Leeds development loans are being repaid faster than almost anywhere else in the country. Over the year to June 2026 the city recorded 0.67 repayments for every new development charge, joint highest of the 73 locations we track and well ahead of the national ratio of 0.40. For developers planning an exit, that is a more useful signal than any headline about lending volumes, because it shows schemes are getting finished, sold or refinanced and lenders are getting their money back.
We combined Companies House charge filings, HM Land Registry sales and Leeds City Council planning decisions to see how local schemes are tracking after the first half of 2026. The full figures, with quarterly charts and national comparisons, are in the Leeds development exit report. Here is what they mean if you are building, selling or refinancing in Leeds.
Repayments have jumped
Lenders filed 84 Leeds development charges as satisfied in the 12 months to June 2026, against 47 in the previous year. That is an increase of 78.7%. Nationally, satisfactions rose by 21.1%.
A satisfied charge means the security has been released, usually because the facility was repaid from sales or refinanced. It counts facilities rather than pounds, and filings often arrive months after the money moves, so recent quarters can still rise. Even allowing for that, the direction in Leeds is clear: more of the local development book is clearing.
New lending is steady rather than booming
Development lenders registered 125 new charges against Leeds sites and developers over the year, up from 118. That rise of 5.9% is slower than the national increase of 11.7%. The number of borrowing companies dipped from 81 to 74.
The first half of 2026 was busier, with 61 new charges against 45 in the same months of 2025, an increase of 35.6%. Those recent figures are provisional, but they suggest lenders still have appetite for Leeds schemes after a quieter 2025.
The live book is ageing, but not unusually
There were 569 development charges still live in Leeds at 30 June 2026. Of those, 62.6% had been registered more than 24 months earlier, against 60.6% across England and Wales. Counting everything older than 18 months, the share is 72.8%.
The facilities repaid during the year had been running for a median of 28.8 months, compared with 26.1 months nationally. So Leeds loans are still overrunning a typical 18 to 24 month term, but by less than in many cities, and the strong repayment rate means the older book is being worked through rather than piling up.
Exit lending has moved away from bridging
Exit and refinance charges against Leeds borrowers fell to 64 over the year, from 71 the year before. The bigger change is who is providing them. A year earlier, bridging lenders accounted for 46 of the 71 exit charges. In the latest 12 months specialist banks provided 40 of the 64 and bridging lenders 20.
That shift matters for pricing. A development exit from a specialist bank is usually cheaper and longer dated than a bridge, so Leeds developers with completed stock appear to be refinancing on better terms than they could a year ago. Across all property-secured lending in the city, specialist lenders took 87.0% of matched charges against 88.4% nationally, with high street lenders at 13.0%.
New-build sales: houses carry the market
Because new-build sales reach the Land Registry slowly, we use the latest settled year, August 2024 to July 2025. Leeds recorded 706 new-build sales in that period, down from 900 a year earlier, a fall of 21.6%. New-build made up 6.7% of all sales, below the national share of 8.3%.
Most of that activity was houses. There were 627 new-build house sales at a median of £364,995, 46.0% above the £250,000 median for existing houses. New-build flats were far scarcer, with 79 sales at a median of £282,500, 85.2% above existing flats at £152,500. With so few new flats selling, valuers will lean heavily on a small set of comparables for any apartment scheme, which is worth building into your exit timetable.
Planning: large consents are coming through
Leeds City Council approved 238 relevant residential applications in the year to 20 September 2026, with 114 still pending. New-build and conversion approvals were almost level at 81 and 82, with 18 HMO approvals.
Where a unit count was stated, the approvals added 1,845 homes across 140 applications. The largest were 371 units at Hilltop Works in Meanwood, 352 units on land at Red Hall Lane in Shadwell and 324 units in the Northern Quadrant phase of the East Leeds Extension. That is the largest stated total of any city we track (only counties and London as a whole are higher), and those schemes will need development finance over the next two to three years.
What it means for your scheme
Leeds currently pairs a healthy repayment rate with a growing pipeline of large consents. For a developer near completion, the market is more forgiving than it was a year ago, and specialist exit finance has largely replaced expensive bridging. For a developer starting out, the competition for buyers will come from those big consented sites, so test your sales rate and pricing against them early. If your scheme is aimed at students, our Leeds student accommodation development report looks at the PBSA pipeline separately.
Sources: Companies House charge register, HM Land Registry Price Paid Data and Leeds City Council planning records, analysed by Construction Capital. Figures for 2026 are provisional. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.