Bolton Business Finance is an independent commercial finance broker working with businesses and property investors across Preston. We arrange commercial mortgages, HMO and buy to let finance, bridging, development finance, business loans, asset finance, invoice finance and merchant cash advances. Our office is twenty two miles away, about thirty five minutes straight up the M61.
We are the commercial mortgage broker Preston businesses and landlords can actually sit down with. We do not lend ourselves. We approach the lenders most likely to say yes to your particular case, and we will come to your premises rather than handle the whole thing by email.
Written by Marcus Wright, owner and founder of Bolton Business Finance Ltd, in financial services since 2008 and a commercial finance broker since 2019. Last reviewed September 2026.
On this page
- We will come to you in Preston
- Commercial mortgage broker Preston
- Student property and HMO finance
- Buy to let and property investment in Preston
- Bridging finance in Preston
- Business loans and asset finance
- Development finance in Preston
- What we do not do
- Preston businesses we work with
- Meeting us in Preston
- Preston commercial finance FAQs
- Apply for commercial finance in Preston
The short version
- A commercial finance broker arranges funding for businesses from lenders across the market, rather than lending money itself.
- A commercial mortgage is a loan secured against property used for business purposes, either premises your own business trades from or a property you let to a tenant.
- UK lenders typically advance up to 70% of value on commercial property and up to 75% on semi-commercial, over terms of 3 to 25 years.
- An HMO is a property let to three or more people from more than one household who share facilities. Larger HMOs are assessed by a smaller group of specialist lenders and are often valued differently from an ordinary house.
- A commercial mortgage in Preston usually takes 3 to 6 months from enquiry to completion. Bridging can complete in two to four weeks and business loans in days.
We Will Come To You In Preston
Preston is about twenty two miles from Westgate House and it is the most straightforward run we do. Straight up the M61 from junction 6 and you are in the city in around thirty five minutes. Bamber Bridge, Walton-le-Dale and Leyland come up before the city itself, and for Fulwood, Broughton and Cottam it is a few minutes further on toward the M55.
On HMO and student property in particular, seeing the building matters more than usual. Room sizes, whether the layout genuinely works as a licensed HMO, what has been done to it and how well. Those are the things that decide both the valuation and whether a lender will take it, and they are exactly the things that do not come across in a set of particulars.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Areas covered | Preston city centre, Fulwood, Ashton-on-Ribble, Deepdale, Ribbleton, Penwortham, Broughton, Cottam and Lea, plus Bamber Bridge, Walton-le-Dale, Leyland and Longridge |
| Distance from our office | About twenty two miles straight up the M61. Thirty five minutes off peak, longer at rush hour around the M6 junction |
| Products arranged | Commercial mortgages, HMO and buy to let finance, bridging, development finance, business loans, asset finance, invoice finance, merchant cash advances |
| Lender panel | Over 135 lenders, from high street banks to specialist and non-bank funders |
| Broker fee | None on most facilities, we are paid a disclosed commission by the lender. Property secured deals carry £495 upfront and 1% on completion |
| First meeting | Free, at your premises, your accountant’s office or ours |
| Regulatory status | Not FCA authorised. Non-regulated business finance only. No residential mortgages and no consumer buy to let |
Commercial Mortgage Broker Preston
A commercial mortgage is a loan secured against property used for business purposes. That covers premises your own business trades from, and property you buy to let to a commercial tenant. Terms usually run 3 to 25 years, occasionally up to 30. Lenders typically advance up to 70% of value on commercial property and up to 75% on semi-commercial, meaning a shop or office with a flat above it.
Preston is a city rather than a town, and its commercial property reflects that. There is a genuine professional services quarter around Winckley Square and the streets off Fishergate, in Georgian and Victorian buildings converted to offices, much of it occupied by solicitors, accountants and surveyors. There is a separate industrial and distribution market out toward the M6 and M55. And there is the retail and leisure stock in the centre and at Riversway. Those three markets have almost nothing in common from a lending point of view, and an application that treats Preston as one market will get priced as the weakest part of it.
What decides your terms
- Property type. Standard industrial and offices attract the widest choice. Pubs, hotels, care homes and petrol stations attract specialists only.
- Whether you occupy it or let it. Owner occupied is assessed on your trading accounts. Investment is assessed on the rent and the strength of the tenant.
- Lease length. A short unexpired lease on an investment property narrows the field quickly.
- Trading history. Two years of filed accounts opens most doors. Less than that pushes you toward specialists.
- Listed status and conversion. A converted period building around Winckley Square brings consent and alteration questions that a modern unit does not.
