In 2022, economic uncertainty, rising interest rates and the need to preserve capital led traditional lenders such as banks, life insurance companies and CMBS investors to reduce their exposure to real estate. Industrial properties were particularly negatively affected, due to their recent emergence as a property type favoured by the institutional equity investment community that had increasingly come to rely on debt to generate successively higher returns. Within this evolving landscape, the private credit market is undergoing a notable transformation as specialised lenders have emerged, carving out niches within real estate sectors. This is a sophisticated evolution in the lending landscape, where sector specialist expertise is becoming a crucial differentiator.

The trend towards specialisation in lending is driven principally by the domain knowledge that can be brought to bear in underwriting and risk assessment. Historically, established lenders maintained broad, diversif