Held in its Brentwood offices, Brightstar invited representatives from the lender - including Business Development Manager Maria Magnussen - to talk to both its team and broker partners about the funding options that were available to them.

Among these are the lender’s latest innovations of extended four and five-year buy-to-let products, which were officially unveiled by Bridging & Commercial last week.

There were also many opportunities for Dragonfly to learn more about Brightstar’s own business and to further solidify what has already been a fruitful working relationship between the two.

Maria told us about three deals agreed with Brightstar in principal at the lender day.

The first was a classic chain-break scenario, in which the clients had fallen in love with a new property to be their dream home, but had not sold their current property. Both homes were desirable and based in Esher and had a combined value of £2.2 million.

The client required a loan of £1.6 million secured across both, which Dragonfly could offer terms on within an hour of Brightstar’s enquiry arriving.

The second case was for a refinance of a recently-developed property owned by a client which was worth approximately £4.5 million.

The house had an outstanding loan of £1.1 million secured against it and the client needed to release a further £1 million of equity in order to fund the purchase of another property. Terms were again agreed and issued to the client within an hour of the enquiry being received.

Though Maria could not disclose details of the third transaction, value of all three deals totalled around £5 million, each agreed with Brightstar’s team on the day itself.

Maria added: “These were fantastic deals that we were delighted to help with.”

Speaking about her hopes for the day, Maria said: “My aim was to be available to the team at Brightstar and all of their brokers and clients to discuss cases in real time. This was particularly useful for any queries relating to Dragonfly.

“I have experienced this type of event in the past as in my previous life as a broker, way back in the Golden Days of broking: the company I worked for had a bank of underwriters from various lenders working within the office, and as there were humans to talk to, face to face, 90 per cent of our lending went to these companies.

“It's always easier and more personal to deal with people you know and the event at Brightstar had the same human touch.”

She added: “I think Brightstar now have a wider understanding of the business Dragonfly can help them with, and I have a better understanding of the business that Brightstar arrange, so this will help us work more closely together.”

Kit Thompson, Director of Brightstar Financial’s Bridging and Commercial division, said: “We were delighted to invite Maria in to the office for the day recently to represent Dragonfly. We know Maria from her broker days, so there is history there anyway.

He added: “It was great to have someone of Maria's experience and knowledge on hand to deal with enquiries in 'real' time and we were able to return formal responses to enquiries even faster than usual. We benefited from increasing our knowledge of Dragonfly's products and criteria and I think it helped for Maria to really get involved and enjoy the 'buzz' in our office.

“We had a great day of new business enquiries, resulting in outline terms being issued on £5 million of new lending, which we are now working on getting through to completion!”

Maria concluded by saying: “I would love the chance to spend another day with the Brightstar team, and hope to have another day in the diary in the near future.”