Commercial Mortgages Romsey Town

The Romsey Town commercial property market

Romsey is the densely built-up Victorian terrace neighbourhood east of Mill Road, bounded broadly by Mill Road to the north, Cherry Hinton Road to the south, Cavendish Road to the east and the railway corridor to the west. The non-residential stock is concentrated on the Mill Road frontage, the Coleridge Road and Catharine Street parades and the small Cherry Hinton Road parade where Romsey meets Cherry Hinton. Most commercial assets are two and three-storey Victorian terrace stock with ground-floor retail, food or service uses and one or two flats or a licensed HMO above. Investment yields on Romsey semi-commercial currently run 6.5 to 8.0 percent depending on covenant, condition and proximity to Mill Road footfall.

Semi-commercial dominates the Romsey commercial mortgage flow, with shop-with-flat and shop-with-HMO accounting for the bulk of transactions. HMO block refinance follows closely, the area has one of the deepest single-occupier HMO concentrations in the city, driven by 24,000 University of Cambridge students and 30,000 Anglia Ruskin students plus a meaningful post-doc rental cohort. Parade retail owner-occupier is the third active flow, smaller in count but steady. Pricing on semi-commercial currently 7.0 to 8.5 percent pa at 70 to 75 percent LTV via specialist desks. HMO block refinance prices 7.0 to 8.5 percent pa at 70 to 75 percent LTV.

HM Land Registry residential transactions across the Romsey CB1 terrace stock confirm the deep rental catchment that underwrites the semi-commercial upper floors and HMO blocks. Recent files include CB1 3FH Clara Rackham Street at 725,000 pounds, CB1 3RN Golding Road at 557,000 pounds and CB1 3AL Sedgwick Street at 525,000 pounds, with terraced and semi-detached medians in the 450,000 to 700,000 pound bracket. We use these as a market-temperature signal on the rental stack underneath each Romsey semi-commercial or HMO block. Stamp duty applies at the commercial or mixed-use rates on every freehold purchase.

Active commercial property types in Romsey Town

Lender appetite for Romsey semi-commercial and HMO investment

Deep across the Romsey investment archetypes. Semi-commercial routes through InterBay Commercial, Shawbrook, Cynergy Bank and Cambridge & Counties Bank at 70 to 75 percent LTV and 7.0 to 8.5 percent pa, with blended ICR around 145 percent stressed across commercial and residential income. Standalone HMO blocks route through InterBay Commercial, Shawbrook and Cambridge & Counties Bank at 70 to 75 percent LTV and 7.0 to 8.5 percent pa, with each lender carrying a different room-count comfort threshold. LendInvest covers value-add and vacant-to-let bridge funding. Owner-occupier parade retailers route through Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays and Santander at 70 to 75 percent LTV and 6.0 to 7.5 percent pa on EBITDA. Commercial mortgages are unregulated lending and fall outside the FCA's regulated mortgage perimeter, we do not hold FCA authorisation because the products we arrange are unregulated.