The finance was ready for months. The building was not

Two partners opening a dental referral centre found the right premises harder to secure than the finance itself, with a lengthy property negotiation and no fallback site. We kept the finance ready throughout the delay. Around £280,000 was secured once the premises were confirmed.

The Situation

Two partners set out to open a dental referral centre, a specialist facility built around advanced treatments referred in from other practices. That kind of business needs a very particular kind of premises, and finding the right one turned out to be the hardest part of the entire process, harder, in the end, than arranging the finance itself, which is an unusual balance for a start-up of this scale.

The ideal site was identified early on. Securing it was another matter. What followed was a protracted property negotiation involving commercial solicitors on both sides, with no suitable alternative site on the horizon if this one fell through. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable position for a buyer to sit in, committed to a location with no real fallback, while the negotiation drags on with no fixed end date and no clear sense of how much longer it might take.

What We Did

There wasn’t a way to speed up a property negotiation that wasn’t ours to run, and trying to push a third party’s timeline rarely achieves anything beyond straining the relationship. What we could control, and did, was keeping the finance in place and ready throughout, so that whenever the property side resolved, funding wasn’t the thing holding the project back. We stayed engaged with the partners through the delays, rather than letting the finance side go quiet just because there was nothing to actively do, checking in regularly so the partners always knew exactly where things stood on our end.

The Result

The partners stayed committed to the location, recognising that the right premises mattered more to the referral centre’s eventual success than the frustration of a slow negotiation. Around £280,000 was secured once the property was finally in hand, giving them the resources to move forward the moment it was needed rather than starting the finance conversation from scratch after months of delay.

The broader point: for a specialist business where the premises genuinely matter, the finance being ready isn’t the bottleneck, the property is. The useful thing a broker can do in that situation isn’t rushing anything, it’s making sure the money is a non-issue whenever the real obstacle finally clears, so the partners could move the moment the property side was resolved rather than losing further time to a second process.

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