- Condition and EPC. Commercial property let in England generally needs an EPC of E or better, and older office conversions frequently fail it.
The distinction that catches people out is investment against trading. If you are buying premises to run your own business from, the lender underwrites your business. If you are buying to let it out, the lender underwrites the rental income and the covenant behind it. Same building, two entirely different applications, and often two entirely different lists of lenders.
Be realistic on timing. In our experience a commercial mortgage takes 3 to 6 months from first enquiry to completion, and longer on a complicated case. Valuation and legal work are the two stages that overrun most often. If your deadline is weeks rather than months, bridging is usually the honest answer and we will say so.
Our main commercial mortgage broker page sets out lender appetite and typical loan to value by property type, from industrial and offices through to pubs, care homes, petrol stations and places of worship.
Student Property and HMO Finance in Preston
Preston is a university city, and that changes the property investment market here in a way that does not apply to the surrounding towns. A large student population sustains a substantial shared housing sector, concentrated in the terraced streets around the university and out toward Deepdale and Ashton. If you are buying in Preston as an investor, there is a reasonable chance you are looking at a house in multiple occupation whether you have called it that yet or not.
An HMO is broadly a property let to three or more people from more than one household who share a kitchen or bathroom. It sounds like a technicality. It is not, because the moment a property becomes an HMO the lending changes completely.
- The lender pool shrinks sharply. Many ordinary buy to let lenders will not touch an HMO at all, and of those that will, a good number cap out at five or six bedrooms. Above that you are into genuinely specialist territory with a much shorter list of names.
- Valuation method changes, and it cuts both ways. A smaller HMO is usually valued as an ordinary house, on comparable sales. A larger one may be valued on its investment income instead, as a commercial asset. That can produce a considerably higher figure than bricks and mortar, or a considerably lower one, and which method the valuer uses is frequently the single biggest variable in the whole application.
- Licensing is not optional. Mandatory licensing applies to HMOs occupied by five or more people forming two or more households, and councils can impose additional licensing schemes beyond that. Lenders will ask to see the licence or evidence the application is in.
- Planning can stop you before you start. Converting an ordinary house into a small HMO is permitted development in much of England, but local authorities can and do remove that right through an Article 4 direction, which is common in university areas. Check the position for the specific street before you exchange, not after.
- Most HMO lenders want landlord experience. A first purchase that happens to be a seven bed HMO is one of the harder cases to place. It is not impossible, but expect a smaller choice and a higher rate than an experienced landlord would be offered on the same building.
The comparison worth doing before you buy
ONS puts the average rent on a four or more bedroom property in Preston at £1,247 a month as a single let, against £856 for a three bed. The case for running the same house as an HMO rests on beating the single let figure by enough to cover the extra cost, and the extra costs are real: licensing, higher management, bills usually included, void rooms rather than void houses, and more wear. Work that arithmetic on the actual building with actual room numbers before you assume the model works, because lenders will, and they will want to see that you have.
Buy To Let and Property Investment in Preston
Preston has had a striking year on price, and it changes the investment case. According to ONS and HM Land Registry data, the average house price in Preston was £188,000 in June 2026, up 12.4% on the year. That is close to three times the North West rise of 4.7% over the same period, and it is one of the sharpest increases anywhere in the region. Average private rent was £788 a month in July 2026, up 6.2% from £742.
Prices rising twice as fast as rents means the yield is compressing. On the city average the gross yield has moved from roughly 5.3% to roughly 5.0% over the year. If you already own here that is straightforwardly good news, because your equity has moved sharply and a refinance may release more than you expect. If you are buying now, the numbers that worked eighteen months ago no longer do, and the entry point has moved against you.
As everywhere, the average hides the spread. ONS publishes both price and rent by property type, so the yield split can be worked out directly.
| Property type | Average price, June 2026 | Average rent, July 2026 | Gross yield |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flats and maisonettes | £99,000 | £665 | 8.1% |
| Terraced | £144,000 | £796 | 6.6% |
| Semi-detached | £202,000 | £855 | 5.1% |
| Detached | £336,000 | £1,114 | 4.0% |
Terraced property, which is the bulk of the Preston investment and student market, yields around 6.6% gross against a city average of 5.0%. It has also had the strongest capital growth, up 13.4% over the year against 8.2% for flats. That combination is unusual, and it is the reason the terraced streets around the university remain the most competitive part of this market to buy into.
