Commercial Loans and Fun Blog

My son, Tom, and I just returned for the 5th Annual American Association of Private Lenders Conference in Las Vegas.  At the conference, fix and flip loans were all the rage.  Everyone was talking about them.  Several of the break-out sessions were about fix and flip financing.  There were even hedge fund managers and Wall Street investment bankers prowling the conference floor in search of hard money shops (private money mortgage brokers) to sell them more fix and flip loans.

There is a lesson to be learned here:  Give the investment community what it is seeking.  If you are not already active in fix and flip financing, you need to start focusing your efforts there.

There are a number of reasons why the investment community is so hot-to-trot to make fix and flip loans:

1. Debt buyers are desperate for yield.  Treasuries, corporate bonds, and even junk bonds offer only very low yields.
   
   
2.  Fix and flip loans are secured by real estate.  In start contrast, corporate and junk bonds do not offer this kind of collateral.
   
   
3. Wall Street has learned that a portfolio of rental homes provides an excellent source of cash flow and potential appreciation.  Its is far from the end of the world if an investor has to foreclose on  a home.
   
   
4. Homeownership rates have plummeted to levels not seen since the 1960's, thereby creating a huge demand for rental homes.  Once again, if a fix and flip lender forecloses on a newly-renovated rental home, it is far from the end of the world.
   
   
5. New home construction is far below the levels of the early 2000's, so home buyers are attracted to newly-renovated properties.

The typical fix and flip loan is a first mortgage loan to a renovator to buy and renovate a one-to-four residence and then to quickly sell it for a profit.  The typical fix and flip loan is a 12-month, interest-only loan, and it has no prepayment penalty.

Virtually all hard money lenders making fix and flip loans will require that the renovator cover at least 15% of the acquisition price of the unrenovated house.  Then most hard money lenders will lend to the renovator 100% of the funds needed to renovate the property.

Example:

John Renny plans to buy a $100,000 house and then to spend another $60,000 in renovations.  The hard money lender will require that he put down at least $15,000 on the home purchase.  The hard money lender will then lend him $85,000 of the acquisition price plus the $60,000 cost of renovation plus the loan points and sometimes even plus a four-month interest reserve.

"I applied for an SBA loan but they turned me down."  Okaaaay, but what did the second SBA lender say?  How about the third?  Today's article is pretty long, so if you don't get to the end, please remember this important lesson:

Every SBA lender is different, and just because one SBA lender turns you down, this doesn't mean that another might not still approve your deal.  By using C-Loans.com to  apply for your SBA loan (the orange button below), you can quickly shift your SBA loan application to six more of our 218 different SBA lenders. 

A lot of commercial mortgage borrowers think that the SBA is the lender, and therefore if the SBA turns them down that they are toast.  The SBA does not make commercial loans.  It only insures a part of the loan.  The actual lender is the bank making the loan.

Example:

Bank of Wyoming makes a $900,000 new SBA loan to renovate a successful but aging truck stop on I-25.  Because the business was an existing one, rather than a start-up, the borrower was able to qualify for an SBA loan of 90% loan-to-value.  Had the business been a start-up, the maximum loan-to-value ratio would have been limited to just 70%.

Now the Small Business Administration is not going to guarantee the entire $900,000 loan.  The SBA wisely demands that the bank have some skin in the game.  The general rule is that the SBA will only guarantee between 50% and 85% of the loan made by Bank of Wyoming, depending on the SBA program (7a versus 504) used and other factors. 

For the sake of this example, let's assume that the SBA agrees to guarantee 70% of the $900,000 truck stop loan made by Bank of Wyoming.  This means that Bank of Wyoming has 30% of $900,000 at risk in this loan or $270,000.  Requiring the bank to have some skin in the game helps to makes sure that banks don't make SBA loans willy-nilly.

In real life, Bank of Wyoming has less than $270,000 at risk.  The bank can sell off the insured portion for a substantial premium.  The insured portion is 70% of $900,000 or $630,000.  Now a premium is the amount that a loan buyer or a bond buyer will pay in excess of the face value of the note.

