Puma Property Finance has said it provided loans for the development of over £150m worth of UK care homes last year.

The purpose-built schemes under development are located all over the UK, including Surrey, Devon, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire and Essex. They will add 400 new care beds to the sector.

Tony Throp, director and head of healthcare at Puma Property Finance, said: “The UK care home industry, which is valued at £26 billion annually, relies heavily on new build developments to keep up with the ever-growing demand and aging supply.

“We believe the outlook for 2025 is similarly strong and we look forward to continuing to work with our valued partners to fund the building of state-of-the-art, future proofed homes that provide the best quality of life for residents.”

He added: “From our experience, larger lenders and mainstream banks typically focus on refinancing existing care homes, instead of funding new-build developments, because, by their very nature, there can be potential development risk.

“However, with Puma’s long established track record in the development finance space across multiple asset classes, including the care home sector, we prioritise our efforts on developing new schemes, adding substantial new care beds to the UK’s infrastructure.”

This is in addition to the nine new care homes which opened in 2024, that Puma had also funded the development of. This delivered a further 600+ beds across locations including Shropshire, Greater Manchester, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, West Sussex, Kent and Hampshire.

Overall, Puma has now funded over £665m of care homes across 39 schemes and approximately 2,800 care beds. All care homes it funds benefit from an array of features, including full en-suite wet rooms, an abundance of communal rooms, utilisation of assistive technology and well-designed outside space, all of which can be beneficial to the health and wellbeing of residents – as well as dealing with the supply shortfall.