Elliott Advisors acquires majority stake in Enra Specialist Finance

The business is acquiring the stake from Enra’s management and Exponent Private Equity, which has owned Enra for five years.

The size of the stake and its price was not disclosed, and as a result of the acquisition Exponent Private Equity will no longer own the business.

Elliott Advisors has made investments in the UK lending market for years, including stakes in Charter Court Financial Services and OneSavings Bank.

Enra said the acquisition was the “culmination of a competitive process” and that the process had “moved extremely quickly”.

As part of the acquisition Amit Sharma and Richard Monahan, portfolio manager and associate portfolio manager respectively, will join Enra’s board.

It is the parent company of West One Loans, Enterprise Finance and Vantage Finance, and was created in 2013 when Enterprise Finance entered the lending market.

West One Loans was acquired by Enra in 2015 and is its primary lending branch, and the firm went on to acquire specialist lending distributor Vantage Finance.

West One Loans offers bridging, development finance, buy-to-let and second charge mortgages.

According to Enra, West One originates around £1.5bn of assets per annum. It was originally a bridging lender and has lent £5bn to date.

Danny Waters (pictured), Enra’s founder and chief executive said Elliott Advisors had a “deep experience in the UK mortgage market” and an “ambition” to support the company’s ongoing growth.

He added: “Their desire to acquire Enra is a great validation of the business we have built over the last 19 years, and a huge vote of confidence in the strength of our future business plans.

“This will be Enra’s third private equity transaction in the last 10 years and our continuing success has been made possible through the hard work of my team at Enra.”

He said having a new private equity partner put the business in a “fantastic position” to develop its broking and lending businesses.

Waters continued to say 2021 had been a record year for the firm in terms of gross lending and financial performance, pointing to its increased warehouse funding capacity and second securitisation as key milestones.

Partner at Exponent Private Equity Mark Taylor said that since it backed Enra in 2017 it had grown in the “leading non-bank mortgage lender” in the UK, pointing to its distribution, credit performance and growth.

He added: “We are delighted with the outcome and are confident Enra will continue to thrive with Elliott Advisors’ backing.”

Monahan said: “Enra is a stand-out performer in a crowded marketplace with the size, experience, funding capacity, and leadership to deliver continuing success.

“In the last five years we have seen Enra expand rapidly from bridging loans into development finance, second charge lending and most recently specialist buy-to-let, and we recognise a business that has the capacity to deliver further significant growth at attractive levels of risk-adjusted return.

He added: “Danny has built a business that is able to write tightly controlled credit risk at attractive margins across several different products to deliver significant profit growth. Taken together this represents an extremely compelling investment case. We look forward to working with Danny and the Enra team in the coming years to support the continued growth of the business.”