Clay Sparkman
This item was originally posted on this site on 4/30/10. I had a sense that it might be relevant once again, and so I have rewritten it slightly and am posting here again. I hope you find it useful.
Most private money investors choose to work with brokers. However it is a decision that each private money investor must make independently and with great care—to use or not to use a broker.
The essence of the matter I think is this. If you want what amounts to more or less a full-time job (and some investors certainly do) then you may well decide to go it alone (without a broker), and essentially setup your own office geared toward managing the various aspects of investing in private money loans and hard money loans secured by trust deeds and real property (including promotion, underwriting, risk assessment, loan servicing, and workout/recovery).
If you don’t want a full-time job (or even a part-time one) and are interested primarily in hands-on investing (in my opinion there is no such thing as hands-off investing in this niche), then you will want to shop for and eventually select a qualified broker to “partner up” with.
This post will be primarily of use to the former type of investor–as the first step in the process of placing trust deed secured loans is finding quality borrowers that meet your criteria. This is not an easy thing. At Fairfield, we receive about 150 loan requests per month these days, and of those, we end up pursuing 6-8 in a typical month. On average maybe five of those will survive our underwriting process, be presented to one or more of our investors, and ultimately be closed through escrow and thus actualized as an investment.
If you are faced with this challenge, a web based tool known as Lendicom.com may be of interest to you. The site is geared toward commercial lending, and allows borrowers and brokers to sign up and submit specific loan proposals to lenders who have also signed up online. The lenders may be institutional or they may be singular individual investors.
If you are a hard money lender looking directly for commercial loans to fund, you may sign up as a lender and create an account that allows you to specify detailed criteria regarding the specific types of loans that you would be interested in and your particular criteria. Then from time to time borrower proposals that meet your criteria will be submitted to you. You may choose to either decline or pursue these proposals. If you choose to pursue a proposal, then you are given contact information in exchange for a small fee. Ultimately if you place a loan which came to you through Lendicom, you pay 25 basis points to Lendicom (or a quarter of a point). Otherwise you pay nothing for the use of this service.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am an officer and a part owner of the company that offers this site. So consider me biased.
Still, I recommend that you check it out at the link below and see what you think.
— Clay (clay@privatemoneysource.com, 503-476-2909 or 800-971-1858)
Clay is Vice President of Fairfield Financial, a primary source for private money loans since 1964. Fairfield works with a broad range of private money investors, in a broker capacity, finding, underwriting, presenting, closing, servicing, and when necessary, assisting in the workout of difficult loans.
Tags: hard money investing, hard money lending, hard money loans, investing, loan underwriting, private money investing, private money lending, private money loans, trust deed investing, trust deed lending, trust deed loans, web resources
I know how hard it is to find a trusted lender but it more hard to find a qualified borrower who true to his word of paying the loan back regularly and on time. I think it is more an advantage if you lend to someone you already know because you know his qualities and his properties and with those you are a bit sure that he is able to pay you back and follow what you’ve agreed upon.
Clark,
No question about it. If I had the option, I would only make loans to people that had proven themselves to me through a high level of performance on past loans and projects.
Thanks,
Clay