Who Funds the Development Exit: Q3 2026

Exit finance is largely a two-category market, tilting further towards bridging lenders.

Companies House shows which types of lender are taking security over development companies, even though it records nothing about loan size. Read by category, it shows where the capacity to fund exits sits.

• Mix. Bridging lenders and specialist banks wrote nearly all exit-type charges, with private credit funds at just 11 by count.
• Momentum. New development lending grew 11.3%, while exit-type lending was flat, at -0.4%.
• Refinance. Title-level refinance events are rising, though only a small subset can be tied to specialist development lenders.

Bridging lenders write 55% of exit-type lending, and their share is growing

5,002 exit-type charges were registered against development companies in the 12 months to September 2026, broadly flat on the year before at -0.4%. New development lending grew 11.3%.

The capacity to fund exits is a two-lender-type market. Bridging lenders and specialist banks wrote almost all of it, and the balance tipped towards bridging over the year. Private credit funds barely register by count, with 11 charges, down from 29, although a count of charges says nothing about their size, and the register records no loan amounts.

For a developer, this mix affects the conversation more than the headline volume does. A bridging lender and a specialist bank usually size, price and monitor a sales period differently, so the same scheme can suit one and not the other. Our development exit bridging and development exit refinance pages set out how those structures differ.

Refinance events reached 446 a quarter, up from 212 in 2023 Q3

A refinance event is the closest the register comes to showing an exit happening: a successor lender's charge landing on the same title as an unrelated senior charge, with related-party moves between a lender's own vehicles taken out.

The count is 31.6% higher than a year earlier. It is a floor, because it needs both charges to name an identifiable title, and it covers more than development exits: any property debt refinanced onto a new lender's charge can appear. Part of the long-run rise may reflect how completely titles are captured, so we put more weight on the recent change than on the comparison with earlier years.

Narrow it to loans where the outgoing senior lender is a specialist development lender and the count falls to 38 events over the last four quarters. That is too few to split by successor lender type, so we publish the total and suppress the mix. The honest reading is that the direction is up and the precise size of the exit refinance market cannot be measured from public data alone.

The specialist book is growing more slowly, but the wider development book is not

Over the four quarters to 2026 Q3, specialist lenders registered 962 charges and 700 were satisfied, a net addition of 262. The same measure was 626 in 2022.

A smaller net addition has two possible causes that mean opposite things: more repayments, or fewer new loans. For specialist lenders it is mainly the second. Compared with 2022, new charges are down by 268 a year and satisfactions up by 96.

That does not mean exit demand is about to ease, because specialist lenders are only part of development lending. Across the wider book, restricted to borrowers with a housebuilding code, new charges rose from 3,840 in 2022 to 4,413, and the net addition was 2,067, against 2,208. Lending appears to have moved across lender types rather than fallen away, and those loans will need exits of their own.

What this means if you are approaching practical completion

This is our opinion as finance arrangers, drawn from the evidence above. It is general commentary rather than advice on any scheme, and indicative structures vary by lender, asset and borrower.

• Start the exit conversation before the facility forces it. With selling times at 67 days to find a buyer before any legal work, a scheme with a few months left on its loan has little room. A development exit facility is easier to arrange with time in hand and sales evidence than with a default date approaching.
• Test the appraisal against today's selling speeds, not 2022's. Rebuild the cash flow with the current time to find a buyer, then add the legal process, and allow for buyers borrowing at higher mortgage rates. If the numbers need faster sales, consider sales period finance before you need it rather than after.
• Decide early whether a block sale is a real option. Company and investor buyers exist, but sales in this category show a much lower median than standard sales, so stress the debt against a lower price. If it does not repay, the plan needs another route, such as finance against unsold units.
• Treat a part-complete scheme as a different conversation. Where the build is unfinished, the funding gap and the exit need to be solved together. Part-complete development exit sets out what lenders generally want to see.
• Bring evidence, not hope. Lenders usually size an exit on what the units will achieve and how fast they will sell. Reservations, local comparables and a realistic sales plan tend to do more for your terms than any market average, including the ones in this report.

How this report was built

Every figure is calculated from the sources below when the page is built. Nothing is estimated, and cuts below the minimum sample are shown as suppressed.

• Charges. Companies House mortgage and charge filings. A charge is security registered by a lender. It shows a loan was taken and when it was repaid, but not how much was lent, because filings have recorded no amounts since 2013. Registered to 30 October 2026, satisfactions filed to 2 November 2026.
• Lender populations. Specialist means charges held by a curated set of pure-play development lenders (10,127 charges). Development-like adds charges from development-active mixed lenders where the borrower carries a housebuilding code (SIC 41100 or 41202), the charge particulars use development terms, or a newly formed property company with no buy-to-let code is the borrower (66,728 charges in total). These mixed lenders also write buy-to-let books, so this wider measure is noisier. Location and exit-type figures use the strict version, with housebuilding codes only. Lenders are never named.
• Satisfactions. Filing is not compulsory, so every repaid figure is a floor and every aged figure is a ceiling. A quarter-end is provisional until 30 days after the data cut-off, which our tests between successive data vintages support: charge filings arrive within about 20 days, and figures at that age did not move materially when re-run three months later.
• Survivorship. The company register holds live companies only, so older cohorts are missing scheme companies since dissolved. Cohorts up to 2020 are reference only.
• Sold data. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, England and Wales, detached, semi-detached, terraced and flats. New-build figures stop at 2025 Q3 because registrations lag completions by a year or more.
• Two new-build counts. National series in this report count every price paid category, giving 80,203 sales in the four quarters to 2025 Q3. Location reports and rankings count Category A only, giving 67,091 in a near-identical window. Most of the difference is Category B, which the buyer mix analysis measures directly.
• Regions. Charges are placed by property postcode where one can be identified: 43.6% of the specialist book and 65.3% of the development-like book. England and Wales only.
• Suppression. Shares and medians with fewer than 30 observations are withheld rather than estimated.
• Planning. Approved residential applications from council portals, deduplicated by authority and reference. Approvals lead completions by two to four years, and coverage differs by region, so totals are context and are not ranked.
• Selling time. Rightmove House Price Index, entered from published releases. It covers all listings, not new-build alone.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Companies House data is used under its public register terms. You are welcome to cite or chart these figures with a link to this page.

This report is general market commentary. It is not financial, legal, tax or investment advice, and it is not an offer of finance. DevExit is a finance arranger and introducer, not a lender.