I have lived in Sussex for twenty years now, and in all that time I have never seen quite so many cranes, hoarding boards and hi-vis jackets around the Gatwick Diamond as I have this year. Gatwick has just appointed eleven contractors — Mace, Morgan Sindall, Costain and a good number of smaller regional firms among them — to deliver a £2 billion, decade-long upgrade of the airport. Piers, terminals, EV charging, self-check-in, the lot. That is not a headline that stays inside the airport fence. It walks straight out into Crawley, Horley, Manor Royal and every business on our patch that has a spare bedroom, an annexe, or a flat above the shop.

Because here is the thing about a project on that scale: it does not run on aeroplanes alone. It runs on people. Site managers, engineers, electricians, project co-ordinators — hundreds of them, in and out of the area for months or years at a time, and every one of them needs somewhere to sleep on a Tuesday night that is not a budget hotel off the M23. That is before you even count the consultants coming into Manor Royal for the airlines, the logistics firms, and the corporate travellers who treat Gatwick as their front door to London and beyond.

This isn't the holiday cottage market any more

If you still think of short-term letting as a seaside cottage that gets booked out in August and sits empty in February, it is worth updating that picture — because the lenders certainly have. What is actually driving this market now is business travel, not school holidays. Hybrid working has settled into a rhythm rather than fading away: roughly 46% of office professionals are now commuting three or more days a week, up from 43% just two years ago, and larger organisations are running at 50–60% office occupancy. Demand has shifted from weekends to Monday-to-Thursday, and from the coast to exactly the sort of well-connected, business-dense corridor we have here between Gatwick and the M23.

For anyone in the Gatwick Diamond with a property already, or thinking about buying one, that is a genuinely interesting opening. A well-run serviced apartment a few minutes from the airport or Manor Royal, aimed squarely at contractors and consultants rather than tourists, is a different — and often steadier — business than a traditional holiday let.

What the finance actually looks like right now

I deal with these applications regularly, and the terms have moved on a good deal in the last couple of years, so it is worth knowing where things stand in 2026.

Deposits typically sit at 25–30%, rising to around 35% for a dedicated serviced accommodation purchase, with loan-to-value available up to roughly 80% through the right specialist lender. You should expect to pay a premium of around 0.5–1.5% above a standard buy-to-let rate — I have seen rates as competitive as 3.16% recently as lenders compete harder for this business — and five-year fixed deals are increasingly popular, simply because they smooth out some of the natural variability in short-term letting income. There are fewer than fifteen lenders in the UK who genuinely understand and price this kind of deal properly, which is exactly why it pays to work with someone who knows which door to knock on first.

Two changes matter enormously and I would be doing you a disservice not to flag them plainly. The Furnished Holiday Lettings tax regime was abolished from 6 April 2025, so the mortgage interest relief and capital allowances that used to make this an especially tax-efficient structure are gone — most serious operators now buy through a limited company as standard, and it is worth talking to your accountant before you talk to me. And England's mandatory short-term let registration scheme, promised for years, is still not live — it slipped from 2024 to spring 2026 and is now expected "later in 2026." Lenders are already asking applicants how they plan to comply once it lands, so having an answer ready, rather than a shrug, makes a real difference to how your application is received.

Evidence, not enthusiasm

If there is one thing I tell every client looking at this kind of purchase, it is that lenders want to see evidence, not projections. Twelve months of real booking data — occupancy, nightly rates, seasonality, your cleaning and management costs laid out honestly — will get you much further than an optimistic spreadsheet ever will. I have seen genuinely strong properties come unstuck purely because the application was thrown together at the last minute rather than presented as the small business it actually is. Reading a lender is a bit like reading the ice before you skate on it — you do not just step out because it looks solid, you check the edges, and you know the conditions shift from one lender to the next.

Why this matters to the Gatwick Diamond specifically

We are lucky in this part of Sussex to sit exactly where business travel, a major international airport and one of the busiest infrastructure programmes in the South East all meet in the same postcode. Members of this association are, in my experience, precisely the kind of owners this market suits — people who understand their local area, know who is coming into it and why, and are used to running something properly rather than leaving it to chance. If you already own investment property near the airport, or you are weighing up whether a purchase in Crawley, Horley or the surrounding villages makes sense, this is worth at least a proper look rather than a passing thought.

I would also gently say: a standard buy-to-let mortgage does not allow short-term letting, and breaching those conditions can see a lender recall the loan entirely. First-time landlords can still get into this market, but expect closer scrutiny on loan-to-value and your management plans. None of that should put you off — it simply means doing it with the right structure and the right lender from day one.

If any of this sounds close to what you are considering, or you would simply like to understand where you stand before Gatwick's next phase of work brings even more demand to our doorstep, I am always happy to have that conversation. You can read the fuller detail on the criteria and lenders we use on our website, on our short-term let and serviced accommodation mortgages page, or give us a call on 01293 541333.

Elena Leach Lime Finance Solutions lime-fs.com