An experienced commercial mortgage broker for Portsmouth, the Solent and South Hampshire

Specialist, not generalist

Our team has been working in property and commercial banking since 2005, and we have stayed in the same lane ever since. Two decades of UK commercial finance, including senior corporate banking roles, sit behind every introduction we make. Most of that career was spent on the lender side, writing credit papers, sitting in committees, declining loans and approving them. That experience shapes how we structure and present every Portsmouth commercial mortgage application now we work on the broker side. We know what credit committees need to see, what triggers a decline, and where there is genuine flexibility versus where there is not.

We broker commercial mortgages and only commercial mortgages. Owner-occupier, commercial investment, semi-commercial (the unregulated cases), portfolio refinance, trading-business, commercial remortgage, commercial bridging and second-charge commercial. We do not place residential mortgages, residential buy-to-let, regulated bridging, car finance, asset finance or unsecured business loans. Those are different markets with different lenders and different broker specialisms. We would rather be excellent at one product family than mediocre across six. If you call us about a residential remortgage, regulated semi-commercial, or anything else that would require FCA authorisation, we will refer you to a regulated firm that handles it properly.

Across the past decade we have arranged in excess of £250M of commercial mortgages. Facility sizes from £150K to £10M+, terms 5 to 25 years, and every mainstream sector relevant to the Portsmouth market: Southsea (PO4, PO5) HMO portfolio refinance and large sui generis HMO conversion, Voyager Park and Walton Road defence supply chain industrial owner-occupier, Lakeside North Harbour (PO6) multi-let office investment, Queen Alexandra Hospital healthcare ancillary including dental and allied-health freeholds, Gunwharf Quays leisure refinance, Albert Road and Osborne Road independent F&B owner-occupier, Cosham and Drayton care home refinance, Tipner Regeneration bridge-to-let, Old Portsmouth heritage hotel acquisition, and Commercial Road and Cascades Centre central retail freeholds. Our work covers the PO1 to PO6 postcode footprint and the wider PO11 Hayling Island fringe across the Havant borough boundary, plus the wider South Hampshire market that reads as a single M27 Solent corridor with the cross-Solent industrial market. See our case studies for representative recent placements.

Portsmouth has three specialisms that shape our weekly deal flow, and the network HMO book in particular makes Portsmouth our highest HMO conversion city by volume. HMO portfolios and large sui generis conversion. The University of Portsmouth (c. 28,000 students) and the surrounding student catchment, combined with the dense terraced PO2 and PO4 stock, generates the most active HMO change-of-use planning pipeline in our network. Portsmouth City Council planning applications regularly include C3 to C4 and C4 to sui generis 7-bed-plus conversions, and stabilised HMO portfolios across Southsea, North End and Stamshaw refinance cleanly. Paragon, Together, Foundation Home Loans and Fleet Mortgages lead the lender competition on stabilised HMO portfolio refinance where the C4 or sui generis planning consent is already in hand. Defence supply chain industrial. The Royal Navy and BAE Systems Maritime Services cluster at Portsmouth Naval Base anchors a substantial defence supply chain industrial footprint across Voyager Park, Walton Road and the Airport Service Road PO3 light-industrial belt, with covenants that lenders price favourably on long-term public-sector-adjacent demand. Cambridge & Counties, Allica Bank, Aldermore and Hampshire Trust Bank lead the owner-occupier and SME freehold competition on this corridor. Queen Alexandra Hospital healthcare ancillary. Cosham and the Drayton care-home corridor concentrate a substantial healthcare and care-home freehold catchment anchored by Queen Alexandra Hospital. Cynergy Bank, HTB and Cambridge & Counties are active across dental, GP and care home owner-occupier. Hampshire Trust Bank, which is locally headquartered in Portsmouth, prices particularly cleanly on Hampshire SME freeholds where the borrower has clean filed accounts.

We are not FCA-authorised because commercial mortgages on commercial property are an unregulated activity in the UK. They fall outside the Financial Conduct Authority's regulated mortgage perimeter. Our consumer credit and regulated mortgage referrals are handled by FCA-authorised partners. That position is not unusual. Most commercial mortgage brokers operate the same way, because the products themselves are unregulated by definition. What it does mean: the underwriting discipline we apply to every deal comes from years on the credit side of the table, not from a regulated obligation. The standards a credit committee expects do not change because the product sits outside FCA scope.

Why a specialist Portsmouth broker

The Portsmouth commercial mortgage market has genuine regional nuance: Portsmouth City Council as the unitary planning authority with its portal at publicaccess.portsmouth.gov.uk covering the full PO1 to PO6 city footprint and an unusually long determination cycle that lenders read as a sequencing risk rather than a refusal risk; the Royal Navy and BAE Systems Maritime Services cluster at Portsmouth Naval Base anchoring the defence supply chain industrial belt across Voyager Park, Walton Road and the Airport Service Road PO3 light-industrial estates; Gunwharf Quays (Land Securities) as the dominant outlet-retail and leisure anchor with Spinnaker Tower, HMS Victory and the Mary Rose driving year-round tourism flow; Commercial Road, the Cascades Centre and Victoria Park / Guildhall Square as the central retail spine; Albert Road and Osborne Road for independent F&B and serviced offices; the Southsea inner (PO5) and seafront (PO4, PO5) leisure-hotel-holiday-let belt; Lakeside North Harbour at Cosham (PO6) as the IBM-legacy multi-tenant office park anchoring c. 1.5M sqft of B1 and B2 stock; Queen Alexandra Hospital as the dominant healthcare anchor with the Drayton and Farlington (PO6) care-home corridor along the A2030; the Tipner Regeneration mixed-use zone; and the dense PO2 (North End, Stamshaw) and PO4 (Southsea) terraced HMO conversion catchment that generates the highest HMO change-of-use volume in our network. The eight lenders we name and show logos for are Shawbrook, InterBay Commercial, LendInvest, Cynergy Bank, Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays and Santander, each with confirmed permission to display marks. Behind those sit another eighty lender relationships including Allica Bank, Hampshire Trust Bank (locally headquartered in Portsmouth), Cambridge & Counties, YBS Commercial and Aldermore on the Hampshire SME owner-occupier and industrial investment side, Paragon, Together, Foundation Home Loans and Fleet Mortgages on the Southsea, North End and PO2 HMO portfolio side, plus OakNorth, Octopus Real Estate and the long tail of specialist commercial mortgage desks. Hampshire Trust Bank, being headquartered in Hampshire, is consistently strong on Portsmouth deals; Cambridge & Counties prices particularly keenly on Hampshire SME freeholds where the borrower has clean filed accounts and a coherent deposit story. National brokers tend to default to whichever desk paid the broker conference fee that quarter. We default to whichever desk will fund your deal cleanest, and we will tell you which one that is on the first call.

For a working read on the wider Portsmouth commercial property landscape, see our 2026 Portsmouth commercial property market piece.