Lloyds teams aim to beat 2013’s £6.9bn lending total

Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking’s property lending teams this year expect to top the £6.9bn they lent to the sector in 2013. Last year’s figure was the highest since 2007, with about £2.5bn lent by each of the mid-markets and global corporate divisions and close to £2bn by the small and medium-sized enterprises team.

John Feeney, managing director of global corporate real estate, said that his division had distributed about £500m of loans it made. A recent example was its half of a £325m loan Lloyds underwrote with Citibank for Peel Group’s Media City in Salford; Lloyds retained £30m.

“The solutions we offer clients are changing and sometimes entail only a subsidiary role for our balance sheet,” Feeney said. “Yet even with this trend we still expect to increase the volume of new property debt we hold this year, as the UK market continues to improve.”

He said next year he hopes to distribute 50% of loans underwritten by the global corporate real estate team. During the year Feeney’s division also advised on £1.6bn of bond issuance by property companies including intu, UNITE, Grainger, Quintain and Telereal. They advised on intu’s latest debt capital raising, a tap issue of its Trafford Centre CMBS.