Business purpose only
We arrange buy to let, HMO and property investment finance on a business basis only, through limited companies, partnerships and portfolio landlords. We are not FCA authorised and we do not arrange consumer buy to let, regulated buy to let or any residential mortgage. If the property is or will be lived in by you or a close family member, that is regulated business and you need an FCA authorised mortgage adviser instead.
Bridging Finance in Preston
Bridging is short term property lending, usually three to eighteen months, priced monthly and repaid from a sale or a refinance. In Preston it comes up most often on student and HMO stock, because a house bought in poor condition in June has to be finished and let by September, and no term lender moves at that speed.
- Buying at auction, where completion is fixed at twenty eight days
- Buying a property no mainstream lender will touch, typically no kitchen, no bathroom or serious damp
- Converting or refurbishing a house into an HMO before refinancing onto a term facility
- Breaking a chain when a sale slips
- Raising working capital quickly against property already owned
The number that catches people out
Bridging lenders size the loan against the 180 day value, not the open market value. That is what the property would fetch in a forced six month sale, and it is routinely 10% to 20% below the figure in the valuation you paid for. On a student refurbishment the second trap is the exit: if the plan is to refinance onto an HMO mortgage once the work is done, the exit lender has to be willing to lend on the finished building, and that needs checking at the start rather than in month five.
Business Loans and Asset Finance in Preston
Across the UK, 99.18% of businesses employ fewer than 50 people and around three quarters employ nobody beyond the owners, according to the government’s Business Population Estimates for 2025. Preston’s business base sits firmly at that end, alongside a larger than usual professional services sector and the public sector employment that comes with being the county town.
What we arrange most often for Preston businesses:
- Unsecured business loans, typically £10,000 to £500,000, decisions in days rather than weeks
- Secured business loans, larger sums against property, slower but cheaper
- Asset finance, for vehicles, plant and machinery, with nil deposit options and no broker fee
- Invoice finance, releasing cash tied up in unpaid invoices, which suits engineering, haulage and contracting
- Merchant cash advances, repaid as a percentage of card takings, which suits retail, hospitality and the city centre trade
If you have already been declined
A decline tells you about that lender’s criteria rather than about whether your business can be funded. Lenders refuse cases for reasons that have nothing to do with the strength of the business: sales below their minimum, a director who does not own a home, a payment provider their systems cannot read, an application already sitting with another introducer. We have placed cases that had been turned down repeatedly, with nothing about the business having changed. What changed was which lender was looking at it.
Development Finance in Preston
Development finance funds building work rather than a purchase. It is released in stages against a schedule of works, with a valuer signing off each drawdown, and it is repaid on sale or on refinance onto a term product once the scheme is finished and let.
Preston has a wider development pipeline than most of the towns we cover, helped by its city status, the university and sustained infrastructure investment across the wider Preston and South Ribble area. The schemes we see most often are conversions rather than ground up: offices and period buildings turned into flats, and larger houses converted for shared occupation. The recurring lender question on a conversion is what the building is worth if the scheme stalls halfway, and a realistic answer to that will get you further than an optimistic gross development value.
- Land or acquisition drawdown. Usually up to 60% to 70% of the purchase price, released on completion.
- Staged build drawdowns. Released in arrears against work completed and signed off by the lender’s monitoring surveyor.
- Practical completion. Final drawdown, and the point at which the exit route has to be real rather than intended.
- Exit. Sale of the units, or refinance onto a commercial mortgage, HMO or buy to let facility.
What We Do Not Do
We do not arrange residential mortgages, and we do not arrange consumer buy to let. A number of people reach this page looking for a mortgage broker in Preston for a home to live in, or for a first buy to let in their own name. We cannot help with either, and it is better to say so plainly than to take the enquiry.
Business buy to let and HMO finance, held through a limited company or as part of a genuine property investment business, is not regulated and we can arrange it. Consumer buy to let, broadly where you did not set out to be a landlord, or where the property has been or will be lived in by you or a close family member, is regulated and we cannot.
Bolton Business Finance Ltd is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We arrange non-regulated commercial and business finance only. That means we cannot advise on or arrange: residential mortgages, first time buyer mortgages, remortgages of your own home, consumer buy to let, equity release, or any consumer credit.
If you need any of those, use the FCA’s Financial Services Register to find an authorised adviser. If you are a business owner, a landlord holding property through a company, or a property investor funding on a commercial basis, then you are in the right place.
Preston Businesses We Work With
Preston’s mix is broader than the surrounding towns, because a county town and university city supports a service economy alongside the industrial one.
- Property investors and student landlords, buying and converting terraced stock around the university, Deepdale and Ashton. HMO finance, bridging and portfolio refinancing.
