Practice owner beats their bank’s own offer by going to market

A dental practice owner already had a freehold offer from their own bank and wanted to know if it was the best available. We took the deal to the open market and flagged a tax-structuring question to the client’s accountant. Two better offers came back, and the purchase was restructured through a property company for a stronger tax position too.

The Situation

A dental practice owner approached us while already in active negotiations to buy the freehold of their existing premises. Their current bank had made an offer, and they wanted a straightforward question answered: was it actually the best available. Most borrowers in this exact position don’t realise that their existing lender has no incentive to tell them a better deal exists elsewhere, and in most cases genuinely won’t know whether one does, since they’re only ever seeing their own offer, not the market, and have no visibility into what a competitor might be prepared to do for the same client.

What We Did

We collected the key information on the practice, goodwill value, EBITDA, and trading history, and took the deal to the open market rather than treating the bank’s existing offer as the baseline to accept or reject. Alongside the finance work, we flagged to the client that it was worth speaking to their accountant about how the property itself should be held before committing to anything, a question that’s easy to overlook when the immediate focus is on securing the best rate. That conversation led the client to place the freehold into a separate limited company, a structure that turned out to be considerably more tax-efficient for their circumstances than continuing to hold the property personally.

The Result

We came back with two offers that beat the bank’s original proposal. The client placed the loan with a different lender entirely, and restructured the purchase through a property company, a better outcome on both the immediate borrowing terms and the client’s longer-term tax position, achieved without the client needing to have raised the tax-structuring question themselves.

The lesson generalises well beyond this one case: an existing lender’s offer is a starting point, not a benchmark. It reflects what one bank is willing to do, not what the wider market would do for the same deal. Taking a genuine second look, and asking the tax-structuring question alongside the finance one, is often where the real value in a transaction like this actually sits.

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