Elevations: A new dawn for Development Finance
Development finance has been running on borrowed tools for too long.
Regular lending systems stretched over staged drawdowns. Spreadsheets filling the gaps. Ops teams who know the product better than the software does. It works, until the day it doesn't.
Over the past few weeks we've been walking through what Elevations does differently, one feature at a time. That series will continue, but here's the whole picture in one place — and why a development finance lender would choose it over the alternatives.
What lenders get with Elevations
- A platform built for the facility, not bent around it. Staged drawdowns, retentions, roll-up interest and restructuring aren't edge cases bolted on afterwards — they're what the system is built from. Read more.
- A schedule that carries the whole loan. Advances, fees, payments linked to sales stages, switches between rolled and serviced interest, rate changes, statements and arrears — all first-class events, as a historical record and a future projection. Read more.
- Fees as development finance actually charges them. Any number of fee cycles running side by side, each a fixed amount or a percentage of balance, limit or undrawn, projected onto the schedule the moment they're set up. Read more.
- Security you can see, live. GDV built bottom-up, plot by plot, with each plot's build and sales stage driving GDV, LTV and 90-day LTV as a development sells down — with notifications when plots sell without the repayments to match. Read more and more.
- A first read on planning risk in minutes. A consistent, versioned and filed assessment from the applicant's Planning Statement, for a credit team to build its own judgement on. Read more.
- Every professional in one place. Solicitors, valuers, monitoring surveyors, brokers and introducers, all sitting against the loan they work on. Read more.
- Corrections that keep the audit trail. Reverse a mistake and Elevations replays the loan without it — posting the correction today, leaving past statements exactly as sent. Read more.
Why not stay with what you have?
A generic lending platform asks you to fit your product to its design. Elevations fits itself to your product. That's the difference between a system that understands a development finance loan and one that shoehorns it into a vanilla lending capability — and it shows up where lenders feel it most: fewer workarounds on every drawdown, fewer spreadsheets bridging the gaps, and a platform that's quicker and cheaper to change.
Spreadsheets are flexible, but the answer is often out of date by the time somebody asks the question. In Elevations, nobody re-keys a total or rebuilds a report. Update the plot, and the scheme's position and the loan's LTV move with it. Before a drawdown or a review, you're not asking someone for the latest numbers. You're looking at them.
And an older, monolithic platform locks a lender in. Elevations was designed from first principles, without the constraints of a legacy platform. Its event-driven architecture means it can adapt as your processes and products evolve, and scale as your organisation grows — without the risks that come with a rebuild. It's the approach Development Finance Today picked up on when it covered the launch.
We've seen this problem from the inside for twenty years. Elevations is what we'd have always built if we could have started again — and now we have.
If you'd like to see what a new dawn for your development finance book could look like, please get in touch!