Commercial property investor and developer The Harkalm Group has secured a £2.1m loan from OakNorth to acquire eight nurseries across the UK.

OakNorth, the digital bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, today celebrates the five-year anniversary of its team in Birmingham who have been supporting businesses across the Midlands.OakNorth has completed over £675m of loans to businesses across the region, with some of its notable deals including:A bespoke loan to MPS Care Group , a leading provider of residential nursing and care homes for adults, to refinance existing facilities and support future growth (loan completed in December 2024);A transaction with Beaufort Wealth Management , the Warwickshire-based IFA firm, to support an MBO (loan completed in November 2024);A bespoke debt facility to OMNI Developments , to support the development of a major new PBSA site in Nottingham (loan completed in August 2024);A structured debt facility to Lovett Care , the award-winning care home provider, to support the next phase of its growth plans (loan completed in March 2023);A £2.1m loan to East-Midlands-based, family run housebuilder, Rose & Co Developments , for a new residential scheme in Ranskill, Nottinghamshire (loan completed in July 2021;A £44.4M loan to the science and tech sector’s leading property provider, Bruntwood SciTech , to support the development of life sciences infrastructure at Birmingham Health Innovation Campus and specialist office space for the digital tech sector at Innovation Birmingham (loan completed in May 2021).OakNorth has continued to bolster its Birmingham-based lending team, hiring Ian Fairclough as a Director of Debt Finance in September 2024 and Safa Arif as an Associate of Debt Finance in January 2025. They joined Dale Cowdell, Mike Tierney and Chris Wall, helping to strengthen OakNorth’s ability to provide trading facilities, alongside its existing real estate offering, including acquisition and buyout finance, as well as roll outs and recaps for growth businesses across the Midlands.Ben Barbanel, Head of Debt Finance at OakNorth, said: “We continue to see a huge opportunity in the Midlands from businesses keen to pursue their growth ambitions, and because incumbent banks and alternative lenders are still retrenching from lending, this has only been compounded. Given our recent hires designed to help strengthen our corporate lending offering, it has also been encouraging to see a noticeable uptick in private equity activity in the region, driven by rising business sentiment that is creating more deal activity. Moving forward, we look forward to building on the impressive work done by the team over the past five years, and will continue to invest in building our team, capabilities, and reach across the Midlands.”

OakNorth, the digital bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, has provided a £50m of new funding to returning customer and leading entrepreneurial private equity real estate investor, Paloma Capital.Founded by Joe Froud and Jack Pitman, Paloma Capital has raised over £520m of wholly discretionary capital in three value-add Funds since 2015, mainly from institutional investors across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East. The firm’s investment philosophy is founded on three key pillars; an acute focus on mispricing, an entrepreneurial approach to capex-intensive asset management; and a preference for the majority of its return to come from income.The £50m of new funding from OakNorth, split across two separate transactions, will be deployed within the firm’s Paloma Real Estate III, following a successful final close of the Fund at which they raised £201m of wholly discretionary equity. Following its launch in November 2022, the Fund has had an opportunistic strategy, investing across sectors and regions, focussing primarily on income-producing, multi-let urban industrial and logistics schemes. It’s asset types include urban logistics, trade counters, open storage and self-storage. OakNorth provided £45m to the fund back in September 2023 to support its growth.Jack Pitman, Founding Partner of Paloma Capital, commented: “At Paloma, we continue to pride ourselves on our hands-on approach to asset management and our focus on multi-let assets which provide us with the greatest opportunity to create additional value through carefully thought-out and well-executed business plans. Given the experience we had with OakNorth last year when we secured a £45m debt facility following the launch of our third fund, we felt they were the obvious choice