This year’s annual NACFB Commercial Finance Expo, was the tenth and by far the busiest yet.

As always, the Signature stand featured our refreshing mocktails mixed to order for the huge number of visitors who wanted to know more about our property finance offering from our 6-strong team on duty for the day.

Despite the official event taking place on the Wednesday on Hall 3A, members of our team enjoyed a gentle start to proceedings with the now-popular pre-exhibition reception in the hotel on the Tuesday evening – good networking and a good conversations with potential clients.

This is billed as the headline event on the commercial finance calendar and this year boasted sponsors spanning the widest cross-section of the market, with more lenders than ever before in attendance to make this the largest finance show for intermediaries in the country.

Growing with confidence

Given the growth we are currently delivering, driven by a new approach to lending and supporting brokers and their property developer clients with low rates and fast decisions, we were expecting a busy day; even we were surprised by the number of visitors to our stand.

Of course, the event is one of few places that brokers can see all of us lenders and funders in one place on the same day, which ensured we made a lot of new contacts, whilst discussing the current bridging market; the optimism in the market was good to hear.

Always high on the agenda for those coming to our stand were our extremely competitive 0.45% bridging rate, high LTV, quick decisions and personal service, together with great interest in our revolving credit facility – a rarity amongst alternative lenders.

Visitors were clearly attracted by the promise of our unique brand of short-term property finance and how we’re simplifying the process, but on a warm day, once news spread of our bar with its ice-cold mocktails, it proved an equally big draw.

Busy from start to finish

Whilst the show attracted the large number of brokers, lawyers and intermediaries expected, we were still surprised by the number that wanted to know more about Signature and our service. News of our latest office opening in Edinburgh had also spread amongst the broker community.

News of the new products we have in the pipeline and our new automated process to be introduced soon, only increased the anticipation of those looking for an alternative lender that understands what they really need from us.

In the past we have discussed a few specific, out-of-the-ordinary deals pitched by brokers, but this year we discussed far more, the suitability of our service for those with volume business to place.

These conversations have ensured a few busy weeks ahead for our lending team, as we arrange the meetings we hope will turn leads into deals and prove a better measure of our success exhibiting, than merely counting the visitors to the show.