About the brokerage
About Bridging Loans Somerset
We sit between Somerset investors, owner-occupiers and developers and the eight bridging lenders who price the work. Independent of any one funder, packaging biased to whatever moves your deal across Bath, Taunton, Yeovil and the wider county.
Who we are
We are a specialist bridging brokerage covering Somerset and the wider South West property market. Bridging is what we do every working day. Not a side product alongside term mortgages, not a referral relationship we maintain in case a client asks. The whole desk wakes up to auction calendars, refurbishment timelines, and the same eight lender contacts who price our work week in, week out. That focus is the point of working with us rather than a generalist mortgage broker, particularly across a county that mixes Bath UNESCO Georgian stock, Mendip Hills barn conversions, Hinkley Point C workforce housing and Yeovilton aerospace-belt commercial security.
How we got here
From single-deal packagers to a Somerset specialist desk.
The brokerage grew out of a packaging team that had been arranging short-term property finance for South West investors since the post-2018 specialist-lender expansion. The shift from a few personal contacts at MT Finance and Together to a settled eight-lender panel happened gradually, as deal volume justified treating bridging as a discipline rather than an occasional product. By 2023 the desk was packaging more bridging loans than any other product line. In 2024 the team split the bridging book out under its own brand to remove confusion with high-street term lending.
Today the Somerset desk handles enquiries from auction buyers across Bridgwater TA6, Yeovil BA20 and Weston-super-Mare BS23, owner-occupiers chain-broken between Wells and Glastonbury or Clevedon and Portishead, BTL landlords running refurbishments on Bath stone Georgian terraces in BA1 and Frome period stock in BA11, and developers exiting practical completion on apartment schemes near Taunton TA1 and Yeovil BA20. The case mix is roughly two-thirds unregulated investor work, one-third regulated owner-occupier bridges introduced through our FCA-authorised partners.
What we are
A brokerage, not an adviser, and not a lender.
We arrange short-term property finance secured against UK property. We are a broker. We package the case, negotiate terms across the lender panel, and run it through to completion alongside the borrower's solicitor and the lender's legal team. We do not lend our own balance sheet and we do not advise. We are not directly authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority; we work with FCA-authorised partners for regulated lending. For regulated bridging, where the loan is secured against a property occupied or to be occupied by the borrower or an immediate family member, we introduce clients to those FCA-authorised partners, who carry out the regulated activity and provide any required advice. For unregulated bridging on commercial, investment, BTL and refurbishment property, we package and place the case directly.
That separation matters. A broker who advises has to file recommendations and document why they fit the client's needs. We are not that party. We are the people who know which lender will price your specific Somerset deal sharpest this week, which valuers turn around the BA, TA and BS postcode areas fastest, and which legal teams have the auction-pack appetite to complete inside 14 days from Bridgwater to Bath.
The lender panel
Eight specialists who cover the bridging map.
We work most regularly with eight bridging specialists: MT Finance, Octane Capital, Roma Finance, United Trust Bank, Hope Capital, Together, LendInvest and Octopus Real Estate. Between them they cover regulated owner-occupier work, standard unregulated bridges, refurbishment to BTL exit, heavy refurb with structural change, development exit, and second-charge cases. Beyond the headline panel we maintain working relationships with Shawbrook, Precise Mortgages, Allica Bank, Bridgebank Capital, Avamore Capital, Glenhawk, Aldermore, Kuflink, ASK Partners and OakNorth for cases that price better with them.
We do not claim whole-of-market reach. The panel is curated, with each lender priced and pitched for the case types they handle well. Sending a heavy refurb HMO conversion on a Bath stone terrace to a fast-turnaround standard bridger wastes a week. Sending a clean 65% LTV chain-break case in Wells to a heavy-refurb specialist wastes basis points. The packaging discipline is matching the case to the right desk first time.
Where we work
Somerset, the South West and the M5 corridor.
The home base is Somerset itself. The bulk of our case flow runs through Bath, Taunton, Yeovil, Wells, Bridgwater, Weston-super-Mare, Frome and Glastonbury, alongside the smaller market towns including Minehead, Chard, Shepton Mallet, Midsomer Norton, Street, Ilminster and Castle Cary. The northern North Somerset belt at Clevedon, Portishead, Nailsea and Keynsham sits inside the BS21 to BS49 postcodes and feeds steady chain-break and downsizer flow toward the Bristol commuter market. Postcodes run BA1 to BA22 through Bath and east Somerset, TA1 to TA24 through Taunton and the west, and BS21 to BS49 across the north Somerset coast.
Beyond the county boundary we lend across the wider South West England region into Devon to the west, Dorset to the south-east, Wiltshire to the east and Gloucestershire to the north-east. Distance from Bath or Taunton is rarely the limit on whether we take a case. The limits are the strength of the security, the credibility of the exit, and whether the property type sits inside the bridging lender appetite. We turn down work where the exit is hand-waved or the security is thin. We say yes where the deal is real and the numbers work, whether the property sits in a Bath UNESCO terrace, a Quantock Hills cottage or a Bridgwater retail unit.
Regulatory note
Regulated bridging finance, where the loan is secured against a property occupied or to be occupied by the borrower or an immediate family member, is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Unregulated bridging finance, including loans secured against commercial property, investment property, buy-to-let, and refurbishment projects, is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We are not directly FCA-authorised. For any regulated bridging requirement we introduce clients to FCA-authorised partners, who carry out the regulated activity and provide any required advice. We do not give advice on regulated mortgages, regulated bridging, or investment products.
Next step
Talk to a Somerset bridging specialist.
A 15-minute triage call usually answers the practical questions: rate band, LTV, term, fees, completion window. Indicative lender terms typically follow inside 24 hours. We are at our most useful when the case has a clock on it.