In this case, lets suppose that Bank of Wyoming can sell off in the secondary market the insured portion of this truck stop loan at a premium of 10%.  Why would bond buyer pay a 10% premium?  An SBA loan yields 2.75% over Prime.  Since Prime is 4.25% today, that's a whopping government-guaranteed yield of 7%.  Thirty-year Treasuries today are only yielding about 2.8%.

Now a 10% premium on $630,000 (the insured portion of our $900,000 loan) is a whopping $63,000!  Therefore Bank of Wyoming doesn't really have $270,000 at risk in the deal but it quickly sells off the insured portion for a $63,000 premium.  Now the bank has only $207,000 at risk in our $900,000 truck stop loan.

In doing my research for this article, I discovered that SBA lenders earn a handsome loan servicing fee of 1% per year.  Therefore the bond buyers are actually only netting 6% after loan servicing fees, but they are still quite happy to pay a 10% premium.  Heavens, I sure love-love-love loan servicing fees.  Every month my own hard money shop enjoys $90,000 in loan servicing fees, whether we close a new loan that month or not.

Okay, we are closing in on the point of today's article.  It is quite possible that the Bank of Wyoming was the third Wyoming SBA lender to look at this deal.  The first two lenders might have turned down the deal because of the fuel tanks or because the deal depended on fuel sales increasing after the renoavtion.  The deal was too speculative in the eyes of the first two banks to look at the deal.

In stark contrast, the President of Bank of Wyoming loved the deal because his dad had owned a trucking company, and his dad had complained for years that this section of I-25 desperately needed a truck stop.  

Remember, despite the large premium paid for SBA loans in the secondary market, Bank of Wyoming still had some serious skin in the game - $207,000.  Therefore the approval of any SBA loan is NOT guaranteed.  It depends on whether or not the bank reviewing the deal is willing to put a ton of their own dough at risk.

If you are trying to get your SBA loan approved, be sure to submit it through C-Loans.com to our 218 SBA lenders.  If one our SBA lenders turns you down, you'll be invited to submit the same application to six more SBA lenders, with no additional paperwork on your part!  One, short SBA loan app works for all 218 of our SBA lenders.  Start by using the orange button below.

Have you guys ever heard of a smartphone app called TuneIn.com?  I stumbled across the app recently, and I am enjoying it so much that I thought I'd share it with you.  I am not getting paid for this article, ha-ha.  I am simply sharing my wonderful experience with TuneIn.com because you guys are my buddies.  I teach my loan officers to write to their contacts, not as some stuffy, boring "professional", but rather as if they were buddies sharing a beer at the end of the day - so pop open a brew and prepare to be wowed.

I am a huge Notre Dame football fan, but my daughter plays soccer for Earlham College, and the Saturday games always start about the same time.  Therefore I obviously can't watch the Notre Dame game on T.V.  But what about radio?  Couldn't I listen to the game?  Well, if my daughter was playing her soccer games in Northern Indiana, and if I could find an old fashioned transistor radio, I might be able to pick the game broadcasting out of a local radio station in South Bend.  Unfortunately Jordi plays her games in Ohio and Eastern Indiana.  Hmmm.  Stay with me, folks.  This gets good.

So I googled "Notre Dame football radio and discovered that I could stream an audio version of the games using a smartphone app called TuneIn.com.  The premium service is only $99 per year, so I bit the bullet, paid the $99 annual fee, and thoroughly enjoyed my Notre Dame games.  You can listen to 50 or 60 different college football games using TuneIn.com, including the Alabama Crimson Tide games, the Georgia Bulldogs games, the Ohio State Buckeyes games, the Clemson Tigers games, etc.

But wait, there's more!  You can also listen to every NFL football game, every NBA basketball game, and every Major League Baseball game.  Wow.  All for just $99 per year.

Now I am a huge audiobook fan, and rather than listen to my music tunes or to music on a local radio station, I am constantly listening to historical fiction audiobooks.  I am a big fan of Napoleonic War naval yarns, like the Horatio Hornblower series.  The problem is that my monthly bill at Audible.com is on the order of $60.  Ouch!

