The Big Interview: Josh Knight on bridging's shifting landscape

Meeting Josh Knight (pictured top) at Glenhawk's Conduit Street offices in London's Mayfair, it quickly becomes clear that the specialist bridging lender's new managing director of sales and marketing has not arrived to manage the status quo.

Knight joined in March from Octane Capital, where he spent more than eight years rising from business development manager to sales and marketing director. His brief at Glenhawk is broader – spanning sales, marketing, and product – but his instinct has always been to serve brokers better, and the volumes will follow.

That philosophy is being tested in a market that has, by his own assessment, become significantly more complex.

"If you take a step back and look at the kind of domino effect as to what's happened this year, you've got a major geopolitical event at the end of February in the Iran conflict, a restriction on oil and gas supply that that's resulted in inflationary pressure, which has caused the markets to react. Swap rate volatility is a nightmare for lenders," Knight told Mortgage Introducer. "You've seen many lenders having to frantically reprice and withdraw products at short notice just to protect their margins. And the result of that is it causes uneasiness amongst borrowers, buyers, and investors. The product of all of this is that the market just moves more slowly."

Where the opportunities sit

Brokers reliant on purchase activity are finding the picture uncomfortable. But Knight argues that discomfort is not evenly distributed, and that the brokers finding traction are the ones identifying who is most affected by a slower market.

"The brokers that we've seen thriving in the market are the ones that are able to target and serve the types of borrowers adversely affected by the fact that the market's moving more slowly," he said. "You can take developers as an example. If you've got development finance coming to term on a new build site and you're reliant on sales to repay your senior lender, then a bridge to afford you more time is just one example of how a bridging loan might be useful to an affected borrower type."

He describes the most common scenario Glenhawk is seeing as what the industry would call a sales bridge – refinancing a buy-to-let loan that has come to term, development finance, or even a residential mortgage where the borrower intends to sell into a sluggish market. "That creates a clear opportunity for brokers to support them and a clear need for a bridge," Knight said.

Developers pivot to permitted development

One of the more striking patterns Knight has observed since joining is experienced ground-up developers increasingly turning their attention to conversion and permitted development (PD) projects. He does not read this as retreat, but more as rational calculation.

"Build costs have risen very steeply, and that's been the trend for over many years now," he said. "The result of that is it affects residual land values; it's difficult to get schemes to work just in terms of what the day one value of the site is worth, and of course, exits are also more challenging."

Conversion projects can offer experienced developers greater certainty over build costs and, in some cases, a clearer route to delivery through prior approval rather than full planning consent, two things that ground-up schemes currently cannot offer. Glenhawk funds projects under Class MA – the conversion of commercial Class E to residential – and Class Q, which covers agricultural buildings. Prior approval is, as Knight describes it, a quicker and less subjective process than full planning, and government planning data published by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities supports the case for its reliability.

Knight cited figures suggesting nearly 400,000 prior approval applications have been made around the past 14 years, with only one in five declined – a hit rate he argues makes PD an increasingly attractive route for developers.

The Renters' Rights Act, which abolished Section 21 no-fault evictions, is adding further momentum toward commercial and mixed-use assets. Glenhawk has seen bridging applications across commercial, mixed-use, and multi-unit freehold blocks rise by as much as 40% when comparing the first half of 2026 with the second half of 2025, according to Knight. "The direction of travel is actually really clear," he said. "Positively for brokers, the more complex the asset type, the higher the requirement for specialist advice. The brokers are really needed at that end of the market."

The question brokers are not asking

Nine years in the property finance market have given Knight a clear view of broker behaviour, including the questions that rarely get asked. On lender funding structures, he is blunt. Brokers almost never raise the subject, even though it has become materially important in the wake of high-profile difficulties across the specialist lending sector, including the collapse of Market Financial Solutions (MFS).

"If I had to boil it down to one question, it would be where in the funding structure does the ultimate decision sit?" he said. "Does the lender have the autonomy to make their own lending decisions, within a pre-agreed criteria, or do they make the decision – say yes to the broker – and then subsequently have to ask for approval from a third party? The answer to that question will tell you a lot about the certainty of funding."

Knight outlines three layers brokers should interrogate – the source of funds (institutional funder, credit fund, balance sheet, customer deposits, or private individuals), the mechanism through which those funds are accessed (for example, warehouse facility or forward flow agreement); and, critically, where decision-making authority actually sits. Bank of England data on financial stability and short-term lending underlines why funding resilience has moved up the agenda. At Glenhawk, Knight said, the answer to the last question is unambiguous: "When we say something is credit-backed, brokers can rely on it."

What comes next for Glenhawk

Knight is candid that Glenhawk's proposition will not be left static. A new refurbishment loan structure launched this month enables the lender to advance up to 10% more net day one by changing the mechanism through which interest is charged. Further changes are planned across refurb, commercial, and mixed-use within the next three months.

"In a market as competitive as ours, if you just leave your proposition alone for a number of years and just hope it's good enough to compete, I don't think that's enough," he said. "We need to be at the top of our game. Not just in terms of the service we offer and our process, but also in terms of the product that we put out to market. We're making changes in all three camps."

Education sits alongside product as a pillar of Knight's strategy. Glenhawk has been running webinars and roadshows on trends shaping the specialist bridging finance market, including one planned on the Renters' Rights Act. The results, Knight said, are already showing: "We're already writing lots of business off the back of those events, so it's clearly working."

It is a philosophy that runs through everything Knight said across an hour in Mayfair – on funding structures, on developer behaviour, on how brokers package cases. In a market where certainty has become the scarcest commodity, his closing thought cuts to the point: "You're only as good as your word, and in a market as competitive as ours, there's no room to let people down because you only get one shot at it. So when you say yes, you have to mean it."