Working capital lender Semper is celebrating after posting an incredible 202% year-on-year growth. The firm has enjoyed success on the back of a new warehousing deal that has greatly improved their ability to fund larger deals.
Director Andrew Way put the success down to the new funding, which has allowed Semper to operate in a different market segment to previous years.
“It’s mainly attributed to the fact that we can write the larger loans,” he said. “It’s a very competitive market in the $1-5m private lending space, but we’re able, with our warehouse, to settle larger transactions.”
“What we’ve seen is that we’ve gone from average loan sizes of $4-5m to around $8-9m. That means that we’re playing in a very different space, which is much less competitive and there’s quite a lot of demand.”
“If you’re writing larger loans, it’s not long before you get a large YOY increase. We’re doing the same sales but for larger loans.”
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“I think the larger transactions are difficult to place with the banks with the type of circumstances that we meet. Clients are looking to settle quickly, or they are taking advantage of an opportunity where they have a lot of work to do to get to bank funding.”
“They get a bespoke approach with us. They’re able to assess the loan and get ready to draw down very quickly. Speed has a lot to do with it, because they are good properties and good borrowers.”
“We don’t have a high default rate – in fact, right the way through Covid, we only had one loan in our entire stable that went more than a month interest overdue.”
“It’s not that we’re taking huge risk, we’re just dealing with people that are looking to take advantage of opportunity very quickly. That’s the only thing I can attribute it to.”
