Private credit’s active lenders

Sources in the market say many lenders were playing it safe until conditions improved, with many on the sidelines.

This year has been a testing one for Europe’s real estate lenders, with rates on the rise and inflation soaring. However, the 2022 iteration of Europe’s Top 50 Lenders reveals that plenty of organisations continued to deploy capital in European property markets, albeit selectively.

Real Estate Capital Europe’s annual list of those making the biggest impact on Europe’s real estate lending markets is back – and it is bigger than ever.

Europe’s Top 50 Lenders has been expanded from 40 entries in previous years to better capture the leading organisations in a growing industry. Although the pandemic suppressed activity in 2020, debt providers have been back to business this year as the markets began to recover. This list contains those we viewed as the most active, based on the evidence.

Welcome to our seventh annual list of the lenders that are most actively providing finance to Europe’s real estate markets.

This year has been challenging for real estate lenders, with the pandemic resulting in reduced investment dealflow and huge uncertainty around underwriting assumptions. However, some lenders have continued to provide liquidity. Here, we highlight the top 40.

Europe’s Top 40 Lenders 2019 is not a ranking. The list contains debt providers of various sizes and strategies that cannot simply be compared on a like-for-like basis. Rather, we considered which organisations have stood out in the parts of the market they aim to serve since we compiled our previous list in October 2018. These have been listed under the following categories: UK banks, German banks, other European banks, North American banks and non-bank lenders.