A specialist commercial mortgage broker for London

Specialist, not generalist

Commercial Mortgage London was founded by Matt Lenzie, who has 25 years in financial services, raising debt and equity, and has arranged around £400m of property finance. We work on the borrower side of the table. We package every London commercial mortgage application the way a credit officer wants to read it: fewer decline surprises, faster decisions, sharper terms. We know what lenders typically need to see, what commonly triggers a decline, and where there is genuine flexibility as opposed to where a policy line is simply fixed.

We broker commercial mortgages and nothing else. Owner-occupier, commercial investment, semi-commercial (the unregulated cases), portfolio refinance, trading-business, commercial remortgage, commercial bridging and second-charge commercial. We do not place residential mortgages, residential buy-to-let, regulated bridging, asset finance or unsecured business loans. Those are separate markets with separate lenders and separate broker specialisms. We would rather be excellent across one product family than adequate across six. If you call us about a residential remortgage, a regulated semi-commercial case or anything else that requires FCA permission, we will say so on the first call and refer you to a regulated firm that handles it properly.

Our founder has arranged around £400m of property finance. Facility sizes from £150K to £10M+, terms of 5 to 25 years, and every mainstream sector: retail, office, industrial and warehouse, leisure and hospitality, healthcare and care homes, pubs and restaurants, MOT and forecourt, day nursery, semi-commercial shop with flats above (unregulated), mixed-use blocks, HMO blocks and holiday-let portfolios. In London the work runs the full width of the city, from a Class E unit on a Croydon high street to a Park Royal industrial freehold, a Canary Wharf office investment or a shop-with-flats parade in Walthamstow. See our illustrative case studies for the deal shapes we see most often.

Commercial mortgages are unregulated lending. They fall outside the Financial Conduct Authority's regulated mortgage perimeter, which means they are not covered by FCA conduct rules and we do not hold FCA authorisation. That position is normal rather than unusual: most commercial mortgage brokers operate the same way, because the products themselves are unregulated. What it does mean in practice is that the underwriting discipline we apply comes from how lenders assess risk, not from a regulatory obligation. A lender's standards do not soften because a product sits outside FCA scope. Where an enquiry is regulated, we refer it to an appropriately authorised firm.

Why a London commercial mortgage specialist

London is 33 separate planning authorities, 222 postcode outcodes and a commercial property market that changes character every few miles. Article 4 directions restrict permitted-development conversions in different terms in different boroughs. The Central Activities Zone runs its own office-retention policies. The 2021 London Plan designates 47 Opportunity Areas, from Old Oak and Park Royal to Croydon, the Royal Docks, Old Kent Road and Wembley, each with its own planning framework and its own effect on what a valuer will accept as comparable evidence. A national broker will not price that in. We do. Active lenders include high-street banks such as Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays and Santander, challengers such as Shawbrook, Allica, Hampshire Trust Bank, Cambridge and Counties, YBS Commercial and Aldermore, and specialists such as InterBay Commercial, LendInvest, Cynergy Bank, Together, Paragon and OakNorth. Naming a lender describes the market; it does not mean we have a relationship with it. For our working read on the market we publish through the year, see the London commercial property market in 2026. We do not default to whichever desk sponsored the last broker conference. We look for the lender whose criteria fit your deal best, and we will tell you which that is likely to be on the first call.

For a working read on the wider London commercial property landscape, see our 2026 London commercial property market piece.