So I was playing around with TuneIn.com and discovered that they also offer free audiobooks!  Right now I am listening to Bill O'Reilly's (the former anchorman on Fox News) smash hit, Killing England, about the Revolutionary War.  It's a fascinating yarn, with exciting, vivid battle scenes, including Indians scalping British redcoats while they were still alive.  Yikes.  After that I am going to listen to Origin by Dan Brown (DaVinci Codes) and then The Cuban Affair by Nelson DeMille (The General's Daughter).

But wait, if you order now... haha, remember I'm not getting paid for this.  I am just a thrilled user of TuneIn.  The app also offers all of the major news shows on radio, like CNN, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News, etc.

Lastly TuneIn offers free podcasts.  Podcasts are pre-recorded audio shows of 30 minutes to 10 hours in length.  I was personally thrilled to note that TuneIn.com offers scores of history podcasts; but if you are a politics junkie or an economics junkie, you will swim in a warm pool of scores and scores of such podcasts.

When you write to your buddies and contacts, you do NOT always have to talk about business.  The idea is to get in front of them and reward them with fun or interesting stuff if they read your marketing piece.

I have been marketing for commercial loans for 37 years, and the most successful marketing piece that I ever wrote was entitled, The Ebola Virus Is Going to Kill Us All.  That piece tells the true story of The Hot Zone, where the Ebola virus mutated in a lab in Restin, Virginia in 1989 to become transmissible by air!  Hellooo?  You no longer have to touch the blood.  You just had to breath the same air as the sick person to become infected with Ebola.  The infected person didn't even need to cough on you.  Apes in totally separate rooms became sick and died.

That marketing piece generated more commercial loan leads for Blackburne & Sons than any other piece in 37 years, and nowhere in the marketing piece did I even mention commercial loans.  As for that mutated strain of Ebola, it turned out that the same genetic mutation that had made it transmissble by air also made it harmless to humans - even though it had spread all throughout the lab, and it had killed 30 different apes and monkeys.

That's it for today.  Did any of you note that Notre Dame, despite losing the first game of the season, has climbed to #3 in the college football playoff rankings?  Go Irish!

Let's suppose that you hear that Rick Savoy is working as a commercial real estate loan officer at Mason Bank, and he is closing a lot of commercial loans.  The problem is that you don't know his email address, and he seems a little weird about giving it out to some new commercial mortgage broker.  Bankers tend to hate unsolicited email and hence his reluctance.

The first thing you should do is to Google his bank.  You would search for "Mason Bank".  Banks are very, very good at hiding their commercial real estate loan officers so they never make commercial loans (pretty stupid, huh?).  Therefore you almost certainly will NOT find Steve the Wonder Loan Officer listed on their website.

Sombody help me!

But what you will find is the URL of the bank.  Maybe the URL of the bank is MasonBankTexas.  For the sake of simplicity, we'll assume the URL is just MasonBank.com.  By the way, I just made up the name of Mason Bank for purposes of writing this commercial loan training lesson, but there actually is a Mason Bank in Texas.  Ha-ha! 

Really, sombody help me!

Then, in order to find his actual email address address, simply send him an email with a subject line:  Three Quick Questions About Your Commercial Loans.  Then you address your email to -

rsavoy@masonbank.com

or

rick.savoy@masonbank.com

There seems to be a convention in banking to use either the first letter of his first name, followed by his last name OR the first name dot last name.  Ninety-five percent of the time one of these two email addresses will work.  You send your email to both email addresses, and the one that does not bounce is his real email address.  Voila!

Well, this isn't actually awful.

I keep reminding you guys that you need to reach out to every banker within 15 miles of your office and start soliciting him for his turndowns.  Remember, the first place that most borrowers call when looking for a commercial loan is their own bank.  And since most bankers are sleepy fellows, the typical commercial real estate loan officer working for a bank turns down five to ten commercial loan requests every week.  The loan is too small, too big, too far away, or the wrong type of property.  You want those turndowns!

 The baby is clearly digging it.

Don't just get one commercial loan officer per bank.  Get three, four, or five of them.  After all, EACH commercial loan officer turns down five to ten commercial loan applications per month.

