Avoid
The summary of my experience with Aspen Bridging- Extremely unprofessional, aggressive, indecisive and personally the worst business decision ever made was to obtain lending with this company.
My experience:
Very slow conveyancing process, they appeared in no rush at all with excessive questions and requests of documents which I have never experienced with other lenders. Internal admin errors meant their valuations were incorrect and on the day of completion they reduced the loan amount by over £50,000, which in many cases would make the deal void. During the loan term had good communication with one staff member. Unfortunately towards the end of the term whilst the exit strategy was very much in play things went extremely south, one of the risk assessors combined with the head of risk had changed their tune completely (I imagine the directors would have also been involved) I received a call saying “Due to the current economic state we are recalling all of our loans coming to an end and if it defaults, not to threaten you but we would look to repossess the property”. The conversation continued in an aggressive and unprofessional manner with no attempts of reasoning or understanding. Their stance was to obtain another bridge to clear theirs rather than high street lending which was in progress. Which is understandable, however this was not the stance they had communicated throughout the term and the timescales did not warrant this. Regardless I proceeded with a bridge loan which in total between arrangement fees, legals and valuations cost me £20,000 as an exercise to appease Aspen. With the high street lending to complete 2 weeks after this. Meaning they simply could not wait 2 weeks, which is ironic as the loan did indeed default by two days in which they charged me a default fee which is valid for a month, meaning had I not entertained their aggression I would have saved £20,000 on the other bridge loan. To add to this when sending them the offer from the other bridging company I received a call from the same risk assessor saying that they would definitely be able to beat the other bridge lenders terms and that he would pass me on to the underwriters. This is a small segment of the awful dealings I have had with Aspen Bridging.