Everyone Tells Me to Wait. I Am in a Hurry.
Everybody involved advises patience, and none of them is the one holding the deadline. The lawyer wants another week for the title review, the bank wants the file complete before it goes to committee, and the adviser observes that transactions done in a hurry are the ones that go wrong. All of that is defensible and none of it addresses the fact that the exclusivity expires on a date somebody else has already fixed.
Hurry is treated in this market as a defect of temperament. It is usually a feature of the transaction, and it is data. A borrower who is in a hurry for a reason that can be written down is in a different position from one who is simply impatient, and the first task is to establish which of the two this is, because everything that follows depends on the answer.
The hurry is a fact of the transaction, not a character flaw
Deadlines in real estate transactions are rarely invented. An exclusivity period ends. A deposit becomes non refundable, or is already at risk. A seller has their own commitment on another purchase and cannot move. A judicial or insolvency calendar sets a bidding date that nobody can negotiate. A facility matures and the refinancing has to be in place before it does. In each of these the date exists independently of the borrower, and advice to wait is not advice at all: it is a preference for a transaction other than the one on the table.
Advisers default to caution because caution is cheap for them and expensive for the client. Nobody is criticised for having recommended more time. The professional who suggests moving faster owns the consequences if something is missed, which is an asymmetry that has nothing to do with the merits of the transaction. This is worth naming plainly, because a borrower who does not recognise it will interpret unanimous caution as a verdict on the deal when it is often only a verdict on professional exposure.
Lenders, on the other hand, read hurry with genuine suspicion, and the borrower needs to understand what they are actually worried about. Speed in a request suggests to a credit officer that something is being outrun: a due diligence finding, a deteriorating position, another lender who has already declined, or a vendor who wants the transaction closed before something becomes visible. That suspicion is reasonable and it is fatal if left unaddressed, because it moves the file from the ordinary queue to the careful queue.
The remedy is straightforward and almost nobody does it. State the deadline, its origin and its consequence in the file itself, at the beginning, in writing. The date the exclusivity ends, the contract clause that sets it, what happens to the deposit if it passes, and why the seller will not extend. An urgency that is documented is a scheduling problem the institution can decide whether to accommodate. An urgency that is merely conveyed by tone is a warning sign, and the borrower has no idea it is being read that way.
What can genuinely be accelerated: the preparation
The largest source of avoidable delay in a financing is not the lender. It is the borrower, waiting to be asked. Files are typically assembled reactively, one request at a time, because each institution asks for documents in its own order and the borrower responds to whatever arrived this morning. That converts work that could have run in parallel into a sequence of rounds, and each round costs the days between the question and the answer plus the days before anybody reads the reply.
Everything that does not depend on a third party can be done before the first conversation, and almost all of it is known to the borrower already. The ownership chain up to the ultimate beneficial owners. Who holds the powers of signature and what those powers actually permit. Sources and uses that balance. The cash flows and what they look like under stress. What repays the debt, on what date, and what happens if that date moves. The security available and how it would be enforced. None of this requires a lender’s involvement and all of it will be required eventually, which means the only question is whether it exists on day one or on day thirty.
Everything that does depend on a third party should be ordered on the first day rather than when it is requested. Apostilles, sworn translations, land registry extracts, corporate certificates, notarised powers and the valuation instruction all have their own processing times that no amount of urgency compresses. Ordered at the start they run underneath the credit process and are ready when it needs them. Ordered when the analyst asks for them, they become the critical path, and a file can sit for weeks waiting for a single document that was entirely foreseeable and could have been requested on the first day.
This is where speed is genuinely available, and the difference it makes is larger than most borrowers imagine. An institution reading a complete, internally consistent file can form a view quickly, because the questions it would otherwise have to ask are already answered on the page. An indicative read on whether a transaction is financeable, and on what basis, can be reached in five business days on that kind of material. Indicative is the operative word: it is a view, not an approval, and it does not shorten the credit process that follows. What it does is tell the borrower early whether the hurry is worth sustaining.
What can be accelerated: the choice of who reads it
The second real source of speed is selection, and it is the one borrowers under time pressure get wrong most often. The instinct when the clock is running is to send the transaction everywhere on the theory that somebody will move fast. It produces the opposite result. Every institution that receives it starts its own process, generates its own questions and consumes the borrower’s attention, and a transaction that has visibly circulated arrives at the right lender carrying the question of what everybody else found.
