Lenders

Every lender is not a bank, and every bank is not the same lender. The community bank that underwrites you as a person, the conduit that will never meet you and sells your loan to bondholders the week it closes, the government program that will not lend to you at all unless your business occupies the building, the private lender who funds in five days at a price to match. They lend against the same property on terms that have almost nothing in common, and the borrower who walks into the wrong door spends months learning why the answer was no.

Lenders are not interchangeable. Each one is built for a specific borrower, a specific asset, and a specific risk, and the fastest way to a yes is knowing which door is yours.

This section is the map of who lends. One page per lender type: what they actually finance, how they underwrite, what they demand, what they cost, and the tell that says you are at the right one. It starts with the banks and the SBA programs, the relationship and government lenders most owners meet first, and it names the single question that routes you between them, which is whether your business will occupy the property or simply own it.

Two things to hold across every page. Nothing here is a referral to a lender; it is a map, and the introduction, if you want one, is a conversation. And the lender’s identity decides more than the rate. It decides the guaranty you sign, whether your loan has a balloon, whether you can prepay, and who holds your cash when things go wrong. Those terms are taught once, in the pages on the loan’s terms, and every lender page here links to them.

The pages are below, in four families. The banks and the SBA programs, the relationship and government lenders most owners meet first. The agency and HUD programs, the cheapest long-term nonrecourse money in existence, which start at five units. The institutional and structured tier, life companies, CMBS, bridge lenders, and the mezzanine lender whose collateral is your LLC. And the alternative tier, DSCR, hard money, seller financing, C-PACE, and the lenders that reach an operating company’s assets. One product sits below all of them and gets no page here, because it is a warning rather than a lender: the merchant cash advance.