Development lending in Nottingham picked up sharply over the last year, and the planning pipeline behind it looks unlike any other city we track. Nearly half of the residential approvals granted by Nottingham City Council in the past 12 months were for houses in multiple occupation. For a developer, that mix shapes both the kind of funding on offer and the exit you can realistically plan for.
We put together the latest Companies House charge filings, HM Land Registry sales and council planning decisions for the City of Nottingham to see where local schemes stand after the first half of 2026. The quarterly detail and a side by side comparison with England and Wales are in the Nottingham development exit report. What follows is the short version for anyone funding, building or refinancing in the city.
Lending has jumped from a low base
Development lenders registered 56 new charges against Nottingham sites and developers in the 12 months to June 2026, against 34 in the previous year. That is an increase of 64.7%, the fifth fastest of the 25 cities we cover and well ahead of the national rise of 11.7%. The number of separate borrowing companies doubled, from 20 to 40.
The first half of 2026 accounts for much of the change: 29 new development charges, compared with 10 in the first half of 2025. Recent filings are provisional and the base is small, so the direction matters more than the exact percentage. Even so, more Nottingham developers are drawing on development finance than a year ago.
Repayments have not kept pace
Lenders filed 25 development charges as satisfied over the year, almost unchanged from 24 the year before. Because new lending rose so quickly, Nottingham now records 0.45 repayments for each new development charge, down from 0.71 a year earlier and a little above the national ratio of 0.40.
A charge is a security document, not a loan balance, so these numbers count facilities rather than pounds. Satisfactions are also filed late. The useful reading is simply that the local book is growing faster than it is clearing.
A loan book close to the national profile
Of the 206 development charges still live at 30 June 2026, 59.7% had been in place for more than 24 months and 69.4% for more than 18 months. Those shares sit almost exactly on the national figures of 60.6% and 69.1%. Nottingham does not carry the unusually old book seen in some cities, but with most facilities written for 18 to 24 months, a majority of live loans have still run past their original term.
Exit lending is steady
Exit and refinance charges against Nottingham borrowers held at 36 in each of the last two 12 month periods. Of the latest 36, 22 came from specialist banks and 14 from bridging lenders. The first half of 2026 was busier than the same half of 2025, with 20 exit charges against 11, so demand for refinance at completion may be building as the newer development facilities mature.
Across all property-secured lending in the city, specialist lenders accounted for 92.0% of matched charges over the year, compared with 88.4% nationally. High street lenders took 8.0%. In practice that means most Nottingham refinancing is priced by specialist and bridging money rather than mainstream mortgage lenders.
New-build sales are thin
Land Registry records new-build completions slowly, so we use the latest settled year, August 2024 to July 2025. Nottingham recorded just 56 new-build sales in that window, down from 94 the year before. New-build made up 1.9% of all sales, against 8.3% nationally.
The 34 new-build flats that did sell achieved a median of £290,500, more than double the £138,000 median for existing flats. With so few sales, that premium rests on a small number of schemes and should not be read as a city-wide value. What it does show is that valuers have very little recent new-build evidence to work from, which can make development exit valuations harder to agree.
Planning: an HMO city
Nottingham City Council approved 175 relevant residential applications in the year to 20 September 2026, with 53 still pending. Houses in multiple occupation made up 78 of those approvals, 44.6% of the total. That is the highest HMO share of any of the 56 locations in our data with at least 50 approvals. Conversions accounted for 35 approvals, new-build 27 and prior approval schemes 14.
Where a unit count was stated, the approvals added 482 homes across 60 applications. The largest were 113 homes on the former Chronos Richardson site at Wyton Close, 104 at the former government buildings on Chalfont Drive, 71 at 490 Radford Road and 42 through prior approval at Pearl Assurance House on Friar Lane.
What it means for a Nottingham scheme
The city combines fast-growing development lending, a pipeline dominated by HMOs and conversions, and very little new-build sales evidence. If you are planning an exit, gather your own comparables early and test a development exit facility against an outright sale. If your scheme is aimed at students, our Nottingham student accommodation development report looks at the purpose-built pipeline and student districts separately.
Sources: Companies House charge register, HM Land Registry Price Paid Data and Nottingham City Council planning records, analysed by Construction Capital. Figures for 2026 are provisional. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.