If the email address works, ask for his minimum and maximum commercial loans, lending area, and whether or not he makes SBA loans.  Always remember that virtually all 6,799 commercial banks in America make the same kind of commwercial loans at pretty much the same interest rate.  Bankers are herd animals.  Moooo.  My kingdom for a capitalistic banker!

Everybody needs to spoon a little.

This brings up another point.  If commercial loan officer Suzie Smith summarily turns down your commercial loan request, don't give up on that bank - especially if the bank is located close to the subject property.  Try presenting your commercial loan to John Jones at the same bank.  Remember, banks are far more likely to approve a commercial loan if the property is located close to one of their branches.

But this is just plain wrong.

Once upon a time, Steve Coach owned a large bus line company, Coach's Coaches.  His company owned 1,200 semi-luxury coaches that they hired out for various tours and sporting events.  Business was good for many years, but a series of unfortunate decisions left the bus line deeply in debt and with only 300 buses fit for use.  Steve had no choice but to put his 30-year-old company into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

His creditors consisted of a $1,000,000 first mortgage on his bus storage and repair facility from his bank, a $6,000,000 equipment loan on his 1,200 buses, and another $2 million in various payables, including a seriously-delinquent fuel bill of $800,000.  No fuel company in the area would even sell him fuel, except of a cash basis.

Everyone knows that when a personal property lender, the lender who loaned on the buses, executes on his collateral, he will be lucky to get forty cents on the dollar.  By the way, a real estate lender forecloses on its collateral.  A personal property lender executes on its collateral; i.e., seizes the collateral, advertises its sale, and then liquidates it.

When a lender sells a property, it is called liquidating; i.e., turning an illiquid asset into liquid money.  One final review of my terminology:  Real estate is land and everything that is (permanently) attached to the land.  Every other asset that is not land is personal property.

The interesting thing about Coach's Coaches, however, is that there is a huge demand for the company's buses.  Sports teams and travel agencies are calling every day, desperate for a company to rent them a bus and driver.  Steve's main problem is that unfortunately 900 of his buses need essential repairs before they can be used, but Steve just doesn't have the dough to fix them.  His local bank, which has the first mortgage on his special use facility, and the specialty finance company that has a chattel mortgage on all of Steve's buses don't dispute this essential fact.  If Steve had $2 million to repair his buses and regain his trade credit, he could soon bring current, and eventually pay off, all of his creditors.

By the way, personal property is also called chattel, just like men think of their wives as chattel.  (Just kidding, ladies!!!  Ouch-ouch-ouch!  Ha-ha.)  In the old days, a security lien on chattel was called a Chattel Mortgage.  We don't use these terms anymore.  We use such newer terms and documents as Security Agreements and Financing Statements; but sometimes its easier just to think of just real estate mortgages and chattel mortgages.

Therefore Steve's attorney submits a Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization to the bankruptcy court that calls for $2 million in additional financing from a new debtor-in-possession (DIP) lender so that Steve can fix his buses and regain his good trade credit; i.e., pay his delinquent fuel and engine parts bills.  Under the plan, the local bank will subordinate its first mortgage and the specialty finance company will subordinate its first chattel mortgage on the coaches as collateral for the new DIP financing. 

Why is a commercial loan to a debtor in bankruptcy called debtor-in-possession financing?  When a borrower or company is hopeless in debt, the bankruptcy is called a Chapter 7 bankruptcy.  Title to the assets (temporary ownership) is transferred to a trustee, who marshals the assets (gathers them all together) and then sells them off to pay the creditors.  In 90% of the cases, the unsecured creditors get completely wiped out.

Some debtors, however, are NOT hopelessly in debt.  Their companies can be saved, if only they are given a little time to reorganize their assets.  In cases like this, the debtor files a Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy.  In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, title to the assets is NOT transferred to some trustee to sell.  Instead, title to the assets remains in the name of the debtor.  He remains in physical possession of the assets.  He is called a debtor-in-possession.  Hence the term, debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing.

In this case, the story ended well for all concerned.  Steve repaired his trucks and paid off his $2 million DIP loan from Blackburne & Sons within two years.  He eventually brought his bank first mortgage and his bus loan current, and he is still operating today.

