Fairfield Financial Services, Inc. - Private Money Loans, Lending & Borrowing

Submiting loans

How to read an appraisal

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

Clay Sparkman This article was originally published, on this blog, on 8/9/10. 2 ½ years later, I feel it is worthy to be modified slightly and published again. Whatever you do in the real estate business, I highly recommend that you give this post a good read. The most important thing that you must understand […]

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What exactly do you want me to do for you?

Monday, March 11th, 2013

Clay Sparkman When evaluating loan requests, this is the fundamental question:  what exactly do you want me to do for you? It is impossible to count the number of times that I have receive loan packets or proposals that didn’t include a loan summary or any clear description of the request.  The process of evaluating […]

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Private Money FAQ

Monday, January 7th, 2013

Clay Sparkman I try to update and publish this FAQ every once in awhile, as it is a handy guide to better understanding the market for private money loans in general–and more particularly, how we operate here at FFS, by way of example. Private money is often misunderstood. Many industry professionals know very little about […]

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The kinds of things we are doing – an example

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Clay Sparkman From time to time, I like to publish the prospectus for a loan that we have placed. I do this for two reasons. One: so you can get an idea of the kinds of loans that we do, and two: so you can see how a nice tight loan presentation should look. The […]

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Getting high quality loan submissions that fit your programs via Lendicom

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Clay Sparkman If you are a broker or borrower of real estate secured commercial money, Lendicom may be of particular interest to you. This 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. Presently we have a database […]

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A private money loan prospectus – Hood Canal, Washington

Monday, September 24th, 2012

Clay Sparkman (In October of 2011, I posted this item on my Private Money Investor blog. I thought it might be useful to brokers as well—the idea being so that you may (a) see how we present loans to our internal working investors, (b) gain perspective on our entire private money loan process, from start […]

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The Doc List

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Clay Sparkman On several occasions, I’ve discussed the importance of a good loan summary. A good loan summary is fairly crucial, as you approach us with a new loan request, as it speeds up the approval process (or denial) to a surprisingly significant degree. Given that, it seems logical to discuss how to speed up […]

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No yesterday might mean Yes today

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

Clay Sparkman Private lending is a constantly changing business. The factors that drive the types of loans that we can do are as varied as the structure of the deals themselves. That’s why, despite the fact that we may have turned something down in the past, it never hurts to ask again. We are based […]

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More time left for you

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Clay Sparkman As I’m sure most of you will agree, it takes more contacts to get a loan done these days. Lenders are more selective and an increased number of borrowers are turning to hard money. More borrowers are talking to brokers, and then brokers have to talk to more lenders to find funding. The […]

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Make your borrower's projects and submissions More robust

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Clay Sparkman In the current climate, it’s getting harder than ever to impress potential lenders with your client’s loan scenarios. It may be that times have changed permanently and that it will be years before lenders return to their pre-2007 comfort level. Until then I thought I would make some suggestions to help you to […]

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