Prime Dining: Tuscan Capital’s Colin Sanders on the Candys, cod roe & compassionate property finance
17.04.18
Property lawyer and food writer Nicky Richmond grills Tuscan Capital founder Colin Sanders over lunch at The Coach in Clerkenwell.
I’m having lunch with Colin Sanders, CEO of Tuscan Capital (and formerly CEO of the Candy brothers’ property finance house Fortwell Capital), at The Coach, in Clerkenwell. For any of you who used to frequent Racine, in Knightsbridge, you will be very familiar with this cooking as it is the very same chef-proprietor, Henry Harris, overseeing this venture.
Given a very tasteful makeover, The Coach is a gastropub with a French accent, serving some of Henry’s signature dishes, including the wonderful Bayonne Ham with celeriac. There is a bright comfortable conservatory and we are booked into that, but the party of nine singing happy birthday at full pelt is not a great start and they move us upstairs to the more formal dining room, usually closed at lunchtimes. Service above and beyond.
Colin has been making headlines recently in his new venture, Tuscan Capital. I ask about the name. “It’s a place I love”, says Colin. Naturally, it also has architectural significance, being the least ornate of the five orders of classical Roman architecture.
Colin had a life before the Candys and he has earned his chops as a serial entrepreneur, as well as a banker. As he says “I’m all banking, finance, mortgages and secured lending” and that’s true, but it’s clear he’s done a lot more than your average lender.
Back in the 1990s he started at National Mortgage Bank, where he learnt the industry from the ground up. Fast forward to the end of the 1990s and he was part of the MBO of a company called iGroup loans, another mortgage lending business, which was sold to GE. He did the large American corporate thing for a while but the environment didn’t suit him; too much travelling, too little control.
In 2004, Colin started another company, with the chaps who had backed his MBO back in the 1990s. Called Money Partners, it did property-backed secured lending, but fairly commoditised and plain vanilla, financed on a wholesale basis. It was bought by Goldman Sachs, in January 2008, not the most auspicious time for mortgage-backed lending deals. Needless to say, that didn’t end well as the market had tanked and each decided to go their separate ways, so by 2009 Colin was on the lookout for other opportunities.
Never one to sit still for long, whilst looking for the next big thing, Colin invested in a debt collection business, Paladin Collections. There was really no point in looking at mortgages at that point, as the market was on its knees. The business expanded into invoice discounting, the other side of the debt collection coin. That then led sideways to the creation of a retail finance business, aimed at retailers who wanted a point-of-sale proposition, offering either free or interest-bearing credit, without having to deal with the administration of it. That business eventually became Omni Capital Retail Finance, running alongside the property finance business of similar name.
By 2010, Colin was starting to miss property lending, at the same time as Nick and Christian Candy were looking for somebody to run their property finance business, Omni Capital Partners. I ask Colin about his first impression of the Candy brothers. He laughs. “Chris Candy is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked for”, he says. “You’d never even think about pulling the wool over his eyes”. The Candys took a majority stake in what became Omni Capital Retail Finance and Colin became CEO both of that business as well as Omni Capital Partners, the property finance business. The property finance book grew to over a billion pounds by 2017 – at which time the firm changed its name to Fortwell Capital – many developers viewing the Candy seal of approval as a sort of guarantee that the deal had legs. After all, they knew it had been scrutinised by Chris himself.
“I really enjoyed those years building the business up”, says Colin, “I had to go through every credit paper with Chris, but that was a really good discipline.”
At this point, we need to order food. Colin asks whether we will go for a starter. He clearly doesn’t know me well. Starters are, in my view the most interesting part of any meal. Colin chooses the smoked cod’s roe with beetroot purée and coriander, whilst I go for the ever-so-modish cauliflower salad with mint and crème fraîche dressing, a description which does little justice to the complex cauliflower prepared three different ways, pickled roasted and puréed topped with pickled red onion.
We return to 2017 and a change of strategy in the business as well as challenging market conditions meant that Colin wanted to consider his future. Not quite old enough to be a non-exec or a consultant, despite offers to do so, the idea of a new bridging business took hold. The market was looked at and a gap identified; bridging finance, carried out by a highly experienced team, with really quick decision-making and turnaround times. There would be no administrators without a clear understanding of the product and the model. All of the senior team to be invested in the success of the business. There was to be no online bureaucracy, just old-fashioned personal lending, by people who had been around longer than some of their borrowers had been alive. And so Tuscan Capital was born.
Tuscan isn’t beholden to a large fund or committed to lending huge amounts, unlike some of its obvious competitors. Backed by a small private equity house, Quilam Capital, itself funded by a high net worth individual with a finance background, with wholesale debt funding, it has a funding line at a cost level unusual for a start-up but which, in truth, reflects their track record. This feeds into their rates, 0.7% a month on average, on loans ranging from £150k to £3m, generally with no exit fees. Like Colin, the offering is flexible. “I can’t compete on price with the likes of Aldermore, Shawbrook and Masthaven, says Colin, “and I don’t want to.” Tuscan offers what he calls the “all-round proposition” where introducers have direct access to decision makers and they don’t get lost in a black hole of computer says no. His perfect deal? One that fits all his covenants, outside central London and where the borrower wants to extend. Twice.
All of the people in Colin’s team, including the brokers and professionals, have worked for him before. He puts that down to the fact that he doesn’t just pay lip service to the “TCF” mantra. Treating customers fairly, he says, goes to the heart of who they are; whether that be customers, introducers or their professionals. It’s why he has the reputation as a gentleman in the sometimes rough and tumble world of property finance. Loyalty goes a long way with Colin.
It’s not often that you hear a lender use the word compassionate in the context of an approach to lending, but I believe him. He wants repeat business. He wants to do it in his own way, imbuing Tuscan with his own ethos and his own way of doing business. Like the unadorned Tuscan column, Colin will be focusing on keeping it simple and leaving the bells and whistles to others.
Written by Nicky Richmond, Managing Partner, Brecher
www.brecher.co.uknickyrichmondnotalwayslegal
Original article: https://primeresi.com/
Nicky & Colin dined at The Coach in Clerkenwell, 26-28 Ray Street, London EC1R 3DJ
T: 020 3954 1595 / thecoachclerkenwell.co.uk
Lunch for two, with a (large) glass of wine each: £106.65