Speed comes from fit. An institution that finances this asset class, in this country, at this size, for this kind of borrower has the questions ready, the process built and a committee that recognises the shape of the case. The same file at an institution meeting the structure for the first time triggers weeks of internal education, and the borrower pays for that education in delay at precisely the moment they cannot afford it. Traditional banks, family offices and specialist credit institutions differ enormously in how quickly they can process an unfamiliar case, and the difference is capability rather than willingness.
Instrument choice belongs to the same decision. Where the constraint is purely one of dates, the right answer is often a facility designed for dates rather than a faster version of a conventional loan. In one transaction a group had to complete an acquisition before the proceeds of a sale it had already signed arrived, with the deposit and the exclusivity sitting in the gap between the two dates. The bridge financing was tied to those proceeds, the security was limited to the companies and assets genuinely required, the acquisition completed on time and the bridge was repaid when the sale settled, without any change to the group’s corporate structure.
Montclare does not act as a lender. It structures transactions, prepares the file and coordinates financing with authorised institutions.
The point of that example is not the instrument. It is that the deadline was treated as a defined problem with a defined solution, rather than as pressure to apply to a process that was never going to bend. Naming the real constraint usually reveals that the transaction does not need a faster lender. It needs a different one, or a different structure, and identifying which takes days rather than weeks.
What cannot be accelerated, and the price of trying
Some parts of the process have their own clocks and are indifferent to the borrower’s. A notary has a diary and a duty to verify. A land registry takes what it takes. An apostille is issued by a public authority on its own timetable, and a sworn translation cannot be produced by an institution that does not have the original document. Credit committees meet when they meet, and in most institutions they meet on fixed days that will not be moved for a file that arrived late. Verification of an ownership chain crossing three jurisdictions involves counterparties who are not party to the transaction and have no interest in its calendar.
Attempting to compress these produces the outcome the cautious advisers were warning about, though not usually in the way they describe it. The transaction does not collapse dramatically. It receives an approval subject to conditions that were supposed to be resolved before signing and were not, and then fails at the notary over a power of attorney that was apostilled incorrectly, or completes with a covenant nobody had time to negotiate properly and which becomes a problem in the second year. Speed does not remove work from a financing. It relocates it to a point where the borrower has less leverage.
There is also a price for buying speed in the market, and it should be stated rather than discovered. Capital that moves quickly is priced for moving quickly, security packages demanded under time pressure are wider than they need to be, and personal guarantees are conceded at the end of a process that no longer has room for an alternative. Sometimes that price is obviously worth paying, because the asset is worth more than the cost of the fast money and the deposit is worth more than the margin. Sometimes it is the market’s way of pointing out that the file should have been prepared three months earlier. The arithmetic is different in each case and it deserves to be done rather than assumed.
The honest test is what happens if the date is missed. If missing it costs a deposit and an opportunity, paying for speed is a commercial decision with a calculable answer. If missing it costs nothing except disappointment, the hurry is preference rather than constraint, and paying market prices for preference is how borrowers end up with expensive facilities they will spend two years refinancing.
Speed with a plan
A hurry that has been converted into a plan stops being a liability. The plan states which date is genuinely immovable and which are merely inconvenient, what has to be true by that date, who is responsible for each element, and what happens if one of them slips. It is a short document and writing it takes an afternoon, and the afternoon is the best investment available to a borrower under time pressure.
The plan also has to contain the fallback, decided in advance rather than improvised in the last week. An extension bought from the seller, at a price agreed now while the relationship is good. A bridge with a documented exit covering the gap between the date the transaction needs money and the date the permanent financing can realistically deliver it. A renegotiated deposit structure. A completion in two stages. Every one of these is easier to arrange while there is still time and nearly impossible to arrange when there is not.
What the plan changes on the lender’s side is the reading of the borrower. A file that arrives with the deadline documented, the constraints identified, the third party items already in progress and a stated fallback tells a credit officer that they are dealing with someone who has organised a transaction under pressure. That is a materially different impression from urgency expressed as chasing, and it is worth more than any amount of explanation about how important the deal is.
The advice to wait is answered not by ignoring it but by making it unnecessary. Almost everything the cautious professionals are worried about can be resolved by preparation that could have happened weeks ago and can start today, and what remains is a genuine constraint that has to be priced or structured around. Hurry with a plan is one of the more ordinary conditions in this market and it closes transactions regularly. Hurry without one is not speed. It is a series of decisions taken in whatever order events happen to impose them, and the outcome belongs to whoever set the calendar rather than to the borrower.