B&C spoke with Suros Capital director Ray Palmer about the world of luxury asset finance, hearing about some of the extravagant and outright bizarre deals he has been involved with.

If you have it, and it costs a fair amount, there’s a chance a firm like Suros may lend against it.

“We lend against luxury assets, so you’re talking about jewellery, luxury watches, gold bullion and coins. We deal with investment wine, luxury and classic cars, rare whisky and art… paintings mainly,” explained Ray.

From Warhols to Rolexes, gold bars to Banksys, Ray deals in the valuable. A deal involving an Oscar award was part of a previous tenure, while another involved Suros completing a loan against 21,000 bottles of wine stored in a second world war bunker, worth around £6m. Another of the lender’s deals saw a loan on a 30-year-old bottle of Macallan whisky worth £60,000.

These are just some of the transactions that have graced Suros’ loan book. The firm has also been approached with deals — although ultimately unsuccessful — on aircraft, Fabergé eggs, and racehorses, as well as 50 tonnes of dirt with the promise of 2% of pure gold hidden inside.

But while the assets may be different from those in the more conventional bridging market, the market is still beholden to its own standards for valuation.

“There are two sides to it: there's pricing — which you can use lots of data points for, and get opinions from experts — and then there's authenticity,” explained Ray.

“You don't have to prove a house is a house. We have to prove that a Rolex is a genuine Rolex. Or be as sure as we can that a certain bottle of wine is legitimate.

“And similarly with artworks, there are huge levels of forgery in the art world that we have to contemplate.”

There are specific methods for checking authenticity, such as auction history and using technology like x-rays and UV light to examine the brush stroke used on a particular painting by a famous artist. For provenance, it's about determining the history of a wine: tracing it back to its respective vineyard, and understanding whether it’s come through distributors and if it’s been held in storage, which should ultimately establish its authenticity.

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With all these checks, like the rest of the bridging market, speed is still of the essence.

Ray and the team at Suros keep a Rolodex of auction-house professionals and specialists, ensuring a network of experts are on hand to examine assets. The lender also has plenty of in-house expertise: according to Ray, it amounts to over a century of experience with jewellery, gold, and watches, among other valuable products.

Also fundamental to the lending process is storage. While items such as wine collections may often already be stored in the appropriate cellars with regulated humidity and temperature, for assets such as gold and jewellery, Suros has its own £30m cash vault with a £300m jewellery valuation for insurance purposes.

But for all the quirkiness and unconventional nature of lending on luxury assets, the market still often plays to the same ends of conventional bridging.

“I believe there's a lot of opportunity for our product. It's never going to supplant property lending, but it's certainly something that can work in partnership with [it],” said Ray.

He listed some of the ways the finance can be utilised: “We can cover the legal fees that weren't anticipated in a transaction, or maybe the LTV in their properties is already maxed out and there's still another £100,000 required to finish a project. That's where we can step in and help.”

According to Ray, the market for lending against art in particular is likely to see an increase, as the art market is currently seeing something of a dip. He predicts that some of those who would normally sell will wait out the stormy waters for a higher price, borrowing against the asset in the meantime.

While luxury assets are often envied, valuing them comes with its own challenges, and possibly even disappointments.

“The tricky part is that most people's expectations of their own personal assets — in terms of what they paid for them — is very different to what the market will actually bear. That’s probably our biggest challenge.”

While valuations may be diverse and unexpected, Ray and Suros are in business to lend upon those diverse and unexpected assets, with a keen eye and backing from a network of specialists — ensuring they are ready to lend on the weird, the wacky and, above all, the authentic.