I keep telling you guys that the real money in commercial mortgage finance is in loan servicing fees.  Blackburne & Sons is up to almost $90,000 per month for servicing just 200 hard money loans.  The easiest way to become a loan servicer is to become a hard money lender.  Raising money is sooo easy these days.

First of all, let's get our terminology correct.  A commercial broker is NOT a commercial loan broker.  A commercial broker is a commercial real estate broker - a guy who helps investors buy, sell, and lease out commercial properties.  You see their signs on commercial buildings all over town.

A second thing is that, by custom, sales agents working for commercial real estate brokers call themselves "commercial brokers", even though they are not brokers themselves and the brokerage license is held by their boss.  It's just the custom and practice in the industry.

Now, in a recent blog article, I wrote that commercial loan brokers should advertise heavily to bankers for their turndowns.  In fact, I said that sixty percent of the contacts on a commercial mortgage broker's mailing list should be bankers.  Why?  Because the first place that most borrowers call when seeking a new commercial loan is their own bank.  Since the typical commercial estate loan officer working for a bank is a sleepy, fifty-year-old guy on salary - a guy who often has little appetite to make more commercial loans - the typical bank loan officer turns down a TON of commercial loan applicants.  The loan is too big, too small, too far away, or the wrong type of property.

By the way, if you should meet a banker making commercial loans, be sure to do a swap with me and get a fee commercial mortgage marketing course or a free list of 750 commercial lenders.  And guys, this is an Honor System swap, so please don't cheat.  The banker has to work for a FDIC-insured bank or a NCUSIF-insured credit union.  A bunch of uneducated guys have inserted their own names, when they are just commercial loan agents.  Grrrrr.  C'mon, guys, its an Honor System. Honesty applies to people of all colors and creeds.

Are you an ambitious, new commercial mortgage broker with a hunger to learn?  Get me seven legitimate bankers, and I'll send you your choice of my nine-hour commercial mortgage brokerage course, my course on becoming a hard money broker, or my wonderful practice course for commercial mortgage brokers with with one to three years of experience.  This is a special deal for the first five guys only.  Please send your lists to george@blackburne.com.

Okay, now back to commercial brokers.  The typical commercial broker has as his clients thirty or more commercial real estate investors.  Many of these investors own multiple commercial properties.  The good news for commercial loan brokers is that most commercial loans have a balloon coming due every five to ten years.  This means that the typical commercial broker will have several investor clients in need of a commercial refinance every year.  If you cultivate a relationship with this commercial broker, he should be good for several loans every year.  Feel free to pay your commercial brokers a referral fee.  Referral fees on commercial loans are perfectly legal.

Now we have finally reached the biggest point of today's training article.  Most successful commercial brokers own commercial property themselves.  When you market to them for their referrals, they will sometimes need a commercial loan of their own.  It's a two-for-one special.

My hard money commercial mortgage company, Blackburne & Sons, was considering a nice hard money commercial loan on a cannabis growing facility in Washington State, where properly licensed facilities are now legally allow to grow it and sell pot for recreational use.

But a big problem has arisen.  Every title company in the state is now refusing to issue title insurance, for fear of running afoul of Federal law, which prohibits the sale and use of marijuana.  If we can't get title insurance, we can't make the loan.

What makes me belly-laugh is that, while I doing research for this short article, I ran across a product now being sold on Amazon.com.  It's a one-plant, discrete growing vessel for pot.  It's a mere $109, and its eligible for free, two-day shipping if you belong to Amazon Prime.  Ha-ha!  In defense of Amazon, one could grow parsley in your closet with this device.

If any of you guys have a solution to my problem, please write to me at george@blackburne.com. 

Have you ever gone snow skiing and rented for your family a gorgeous ski chalet near the slopes for a week?  What about the beach or the shore of some big, beautiful lake?  Did you ever rent a big, gorgeous home on the water for a week?

