About the brokerage
About Bridging Loans Dorset
We sit between Dorset 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.
Who we are
We are a bridging brokerage covering Dorset 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.
How we got here
From single-deal packagers to a Dorset 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 separate it from high-street term lending.
Today the Dorset desk handles enquiries from auction buyers across the BH and DT postcodes, owner-occupiers chain-broken between Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, BTL landlords running refurbishments across Boscombe, Charminster and the BH8 to BH11 belt, holiday-let buyers on the Jurassic Coast in Swanage and Lyme Regis, and developers exiting practical completion on Poole apartment schemes and the Dorchester fringe. 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. 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 FCA-authorised partners who carry out the regulated activity and provide any required advice. We are not directly FCA-authorised. For unregulated bridging on commercial, investment, BTL, holiday-let 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 deal sharpest this week, which valuers turn around the BH13 Sandbanks or DT11 Blandford Forum postcode area fastest, and which legal teams have the auction-pack appetite to complete inside 14 days.
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 and Kuflink 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 barn conversion to a fast-turnaround standard bridger wastes a week. Sending a clean 65% LTV chain-break case to a heavy-refurb specialist wastes basis points. The packaging discipline is matching the case to the right desk first time.
Where we work
Dorset, the South West and the bordering counties.
The home patch is the whole of Dorset. The bulk of our case flow runs through the BCP conurbation of Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, the Jurassic Coast frontage from Lyme Regis through Weymouth and Portland to Swanage, the county town of Dorchester, and the inland market towns of Sherborne, Shaftesbury, Gillingham, Wimborne Minster, Blandford Forum, Bridport, Beaminster, Wareham, Verwood, Ferndown, Sturminster Newton and Stalbridge. The 20 named towns above cover the working brief; we also handle cases in Christchurch, Lytchett Minster, Corfe Castle, Charmouth and the villages around the Cranborne Chase AONB.
Beyond the county boundary we lend across the wider South West region into Somerset, Wiltshire and east Devon where the deal flow and the lender panel both make sense. The SP7 and SP8 postcodes around Shaftesbury and Gillingham sit on the Wiltshire fringe and we treat those as core Dorset territory. The BA12 postcode at Mere is shared with our reach. Distance from the BCP base 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.
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 Dorset 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.