-let term lending and is never presented as a development signal.
• Live book: a charge is live at a date if registered on or before it and not satisfied by it. Quarter-ends within six months of the satisfaction vintage (2026-08-03) are provisional and excluded from the scorecard.
• Release cohorts: a registration year is reported at a window only when every charge in it has had the full window of observation. Release rates are floors because satisfactions are often filed late or never.
• Exit refinance events: a specialist development senior charge satisfied at or near the registration of an unrelated lender's charge on the same title. Related-party successions are excluded.
• Land Registry: England and Wales houses, bungalows and flats aggregated by postcode district. All-sales quarters within six months of the vintage (2026-06-30) and new-build quarters within twelve months are censored and excluded.
• Time on market: Rightmove's average days from listing to sold subject to contract, all listings, not new-build specific. Zoopla publishes a different measure on a different basis; we do not chain the two.
• Sensitivity: admitting mixed-tier charges on development SIC codes alone (38,668 charges) gives an over-24-month share of 43.2% at end-2019, 55.7% at end-2022 and 64.6% at Dec 2025, and the scorecard reads: 5 of 13 available signals point to a rising requirement for development exit finance; 3 point to a falling requirement; 5 are flat.
• No lender is named. Companies House filings record no loan values. Scotland is outside the sold-data and regional scope.