- Professional services firms, around Winckley Square and Fishergate. Commercial mortgages on owner occupied offices, and partner buy in and buy out funding.
- Manufacturing and engineering, on the estates out toward the M6 and M55. Machinery finance and owner occupier commercial mortgages.
- Construction and trades, where the problem is nearly always the gap between doing the work and being paid for it.
- Retail, hospitality and leisure, in the city centre, around Riversway and out in Penwortham and Bamber Bridge. Merchant cash advances and short term working capital.
Meeting Us in Preston
We do not have an office in Preston and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are based at Westgate House in Bolton and we travel. Preston is a straight run up the M61 and one of the easier journeys we make, so arranging a meeting is rarely difficult.
Where we will meet you
- At the property, which on an HMO or student purchase is genuinely worth doing, because room sizes and layout decide more than the particulars suggest.
- At your premises or office, anywhere in Preston, Fulwood, Penwortham, Bamber Bridge or Leyland.
- At your accountant’s office, which often saves a meeting later when the figures come up.
- At ours in Bolton, if you would rather come to us. Free parking.
Preston Commercial Finance FAQs
Do you actually visit businesses and properties in Preston?
Yes. Preston is about twenty two miles from our Bolton office, roughly thirty five minutes straight up the M61, and we cover the city and the surrounding area including Fulwood, Penwortham, Bamber Bridge, Leyland and Longridge. We meet clients at their premises, at the property itself, or at their accountant’s office. There is no charge for a first meeting and no obligation to proceed. If you would rather come to us, we are at Westgate House, Westgate Avenue, Bolton, BL1 4RF.
Can you arrange finance for a student HMO in Preston?
Yes, provided it is held on a business basis, which in practice means through a limited company or as part of a genuine property investment business. HMO lending is more specialist than ordinary buy to let: the lender pool is smaller, larger HMOs may be valued on investment income rather than as an ordinary house, licensing has to be in place or applied for, and most lenders want to see previous landlord experience. Tell us the number of bedrooms, whether the licence is in place, and whether any conversion work is needed, and we will tell you realistically which lenders will look at it.
How long does a commercial mortgage take?
Typically 3 to 6 months from first enquiry to completion, and longer on a complicated case. Valuation and legal work are the two stages that overrun most often. If your deadline is weeks rather than months, bridging is usually the honest answer and we will tell you that rather than start an application that cannot land in time.
How much can I borrow?
On commercial property, typically up to 70% of value, or up to 75% on semi-commercial. On unsecured business loans, commonly £10,000 to £500,000 depending on turnover and trading history. On asset finance it is driven by the asset itself, with nil deposit options available. On invoice finance, usually up to 90% of the invoice value released within a day or two of raising it.
Can you help if I have already been declined?
Often, yes. A decline reflects one lender’s criteria, not a verdict on your business. Lenders turn cases down for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the business is sound, and with more than 135 lenders on our panel the question is usually which one to approach rather than whether anyone will look at it. Tell us who has already seen the case, because approaching the same lender twice through a different route does not help you.
Do you charge a broker fee?
Not on most facilities. On business loans, asset finance, invoice finance and merchant cash advances we are paid a commission by the lender, which is disclosed to you. Property secured deals carry a £495 upfront fee and 1% on completion. You will know the full cost before anything is submitted.
Apply For Commercial Finance in Preston
Tell us what you need funding for
Send us the outline and we will tell you honestly whether it is fundable, roughly what it should cost, and how long it will take. No charge for the conversation and no obligation to proceed. Call 0161 546 9128 or use the form below.
About the author
Marcus Wright is the owner and founder of Bolton Business Finance Ltd. He has worked in financial services since 2008, beginning at Santander, and has been a commercial finance broker since March 2019. He founded the firm in 2020 and is a member of the National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers.
He arranges commercial mortgages, bridging finance, development finance, business loans, asset finance, invoice finance and merchant cash advances for UK businesses, working with a panel of more than 135 lenders. He can be reached on 0161 546 9128.
Marcus is also the author of UK Commercial Finance (2026), a commercial finance book for UK business owners and property investors.
Bolton Business Finance Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 12495909. Registered office: Westgate House, Westgate Avenue, Bolton, BL1 4RF.
Bolton Business Finance Ltd is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We arrange non-regulated commercial and business finance only, and do not advise on or arrange residential mortgages, consumer buy to let, equity release or consumer credit. All finance is subject to status, lender criteria and credit assessment. Your property may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on a mortgage or any other debt secured on it.