Pallas Capital secures £200m facility for UK bridging growth
A £200m senior line from a European debt fund gives the January-launched UK lender committed capital before it has a track record of its own.
Pallas Capital, the UK bridging lender that began operating in January, has secured a £200m senior funding line from a European debt fund, Alternative Credit Investor reports. The facility sits against the firm's whole product range — residential, mixed-use and commercial bridging, plus refurbishment and development finance — with individual loans sized between £250,000 and £35m, and it turns the platform's stated mid-market positioning from a sales pitch into a balance sheet fact.
Ben Keenan, executive director, called the deal a boost in "firepower" and, more revealingly, said it gives Pallas the ability to "say yes to more transactions, move with even greater speed and certainty." For a UK operation that has existed for barely eight months, that claim rests on the line rather than on Pallas Capital's own record, even though it sits inside the wider Pallas Group, which has completed more than 1,300 transactions and managed a loan book of roughly £2.5bn since 2016. A parent firm's record helps in the sales meeting; the line funds the transaction.
The financing is senior debt, not an equity raise, so Pallas draws on the facility as loans come to it rather than collecting commitments from LPs. For a bridging shop, that debt is inventory — the product sold to brokers is certainty that the money has been arranged before the borrower's solicitor starts asking questions, as well as an underwriting decision. The European fund takes the senior position in the structure, while Pallas keeps the originator's role and the relationships that feed it.
The deal is the UK expression of the collateral-backed push this publication has been tracking in US real-estate credit, most recently when BridgeInvest banked $612m for an open-ended real-estate credit fund. There the money arrived as fund equity; here it arrives as warehouse debt. Fund equity or warehouse debt, private credit's next scale is being built against property and other collateral, with institutions providing the funding and specialists providing the loans.
The Wrap