Ealing is running against the London tide. Across London as a whole, new development lending rose by 13.2% in the 12 months to June 2026. In Ealing it fell by 22.0%, the fourth steepest decline of the 35 locations we track with enough lending to compare. Exit lending has dropped even faster. For anyone with a scheme in the borough, that changes the conversation with both the development lender and whoever is meant to take them out at the end.
We pulled the latest Companies House charge filings, Land Registry sales and London Borough of Ealing planning decisions to see where local schemes stand after the first half of 2026. The full dataset, with quarterly charts and comparisons against London and England and Wales, is in the Ealing development exit report. Here is what it means for developers.
Fewer new development loans
Development lenders registered 78 new charges against Ealing sites and developers in the 12 months to June 2026, down from 100 in the year before. They were taken by 62 borrowing companies, against 73 a year earlier. Nationally, new development charges rose by 11.7% over the same period.
The first half of 2026 was closer to flat: 43 new charges against 45 in the first half of 2025. Recent filings are provisional and usually rise as late registrations arrive, so the 12 month figure is the better guide. It points to a market where fewer schemes are getting to a funded start.
Repayments are slow
Lenders filed 24 development charges as satisfied over the year, down from 28. That is 0.31 repayments for every new development charge, below both the national ratio of 0.40 and the London figure of 0.33.
A charge is a security document rather than a loan balance, so these counts measure facilities, not debt. Satisfactions are also filed late. Even so, a low repayment rate alongside falling new lending suggests schemes are taking longer to clear than they are to start.
The live book is ageing in line with London
Of the 413 development charges still live in Ealing at 30 June 2026, 59.3% had been registered more than 24 months earlier, slightly below the national figure of 60.6%. Taking everything older than 18 months, the share is 71.2%. Most development facilities are written for 18 to 24 months, so a large part of the local book is already past its original term.
Exit lending has fallen sharply
Exit and refinance charges against Ealing borrowers fell to 31 in the 12 months to June 2026, from 45 the year before, a drop of 31.1%. That is the fifth steepest fall of the 34 locations we can compare. Nationally, exit lending rose by 3.4%, and across London it was broadly flat.
The mix has shifted too. Of those 31 exit charges, 16 came from specialist banks and 15 from bridging lenders, so bridging now provides close to half of Ealing's exit finance. Across all property-secured lending in the borough, specialist lenders accounted for 91.0% of matched charges, against 88.4% nationally, with high street lenders at 9.0%.
For a developer approaching practical completion, the message is to line up the exit early. With fewer exit facilities being written locally, a scheme that needs time to sell should expect closer scrutiny of its sales evidence and pricing.
New-build sales slowed
Land Registry registers new-build sales slowly, so we read them over the latest settled year, August 2024 to July 2025. Ealing recorded 192 new-build sales in that window, down from 288 in the year before. New-build made up 6.2% of all sales, below the national share of 8.3%.
Almost all of that stock is flats. New-build flats sold at a median of £473,000, 14.0% above the £415,000 median for existing flats. That is a modest premium for London, and it leaves less room for error on build costs and sales periods than a wider gap would.
Planning: a conversion market
The London Borough of Ealing approved 696 relevant residential applications in the year to 20 September 2026, with 202 still pending. Prior approval consents, mostly permitted development conversions of commercial buildings, made up 142 of them. That is 20.4% of approvals, the highest share of the 56 locations we track with at least 50 approvals. A further 104 approvals were conversions and 60 were changes of use, against 25 new-build consents.
Where a unit count was stated, the approvals added 818 homes across 151 applications. The largest were a 194 unit prior approval at TNS House on West Gate, a 149 unit new-build scheme at the Transport Yard in Northolt, and 124 homes at 8 to 10 Greenock Road in Acton.
That profile matters for funding. Permitted development schemes are financed differently from ground-up new build: lenders look hard at unit sizes, space standards and the strength of the residential exit, and some will not lend on them at all.
What to take from it
Ealing has fewer new development loans, a slow repayment rate and a sharp fall in exit lending, set against a planning pipeline dominated by conversions. New company formation is still rising, with 810 property SPVs incorporated in the year against 748, so developer interest has not gone away. If you are building or converting in the borough, test the exit route before you start, and expect lenders to weigh conversion schemes on their residential end values. If your scheme is student-led, our Ealing student accommodation development report covers that market separately.
Sources: Companies House charge register, HM Land Registry Price Paid Data and London Borough of Ealing planning records, analysed by Construction Capital. Period figures for 2026 are provisional. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.