Guyof all trades

Words by ANDREEA DULGHERU

Guy Harrington is best known for creating and leading specialist lender Glenhawk. However, behind the property finance expert and aficionado image lies a deeper character, passionate about all things with wheels and the thrill of any innovation. I sit down with him to discover more about his eclectic career, his decision to launch Glenhawk, and the company’s plans to grow

Back when he was a child, it wasn’t property finance that was on Guy’s mind when thinking about careers—quite far from that, as his heart’s desire was to be a meteorologist, thanks to his fascination with thunderstorms and lightning. “In the end, I entered a space that ultimately is a bit like the weather—sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes you get struck by lightning,” he jokes.

His passion for property came on a seemingly random day out spent with a pal—a defining moment for Guy and one that he vividly remembers to this day: “I was with my friend and his dad at their house. My friend’s father was a property developer, and I remember asking him how to get into it, to which he answered to ‘Just do it’. That stayed with me throughout my teens, and I ended up going to university to study commercial property management,” recalls Guy.

While at university, he showcased his entrepreneurial skills quite early, setting up a business where he’d sell mobile phones from a local retailer to students for a profit. However, Guy’s time at university was short-lived; while he loved reading books and learning new things—and still does—he realised quite quickly that the world of academia didn’t fit him, which led him to drop out.

Kaleidoscope of ventures

With the money earned from his university business venture, Guy decided to use it as deposit for acquiring a small portfolio of BTLs in the north of England. At the same time, he worked for a car-exporting business for two years—quite different from his love of property. “I’m passionate about anything with wheels—planes, motorbikes etc. I’m a bit of a petrolhead at heart, so when this lovely guy, Raj, approached me to help him export cars from the UK to Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia, I jumped at the opportunity as it looked interesting. We were probably one of the leading exporters for a two-year period, and then the market got really competitive, which is when my attention flicked back to property,” he explains.

After his time at the car exporter, Guy moved to London where his connections with various estate agents and developers led him to create his next business venture, helping property investors find and manage their upcoming projects. This saw him scout for property opportunities, present a detailed investment plan to a potential buyer, and handle all aspects of the deal, from the buying process with all parties, securing the necessary finance, arranging refurbishments—including assessing and managing build costs—and handling the sale of the improved property. “I very quickly got two or three people who came to me as their guy to help them source opportunities all over central London. I'd be seeing 15–20 properties a day back to back, trying to find opportunities, and probably one in 100 that I saw came to fruition. I ended up doing a lot of developments in Fulham and Kensington, as well as some in Wandsworth and Putney. I had an exciting time doing that.”

While property is his main passion, Guy tells me he is always open to new opportunities to innovate in any sector—which is the reason why he ended up co-founding and developing a voice-based dating application,

Revealr, back in 2013, while still working in his solo property business. “At the time of founding it, I was living with my best friend and his girlfriend. I had come back from a date one night and I thought there was a problem, as all the time you’re messaging away on dating apps, you’re just talking through text—so why not do something like Blind Date that Cilla Black hosted in the 90s? My friend, being a very good developer and chief technology officer, said he could build it, and I’d do the marketing, branding, and raise the funding for it to launch. So, we built it in about four months and it did really well—we had nearly half a million users on it at its highest point, and we were featured in Time Magazine,” he recalls. After a while, Guy and his friend ended up selling the app to a large dating company.

Swapping sides

It was the same passion to innovate that drove Guy to launch Glenhawk in 2018. After years of using different bridging lenders for the property developments he was working on with his clients, he identified several points in a deal that he thought he could do more efficiently. And so, after hours spent in a cafe in Putney finding the right name for the business, Glenhawk was born. A combination between the word ‘glen’, which is a valley in Scotland, and ‘hawk’, the name is meant to symbolise bridging finance—as the hawk connects the two sides of the glen. However, Guy lets me in on a little secret: the meaning behind Glenhawk came after he selected the name, not before, as one would expect. “I was on a domain branding site generator looking at some one-word names like all the big powerful brands that I admired. I ended up buying the name Glenhawk, and then six months later, I looked at it and thought [of the meaning]. So you’ve got the exciting marketing side, and the very dull reality of me sitting in the café in Putney coming up with a name.”

