Excess Spread — Binary outcomes, Hampshire, guardrails
- Owen Sanderson
Excess Spread is our weekly newsletter, covering trends, deals and more in structured credit and ABS. Find out more about 9fin for structured credit.
Somewhere in a field in Hampshire
One small town 40 miles west of London hosts an improbably large proportion of the UK’s specialist buy-to-let mortgage community.
That’s because Fleet is where Capital Home Loans resides, and where a splinter group of former Capital Home Loans employees also set up Fleet Mortgages back in 2013 (originally named CHL Mortgages!). The next town north, Bracknell, hosts the headquarters of Foundation Home Loans.
The stories of the three lenders illuminate much about the post-crisis lending landscape in the UK — we have two legacy lenders trading to sponsors looking for a bargain post-crisis (Cerberus and Fortress), a startup capitalising on the opportunity (and selling at the right time to a challenger bank, Starling). Foundation was sold to Apollo’s Athene insurer, also at the right time, and now CHL’s platform has been sold to a challenger, Chetwood, and so the wheel turns.