Often these ski chalets and waterfront homes are of fairly new construction, and they were built with five, six, and sometimes even seven bedrooms.  These giant homes are perfect for extended families, say, three brothers, their wives, and their children.  This is not just a happy coincidence.  These homes were built exactly for this use - to be rented out on a weekly basis to extended families.

Sometimes these gorgeous vacation mansions are owned by a single, filthy-rich guy.  I don't even know the guy, but I hate him.  I'm so jealous.  Ha-ha!

Many times, however, these vacation mansions are owned by four to ten families in a concept known as fractional ownership.  Each family will own, say, a one-eighth of the mansion, giving them the right to six or seven weeks of the year in which to live in the property.

In real life, the family owning one-eighth of the property will usually only stay in the property for one or two weeks per year.  The rest of the unused weeks owned by the eight families will all be rented out to vacationing families, typically a week at a time.

Essentially these vacation mansions will be run as hotel units - rented out and cleaned weekly by a management company originally selected by the developer-sponsor of the of the fractional vacation mansions.  The developer-sponsor will often develop a half-dozen to a dozen similar properties nearby, giving him enough fractional ownership units to sell to justify a decent-sized marketing budget, much like a large timeshare project.  In plain English, there may be ten of these beautiful vacation mansions right next to each other, all managed by the same management company.

Now do you remember that filthy-rich guy that I hated?  He owned this entire vacation mansion by himself, so he would have no problem getting the property financed as a second home or as a rental home.  Remember, home loan rates are always much lower than commercial loan rates, so he wants this property characterized by his lender as a home, not as a commercial property.  He wants a garden-variety conventional home loan, NOT a commercial loan.

But to those eight families who own their vacation mansion as fractional ownership units, financing may prove to be problematic.  First of all, each of them does not own the entire property by himself.  Unless all eight families miraculously agreed that they wanted to finance the property, they would never be able to get a conventional loan.  And who wants to guaranty a $1.8 million loan when he only owns 1/8th of the property???  The other owners could easily walk away in a financial pinch.

Secondly, the property is essentially a tiny hotel, with tenants coming and going every week.  Such a property would be viewed as a nightmare by most banks considering the property as a commercial loan.  Yikes!

Is it therefore possible to even get a loan on a fractional ownership unit?  Blackburne & Sons, my own private money lending company, will make a 15-year fully-amortized commercial loan on fractional ownership interests.  Our loans have no prepayment penalty.  We have done several such loans, and they have performed well.

Are you ready for a commercial loan right now?  You can't close your deal until you actually apply for it.

I started out writing these commercial real estate finance training (CREF) articles to train my sons and my staff in the business.  Now over 5,200 commercial real estate professionals follow this blog.  And why not?  It's free training in commercial real estate finance, and I try to write two articles per week.

Before I get into how to meet bankers, let me first explain why you want to meet bankers.

The first thing that most borrowers do to get a commercial loan is to call the commercial real estate loan officer working at their own bank.  Underwriting a commercial real estate loan is fairly sophisticated, so the profile of a typical bank commercial loan officer is a sleepy, white male between 48 and 60-years-old.  Unfortunately this guy (or lady) is not usually on commission.  As a result, a great many of these mature, salaried, commercial loan officers really don't care if they make another commercial real estate loan or not.

I think that its a mistake that banks don't give their commercial loan officers more of a financial incentive to close commercial loans. Just about every bank in America would benefit from a few more good, commercial real estate loans in its portfolio. After all, commercial real estate loans are among the most profitable loans that a bank can make. But I've said it before, "Banks are lousy capitalists."

So why do you want to meet bankers? If you are commercial real estate investor, and you are thrifty by nature, you may not want to pay some commercial mortgage broker a one-point fee to find you a bank willing to make you a commercial loan. You will want your own Rolodex of six to ten bankers located close to your income property. Remember, you can't just rely on your own bank.

Bankers are notoriously moody and unpredictable when it comes to commercial real estate lending. One moment they love self storage loans, and the next moment, usually after a big loss, they wouldn't touch a self storage loan with a ten-foot pole. One moment the bank is as tight as a drum, and the next moment the bank will make a commercial loan on a so-so property to a recent bankrupt, all because the bank got a big commercial loan payoff, and they are flush with cash. As an income property investor, you need multiple (6-10) bankers to whom to offer your deal.

