Private and specialist lenders
When a high street bank says no, the deal is not necessarily dead — but it will cost more, and the question is whether it still works at the higher rate. That is arithmetic, and you can do it before you apply anywhere.
Test it at their rate, not the one you wanted
What actually changes
The rate is the obvious difference and usually not the important one. What changes is what the lender is willing to look at.
High street banks tend to want clean accounts, an established trading record and a conventional asset. Specialist lenders will look at shorter leases, unusual trades, adverse credit, and borrowers who do not fit a scorecard — and they price for it. Some publish their criteria openly and some do not. Of four we checked in August 2026, InterBay and Together publish their cover ratios and stress rules; Shawbrook and Cambridge & Counties publish loan sizes and loan-to-value but keep the ratios in documents they do not put on the open web.
That matters when you are comparing: you cannot benchmark against a market average, because the published half of the market is self-selected. Ask each lender for their figure.
Things worth establishing early
What the loan-to-value is measured against. Not every lender uses the same denominator. Cambridge & Counties, for example, publish commercial investment against open market value but owner-occupier and bridging against vacant possession value. On a trading property those are different numbers, so the same percentage is a different loan.
Whether the rate is tested or paid. Lenders size the loan at a stressed rate. InterBay publish theirs as “5%, or the initial pay rate, whichever is higher”. A cheap headline rate does not lift what you can borrow if the stress floor is above it.
Fees, and what they are charged on. Arrangement fees, exit fees, valuation and legal costs all move the real cost, and exit fees in particular are sometimes charged on the loan and sometimes on the value at exit. That is a materially different number.
A note on security
Borrowing for a limited company for a commercial purpose is generally outside the regulated consumer credit regime. Borrowing secured on your own home is not — that is a regulated mortgage contract with a different set of protections and a different set of consequences if it goes wrong. Those are not interchangeable, whatever the arithmetic says, and it is worth being clear which one you are being offered.
Where this comes from
Lender criteria cited above were read from those lenders’ own published pages on 26 August 2026 and are recorded with their sources in this site’s working notes. The rest is twenty years of placing small commercial deals. It is not advice, and this site is not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority.