Funding clears, and the diggers move in

Native Land has secured £132m in development finance for St Mary's Wharf, its 180-home scheme on the banks of the River Wey in Guildford town centre, Construction News and Estates Gazette reported this week. The package is split between a £100m senior debt facility from NatWest and £32m of mezzanine finance from the National Housing Bank, the Homes England subsidiary set up to unlock stalled housing sites.

Bennett Construction has been appointed to deliver the main build. The contractor takes over the 1.7 acre site, on the former Debenhams land, with preparatory work starting immediately and the main phase beginning within weeks. Squire & Partners designed the two residential buildings, which will provide roughly 18,600 square metres of space including affordable homes, an acre of public gardens, a riverside walkway and ground floor restaurants and retail. Completion is due before the end of 2028, with sales launching in spring 2027.

Why it matters

This is a scheme that stalled once already, and the way it has been unstuck says something about where mid-market residential funding sits right now. A senior lender alone would not carry it. It needed a mezzanine slice from a state-backed vehicle before NatWest's debt made sense, which tells you how cautious conventional lenders remain about town centre schemes outside London, even good ones with planning in place and a credible developer behind them. Expect more of this blended structure on regional schemes in the 50 to 300 unit range over the next year, rather than straightforward senior debt deals.

What it means for careers and hiring

Bennett now needs to resource a near three year build in Guildford, which means site management, package managers and site-based QS roles opening in the Surrey and M25 corridor over the coming weeks, not months. Worth a look if you are commuting into London from that patch and would rather build five minutes from home.

The bigger signal is for commercial and project teams generally. Schemes funded through blended senior-plus-mezzanine stacks carry more reporting and drawdown conditions than a single-lender deal, and developers increasingly want commercial managers who have actually administered a funding structure like this, not just a JCT contract. If your CV can show you have worked a scheme with staged drawdowns tied to build milestones, that is worth foregrounding now. Native Land and similar mid-sized developers are likely to lean on the same mezzanine route again, and they will want contractors' commercial teams who already know how it works.