Portfolio refinance across the London boroughs: the document that turns a conversation into a quote

A portfolio refinance is one of the few commercial mortgage transactions where the paperwork genuinely is the deal. Get the asset schedule right and the quotes follow. Get it wrong, or arrive without one, and no lender can price the case at all.

The problem, as it usually arrives

Seven assets across South and East London, assembled over fourteen years. Four lenders. Four rates. Four maturity dates falling in different years. Two ownership structures, part personal and part limited company. Seventeen tenancies. Total gross rent somewhere around £500,000 a year, though nobody has added it up recently.

The landlord wants three things: one facility rather than four, an equity release to fund the next acquisition, and an end to the annual scramble of staggered product maturities.

None of that can be priced until somebody builds the schedule.

What the asset schedule has to contain

Per property, without gaps:

• Full address and title number
• Tenure, freehold or leasehold, and unexpired term if leasehold
• Current estimated value and the date and basis of the last valuation
• Passing rent and the tenancy detail behind it: tenant, lease start, expiry, break dates, review dates, arrears
• Existing debt outstanding
• Existing lender, product, rate and rate type
• Product end date
• Early repayment charge position, stated as a figure not a percentage
• Ownership entity

The two lines borrowers most often leave blank are the ERC position and the ownership entity, and those are the two that most often change the answer.

The ERC break-even, done properly

Consolidating means redeeming existing facilities, and some of them will carry an early repayment charge. That charge is a real cost and it has to be shown against a real saving, not asserted.

The calculation is not complicated but it has to be honest: the total ERC payable now, against the difference between the blended rate you are paying and the rate you would move to, across the remaining term of the facilities being redeemed, discounted for the fact that the money is paid today and saved over years.

Sometimes breaking two out of four facilities is the answer, leaving the other two to run to maturity and folding them in later. A staged consolidation is a perfectly respectable outcome and it is often the one the arithmetic supports.

The carve-out nobody expects

Portfolios assembled over a decade frequently contain one asset that has to come out of the facility entirely.

The commonest is a shop with a flat above where a family member lives. That occupation can pull the case towards the FCA regulated mortgage perimeter, and the clean answer is to leave the asset outside the portfolio facility and refinance it separately through a regulated firm. Commercial mortgages are unregulated lending and we do not hold FCA authorisation, so we would not act on that element ourselves.

The second commonest is a leasehold with an unexpired term short enough that including it drags the whole facility's terms down. Better to fund six assets well than seven badly.

Identify the carve-outs during the schedule build, not during legals.

Pricing and structure

Portfolio refinance sits at 6.5 to 8.0% pa on the mid-2026 band, generally at 60 to 70% LTV, tested on a portfolio ICR rather than asset by asset. Portfolio ICR of 155 to 160% stressed is a comfortable place to be. It also means a weak asset can be carried by strong ones, which is one of the genuine advantages of a portfolio facility over separate loans.

Cross-collateralisation is the trade-off. All the assets secure all the debt, so an underperforming asset is no longer ring-fenced. For most landlords the single rate, single maturity and single annual review is worth that, but it should be a decision rather than a discovery.

The London angle

Portfolios spanning several boroughs are normal here and they carry a specific complication: the valuer has to be comfortable across all of them. A portfolio spread across five boroughs with genuinely different market characters may need more than one valuer, which affects both cost and timeline.

It also affects how a lender reads concentration. A portfolio entirely inside one outer borough looks different from the same value spread across five, and not always in the direction landlords expect.

For market context we use HM Land Registry residential price paid data as a temperature gauge only, never as commercial transaction or pricing evidence. In the 12 months to May 2026, South London (six boroughs) showed a £515,000 median across 14,652 residential sales, down 1.0%, and East London (ten boroughs) £467,500 across 18,344 sales, down 0.5%, against Greater London at £525,000 across 60,368 sales, down 0.9%. Outer London has been steadier than prime central, which is where most multi-borough commercial portfolios sit.

Where to start

Build the schedule. If that is two weeks of work, it is two weeks well spent, because it is the same two weeks whether you do it now or a lender forces it later.

Send it to us when it is done, or send us what you have and we will tell you what is missing. We can price a portfolio from a complete schedule inside 48 hours. We cannot price one from a list of addresses.