Very big house in the country .. 12%

I'm going to expand on what ramblin rose has said.

Loans are 'renewed' at FS only if the borrower pays the accrued interest (to lenders) and fees (to FS) on the maturing loan.  If they can't/don't then -- except for the few cases where FS have granted the borrower a short extension -- the loan is declared to be in default and the security is sold to repay the lenders. 

In the case of relatively small loans -- say less than £4k -- the fees seem to be greater than the interest, so six months' worth might be something in the order of 15-25% of the amount borrowed.  Because the loans are small, the amounts required to renew a loan might be manageable by the borrower, and that's what happens.

The situation would be very different for a substantial bridging loan.  If the borrower of the current bridging loan were to want to renew it, they would have to come up with something in excess of £20k, and that might not be easy.

The good news is that the borrower in this case has a huge incentive not to default, because if they did and the property were to be sold at auction in a foreclosure sale the price achieved likely would be considerably below the 'value' put on it by the estate agent and the borrower would lose a substantial amount of their equity.  This is quite a contrast with the situation of 70% LTV jewellery loans where most of the borrower's equity would be eaten up to pay the accrued interest and fees, so they're unlikely to lose much if they default FS and sell the security.

Finally, echoing what others have said, I'd really appreciate it if fundingsecure would give us a little more info here.  Do they expect the further tranches of this loan to be funded before or after this tranche goes live around the end of November?  Is the borrower taking this loan so that they can do something to the property development-wise or for a completely different purpose?  If the latter, we don't need to know any more than that.  Is the interest on the loan being retained at drawdown as AC and SS often do?

What the estate agent actually wrote was...
Perhaps I'm being generous with my interpretation, but it looks to me like the agent actually was at the property the week before writing the letter (dated 06/Jun/14) and has seen the house before.  And depending on the purpose of the Apr.'11 visit, he may have good notes to rely on.

And maybe he did get a cuppa -- in the garden! 

As for whether a full valuation report is necessary, doesn't it depend on the size of the loan being requested?  If the borrower were trying to obtain the largest loan they could, and the LTV was going to be 70+%, then a valuation would be appropriate.  But in a case like this, where the proposed loan would have a LTV of more like 35%, I wouldn't have thought a valuation would be necessary.  After all, how far wrong could the £800k 'marketing advice' estimate be?  Even if it turned out to be double what actually could be achieved in a foreclosure 'fire sale' there should be enough proceeds to repay the £275k loan plus accrued interest, fees, and costs.  Or am I being too optimistic?

Think though this request is continuously falling on deaf ears.

I'm afraid fundingsecure have become rather unresponsive on the forum lately.  This issue has been raised repeatedly here, and FS haven't even bothered to reply.  At least six months ago they said they were working on a secondary market, but they've said absolutely nothing since.  If they want to change their position, they're entitled to, but I do think they owe us the courtesy of telling us that they have done that.

Now that FS seem to be bringing larger loans to the platform they've offered shadow bidding to their deeper-pocketed investors.  That's a positive move, but it seems to be a completely manual process.  I suppose that's not a problem at the moment, but it's not exactly scalable.  And is an investor supposed to keep their own records of how many shadow bids they have placed and when they are likely to be called?  Surely they shouldn't have to be doing that -- that's something the system should be telling them.