Paragon Banking Group reported another quarter of strong growth. The latest update shows a total of £1.90 billion of new lending across all business lines in the nine months to 30 June 2019. This represents a 20% increase on the previous year. Within this total, Paragon’s mortgage lending grew from £1.13 billion to £1.19 billion.
Paragon’s specialist focus on professional landlords enabled it to increase its share of the market, with 89% of completions being from complex landlords, compared to 76% in 2018.
It was a particularly strong quarter for buy-to-let, with the new business pipeline reaching £733 million, up from £711 million in the previous quarter. Annualised buy-to-let redemptions continue to be encouraging at 8.6%, down 2.1 percentage points from the previous year.
John Heron, Managing Director of Mortgages at Paragon, said:
“Paragon is performing well. We have delivered strong new lending across all our business lines and the buy-to-let pipeline has grown despite the uncertain economic backdrop. We’re confident of meeting our objectives for the year as we continue to focus on the needs of larger, more complex and specialist landlords.”
Paragon’s Commercial Lending division, which includes development finance, has grown its new lending to £0.71 billion, up 58% from the previous year.
This growth reflects Paragon’s commitment to supporting more British SMEs in specialist lending markets.
Paragon has continued to strengthen its asset finance and development finance divisions. The development finance business has enhanced its product range following the acquisition of Titlestone Property Finance last year. Since then, Paragon has funded multiple projects in the South-East of England and has revealed plans to expand its services to small and medium sized property developers throughout the UK.
The above is an example of how the market is switching from small nonporfolio BTL borrowers to the larger professional landlords and borrowing in Ltd companies especially.
Source: Property118