Most schemes that get declined aren't bad schemes — they're sitting the wrong side of a lender's LTV threshold. Apex works with brokers and lenders to restructure the cost composition of difficult deals. We know the levers that move LTGDV below the line — and we can pull all of them.
Your client has planning consent, a site, and a contractor — but LTGDV sits above the lender's threshold and the deal won't place. The scheme isn't bad. The cost structure is.
Apex sits between the lender's requirement and the developer's cost stack. We restructure what's inside the numbers — using four distinct mechanisms — until the deal clears the threshold. Then we deliver it.
We take a declined or difficult scheme and rebuild the cost stack from first principles — identifying exactly which combination of contract structure, procurement savings and contingency management will move LTGDV below the lender's threshold.
Once the numbers work, we deliver. SEG Construction provides the contract structure the restructured appraisal requires — fixed price, at-cost, or a developer JV where SEG takes equity in lieu of margin.
Most developers know about one. Apex can deploy all four — in combination, or individually, depending on where the scheme is and what the lender needs to see.
SEG takes an equity stake in the development SPV in lieu of charging a contractor margin. Removes profit and overhead from the construction cost entirely — the single biggest move available on LTGDV. The lender sees a lower cost base; SEG's return comes from the completed scheme.
SEG charges actual build cost plus a transparent management fee — stripping out the risk premium a standard fixed-price contractor bakes in to protect their margin. The saving is real and auditable. Lenders accept it because the cost schedule is open-book and verifiable.
SEG's established subcontractor network operates at genuine scale — carpentry contractors completing 1,200 homes per year, decorators over 1,500, M&E team 200+, roofers 300. Volume relationships at that level command material and labour pricing that a single-scheme developer cannot access. These savings reduce the build cost before the contract structure is even considered.
Lenders typically load a 10% contingency into total development cost from day one — inflating LTGDV before a brick is laid. Apex structures contingency drawdown on an as-needed basis, agreed with the lender upfront. It only enters the calculation when genuinely required, not as a blanket addition to the cost stack.
Advisory is where most engagements start. It isn't always where they end.
On select deals, Apex can take a minority equity position alongside the developer. It signals conviction — we only apply the methodology to deals we'd stake capital on ourselves. If the numbers work well enough to restructure, they should work well enough to back.
Deal size open. Structure assessed case by case.
Where a project needs a development principal — a consented site without a developer, or a lender holding a stalled asset that needs resolving — Apex can step into that role. We structure the finance, SEG delivers the build, Apex runs the project from appraisal to completion.
Every case assessed on its own merits. Send it over.
An Apex appraisal — 7 houses, GDV £4.78M. The only variable is how the construction contract is priced. Levers 03 and 04 would reduce these numbers further still.
| Metric | Fixed Price | At-Cost | Developer JV |
|---|---|---|---|
| GDV | £4.78M | £4.78M | £4.78M |
| Construction Cost | £2.48M | £1.98M | £1.98M |
| Total Dev Cost | £3.89M | £3.39M | £3.34M |
| Developer Profit | £896K | £1.39M | £1.44M |
| Profit on Cost | 23% | 41% | 43.2% |
| LTGDV | 81.3% — marginal | 70.9% — viable | 69.8% — preferred |
Moving from fixed-price to at-cost drops LTGDV by 10.4 points — often the difference between a lender decline and an approval.
When Apex restructures a scheme, construction is delivered through SEG Construction — a third-generation firm led by Managing Director John Gooch, with 25+ years in the industry. SEG carries a full in-house team: Construction Director, Project Manager, Site Manager, Quantity Surveyor and Assistant QS — not a skeleton operation subcontracting everything out.
SEG operates across all three contract structures — fixed price, at-cost, and developer JV — which is what makes the Apex appraisal deliverable, not theoretical. The numbers in the restructured cost schedule are the numbers SEG will build to.
Critically, SEG holds an established national subcontractor network operating at volume — giving access to trade pricing that significantly undercuts what any individual developer can negotiate directly.
Every Apex appraisal is built from first principles — actual build cost schedules, real land values, verified lender thresholds. Here are two schemes we have worked on.
Institutional development lenders have been running AI-assisted underwriting for years. The SME development market is still on spreadsheets, benchmarked against BCIS data that's often 18 months stale. That gap is where the Apex appraisal sits.
Bill Gooch was instrumental in building the AI workflows that enabled Morgan Stanley's development team to take ideas from asset managers and quantitative strategists and deploy them into production at pace. Working alongside teams deploying LLM-based environmental risk assessment — covering fire, flood, planning, and community factors — gave direct exposure to how institutional lenders were applying AI to credit decisions before most of the market knew it was happening.
Apex's proprietary intelligence agent — built independently from scratch using workflow automation, specialist plugins, skills, and persistent memory context — synthesises data across HM Land Registry price trajectories, multi-source rental comparables, institutional transaction benchmarks nationally, employment cluster modelling, macroeconomic indicators, and DSCR financing scenarios into a single coherent investment case for a specific scheme and location.
First deployed on a live 38-unit new-build residential scheme in Cambridgeshire, it produced an institutional-grade investment memorandum benchmarking the scheme against comparable Invesco, Greystar, and KKR acquisitions across the UK — the kind of analysis a credit team produces internally, built by someone who spent 11.5 years building the tools they use.
Ground conditions, planning politics, subcontractor availability in a specific postcode — these don't live in any training dataset. A qualified construction director on a site visit still beats any model. The Apex methodology uses AI where the data exists, and keeps the human layer central where it matters.
Bill Gooch spent 11.5 years at Morgan Stanley building CREW — their global commercial real estate lending platform — and was instrumental in building the AI workflows that enabled the development team to take ideas from asset managers and quantitative strategists and deploy them at pace. Working alongside teams applying LLM-based environmental risk assessment gave direct exposure to how institutional lenders were using AI in credit decisions before most of the market caught on.
Since leaving Morgan Stanley, he has built Apex's proprietary intelligence layer independently — an AI agent architecture combining workflow automation, specialist plugins, skills, and persistent memory context, all developed in-house. That institutional methodology, now applied at the SME scheme level, is what makes the Apex appraisal credible from the first conversation.
John Gooch is a third-generation builder and the Managing Director of SEG Construction, with over 25 years in residential and mixed-use development. SEG's competitive edge is built on supply chain depth, not margin: John has spent years constructing a regional subcontractor network that operates at scale — carpentry across 1,200 homes per year, decorating covering 1,500+ units annually, specialist M&E and roofing teams deployed across 200 and 300 sites respectively. That procurement reach is what makes at-cost pricing viable. SEG carries a full in-house management team — Construction Director, Project Manager, Site Manager, QS and Assistant QS — so nothing critical is subcontracted out at a premium.
Alan Kelly brings 15 years of construction and finance experience, including time as a Bank Monitor for development financers — reviewing and stress-testing construction cost submissions on behalf of lenders before credit decisions were made. Alan knows exactly what passes credit committee and why, because he was the person making that assessment. As Apex's Construction Director, he ensures every cost plan we put to a lender is built to survive scrutiny — because it was built by someone who used to apply that scrutiny.
Every Apex appraisal incorporates AI-assisted viability screening across flood, fire, planning and environmental risk — alongside rental market analysis, WFH-driven demand shifts, local occupancy trends, and community economic indicators — the same lenses institutional lenders apply before credit committee, brought to your scheme before we approach the market.
If a client's scheme keeps failing at credit committee — or a lender is holding a development that's gone wrong — send it to us. We'll restructure the numbers and tell you if we can get it over the line.
billgooch@apexdevelopmentadvisory.com