Smart and disciplined developers will certainly survive and thrive providing opportunities for builders and investors. By choosing to limit their exposure to the market and not overstretching their financial capacity, those smart developers will be able to develop, safe in the knowledge that with the right lender support, they weather the inevitable curve balls that the current market will throw at them
The same goes for lenders who take a sensible approach, as this isn’t the time to shoot for the stars. It is the time to bed down your business model, evaluate the risks and how you will manage them and then focus on execution of those plans. It certainly isn’t the time to allow those with untested business plans to distract you.
‘Smart and disciplined’ is the key theme for FY25 across the board.
With this in mind, HCP has been rigorously updating and refining its approach and due diligence systems, to try and provide developers with a quick ‘no’ where appropriate without limiting ourselves to just the obvious vanilla deals. The ‘smart and sensible’ discipline doesn’t mean that we have a closed mind, and where a deal makes good sense, even if it’s a bit counterintuitive, it will get a fair hearing.
Equally, we remain cognisant of our responsibilities to our investors who are the life blood of this business. As always, we aim to provide a diversity of investment opportunities within our stated parameters, aimed at delivering well-conceived, researched and delivered products that meet their risk appetite. To do this also requires us to maintain the same type of discipline we expect of our borrowers and we continue to research the markets and listen to the feedback from all sources in order to achieve these objectives.
We see the next 12 months as being not dissimilar to the last, requiring us to sift carefully through a steady supply of deals while dealing with the inevitable challenges the market will though up.
We certainly remain up for it.