Shortly after this, Guy brought in Nick Hilton—who is now the managing director of the specialist lender—to help build the brand using his extensive experience. “A mortgage broker, Paul Agnew, introduced me to Nick, who absolutely lives and breathes bridging. He's not only incredibly passionate about it, but also a phenomenal problem solver, and I'm really glad to say he's one of my best mates. Nick brought so much knowledge to the business in terms of the procedures and operations, and that enabled us to start building out the platform,” Guy tells me. “Ultimately, you don’t know everything, so it's important to be surrounded by the best people possible; pay them well and treat them fairly, and they'll grow with you. Nick and that early team were instrumental in getting Glenhawk going, and they were a big part of us attracting investment into the business.”

Throughout its five-year history, Glenhawk has gone from strength to strength, lending hundreds of millions of pounds to borrowers—the highest monthly sum lent being £54m, recorded in May 2023—and securing several funding lines from investors, including £200m from NatWest and £200m from JP Morgan— which Guy quotes as one of his biggest career achievements. However, the journey was not without its bumps, as the business was affected by Brexit and Covid-19, and now inflation and numerous Bank of England base rate hikes—the latter Guy cites as the toughest challenge to date.

“We offer fixed-rate loans, so our funding is linked to SONIA and, as that starts to creep up, that erodes our margin,” divulges Guy. “Last year was painful. We were meant to have a nicely profitable year, but it cost us several million in the end, which was unavoidable, because you can’t hedge short-term loans. We mitigated it by putting up client rates like every lender did in the market and by putting more fees on our products, which wasn’t enjoyable, but here we are now—we've ridden it out. We learnt a lot from this; we’ve got protections in place for rate rises to go far higher than they are now, and we're in a great position where we're back on profit monthly and everything's stable.”

While the company has hit several milestones, the specialist lender’s ambitious founder is not fully satisfied with where it’s at. “Yes, we’re lending half a billion a year now in the bridging space and we’re backed by JP Morgan, NatWest, and some amazing hedge funds but, to me, the job is still not done; I feel like we’re only one-third of the way through the journey,” he states, adding that his goal is to get Glenhawk to reach £500m of assets under management in 2024, then £1bn within the next three years and, ultimately, hit £1.5bn. Not only that, but he also anticipates the lender to hit £1bn of bridging lending in Q1 next year.

Guy also has big plans to bring some industry heavyweights to boost its operations team, as well as to expand its proposition. He confirms that Glenhawk is looking to introduce a BTL product range in 2024.

“BTL is crowded at the moment, for sure, but I feel the market will be a slightly more attractive place for us strategically to go into early or mid-next year.”

The founder also highlights the company’s desire to offer a range of traditional, regulated mortgages, including specialist homeowner loans, facilities for borrowers with slightly adverse credit, the self-employed, and more. “Once we've covered the mortgage market, we can look at asset and business finance. I really want to take the whole group and brand not just in real estate finance but also in other asset-backed areas . . . I feel we have the platform to do that. 2024 will be our golden year where we can really ramp up into other areas—as long as the market is back to normal and rates are looking more favourable.”

Sharing his predictions for the overall UK market, Guy tells me he expects to see the Bank of England base rate go up to 6% by the end of this year. He also forecasts a short recession this winter, which will then lead to a drop in interest rates to 2.5% or 3% by Q2 2024. “Normally, I'm a very positive person, but I'm also a realist. I think what we're seeing now and what the Bank of England hasn't seen is the huge lag in the tail that is on these interest rate rises. So, if they're still upping them towards the end of this year, that lag will knock into Q1 and that's when we'll start to see a bit of stress on everybody.”

Nevertheless, Guy believes the UK is strong and resilient enough to pull through. “People always buy property and need mortgages, so there'll always be demand there from our side. I think the UK is in a pretty good place to weather this out and head into the new year in quite a strong position.”

His optimism is even greater when it comes to Glenhawk, as Guy is confident the lender is more than capable to succeed and evolve, despite what challenges may come its way. “The business is very resilient; we've got great funders and an excellent team so, if something does come along, we adapt, innovate, and we move on. We're working every day as a team to make our borrowers’ and intermediaries’ lives easier and build something that people are proud of using, and our team are proud of supplying as well.”

While he admits he is often too hard on himself and doesn’t take the time to pat himself on the back for his achievements, Guy tells me he is incredibly pleased with Glenhawk’s evolution throughout the years— from an idea born in a café to a successful short-term lender nearing £1bn of bridging lending—and is motivated at the prospect of growing the business further. “I’ve always had in my head [the idea of having] 200 staff, so I can look across the business at all these people with their individual skills, working towards one goal, one dream. Seeing this one day across the floor in a big office building would be amazing.”“2024”