Multi-park portfolio finance for operators consolidating or scaling

Why borrow across the portfolio rather than park by park?

Lending park by park leaves value stranded. A site that is performing strongly, with a healthy holiday-home sales pipeline and a long licence, often carries more debt capacity than its own balance sheet shows, while a newer or seasonal park may not stand alone at all. Pooling the parks into one facility lets the lender look at combined trading, so the stronger sites support the weaker ones and the blended loan to value sits comfortably inside the lender's appetite. That usually means more total borrowing, a single rate and one set of covenants to manage rather than several.

It also simplifies how you run the group. One reporting pack, one renewal date and one relationship beats juggling maturities that all fall due at different times. When a lender already understands the whole portfolio, the next acquisition or refinance is a conversation rather than a fresh underwrite from scratch. We arrange the facility and introduce you to lenders who genuinely understand parks as trading businesses, not as residential bricks and mortar.

How do lenders size a portfolio facility?

Lenders start from aggregate trading rather than from a simple property valuation. They build the EBITDA across all the parks, strip out one-off and non-recurring items, and look at how durable the pitch-fee income, touring and camping receipts and holiday-home sales margin are across the group. From that they set a debt-service cover requirement and a loan-to-value cap, and the facility is sized to whichever bites first. On a portfolio of established trading parks we typically see aggregate loan to value in the region of fifty to sixty-five per cent, though the licence position and tenure of each site move that figure.

Tenure and licence term matter enormously here. Freehold parks with long-dated or evergreen site licences are treated as strong security, while short leasehold or a licence with limited remaining term can cap the borrowing against that particular site or pull it out of the pool. The lender will also weigh management depth, the quality of the trading accounts and any concentration risk, for example if one park produces most of the group's profit. These are indicative ranges, not an offer of finance, and every portfolio is underwritten on its own facts.

How do partial releases and acquisitions work?

A well-drafted portfolio facility lets individual parks come in and out without disturbing the rest. If you sell a park, the facility documents set out a release price, the share of debt that must be repaid for the lender to discharge its charge over that site, calculated to keep the remaining loan to value and cover ratios inside covenant. The balance of the sale proceeds is then yours to redeploy. Substitution clauses can let you swap a sold park for a newly acquired one, so the security pool keeps pace with the business.

On the buy side, portfolio borrowers often hold pre-agreed headroom or an accordion to fund the next acquisition quickly. Where speed matters more than the new park has trading history, a short bridge can sit alongside the term facility and then fold into it once the accounts mature. For ground-up expansion of an existing site you may want development funding instead, and our Commercial Property Development Finance colleagues arrange that against cost and end value. We map the right tool to the right move and arrange the introductions.

What security and covenants should I expect?

Expect the lender to take a first legal charge over each park in the pool, a debenture over the trading companies, and personal guarantees from the principal owners, often capped at a proportion of the facility. Inter-company guarantees and a share charge over holding companies are common in group structures. Because this is unregulated commercial lending, the documentation is negotiated rather than standardised, and the detail of the security package is where a portfolio facility is won or lost. We help you understand what is being asked and why before you commit.

Covenants are tested on the group. The usual pair is a loan-to-value cap, retested on periodic revaluation, and a debt-service or EBITDA cover ratio measured against the consolidated accounts. You will also see reporting covenants, such as quarterly management accounts and annual audited figures, and conditions around capital expenditure, distributions and further borrowing. None of this is advice, and you should take your own legal and accounting counsel, but we make sure the covenant package reflects how a seasonal, trading park business actually performs through the year.

Is portfolio finance right for my group?

It tends to suit operators who already hold more than one trading park and who want to manage their debt as a single, coherent facility rather than a stack of unrelated loans. If you are consolidating legacy borrowing, planning a run of acquisitions, or want the flexibility to release and redeploy capital as parks are bought and sold, a portfolio facility usually earns its keep. The Christie and Co market commentary reported agreed park and leisure deals tripling in the first half of 2025, and active acquirers in particular benefit from a facility built to flex.

It is less suited to a single-site owner, where a straightforward trading-business mortgage on that one park is simpler and often cheaper. It also depends on the group being able to present clean, consolidated accounts and a defensible licence and tenure position across the pool. We will tell you honestly when a single-park term loan or a different structure would serve you better, because our job is to arrange the facility that fits, not to push you into one shape of borrowing.