Institutional capital hasn’t retreated from real estate. If anything, appetite has grown – family offices, debt funds, and alternative lenders are actively looking for deployment opportunities across Europe.
The mix of capital is shifting. Banks are pulling back from structurally complex positions – layered stacks, land-heavy deals, anything outside a clean LTV box. Non-bank lenders are filling that space, but the market is fragmented: dozens of debt funds, family offices, and specialist lenders each operating with narrow mandates and specific deal criteria.
That creates a gap – not between sponsors and funding partners in the abstract, but between sponsors and the right funding partners for their specific deal.
The gap is sharpest in markets outside Frankfurt, Paris, or central London. In Poland – one of the most promising residential development markets in Europe – and across non-gateway UK cities, the right deal frequently doesn’t reach the right desk. Western Europe faces its own version of the same problem.
The solution is knowing which lenders do which deals. Senior debt, stretch senior, mezzanine, JV equity – each instrument has a different pool of providers, and that pool shifts constantly. HIC brings direct access to specialist funding partners across Poland, the UK, and Western Europe, and the knowledge to match structure to the right source from the start.