If you are a commercial mortgage broker, you want bank turn-downs. Bankers get first crack at most commercial real estate loans, and they turn down the vast majority of their commercial loan applicants. Remember, the typical bank loan officer is not on commission, so he has little incentive to say yes. Bankers are therefore the absolute, very best source of referrals. If your mailing list (email or snail mail) does not consist of 60% bankers, you have some work to do.

Now before I explain how to find bankers, let me give you a quick refresher on where to find bankers.  A bank is three-times more likely to approve a commercial loan if the property is located close to one of its branches.  This lesson alone is worth the price of today's admission.  A bank is three-time more likely to approve a commercial loan if the property is located close to one of its branches.

Therefore you want to meet all of the bankers located close to your commercial mortgage brokerage office or close to your income property.  Its easy to find nearby bankers.  Simply go to maps.google.com.  In the upper-left-hand corner, you will type in the address of your office or your commercial property.  Lastly, click on the "Nearby" icon and then type, "banks."  Voila!  You have just identitified every bank located close to your office or the commercial property that you are trying to finance.  Good stuff, huh?

Now, finally, we will explain how to find bankers.  Simply call up the nearby bank branch that you identified using Google.  Be sure to ask the receptionist for a loan officer who handles commercial real estate loans.  If you just ask for a commercial loan officer, you might get the wrong guy.  Normally there will be one commercial real estate loan officer, usually working out of a different branch, who handles all of the commercial real estate loan requests for five or six branches.

Once you reach the guy, make sure that the first words out of your mouth are the following, "Hi, Bob.  My name is John Smith, a commercial mortgage broker (or a commercial real estate investor).  Did I catch you at a good time?"  Those eight words are the keys to the kingdom.

Unless you have a specific deal to present, you really only need to know a few things:

1.  Minumum loan?

2. Maximum loan?

3. Lending area?

4.  Do you make SBA loans or USDA loans?

Why don't you need to know any more?  Because banks all quote pretty much the same commercial loan.

Perhaps the most important thing to retrieve from a new banker is his email address.  Bankers can sometimes be freaky-deaky about giving out their email address because they get a ton of unsolicited email.  The way I like to handle it - at the very end - is to ask, "If I have a commercial loan that I want to show to you, to what email address should I send it?"  That seems to work for me.  Asking the question at the end seems to imply that the entire seven-minute phone call will have been wasted if the banker doesn't give up his email address.

Did you learn something today?  This is how I teach.  I use a ton of humor, and I try to weave in lots of verbal proof stories - real life stories that prove a point.  I strongly encourage you to order this course about how to become a commercial mortgage broker.  Trever Cole Commercial - who just closed their 50th loan for C-Loans, Inc. this month - uses this video course to train all of their new commercial loan officers.

Nobody ever listens to me, but the real money in commercial real estate finance is in loan servicing fees. My little eleven-person commercial hard money firm now brings in over $83,000 per month, whether we close any new loans that month or not. When Cisca and I were first married, we dreamt of the day when our loan servicing income would exceed $2,000 per month. Then our mortgage and utilities would always be paid. Today this number is $83,333 per month. The real money in commercial real estate finance is in loan servicing fees.

This is your best deal.

When we physically shop these days, there are apparently two different ways to shop for physical goods that you can take home immediately, as opposed to waiting for Amazon Prime to deliver them.  The first way to physically shop is that you can go to some big box store, walk the acres of concrete flooring, and buy your stuff quite cheaply.  

But there is now an alternate way to shop, where perhaps you pay a little more, but the whole outing becomes an enjoyable and stimulating experience.  This is called experience-based retail.  I stole the following paragraph from an interesting article on the subject:

"A customer’s shopping experience is affected by a myriad of factors, but we would place the greatest emphasis on a retailer’s ability to offer unique products and deliver a high level of customer service. Apple’s stylish devices are sold by knowledgeable staff able to help customers navigate sometimes complicated electronics, and their numbers ensure that service is rapid. Sales staff at lululemon athletica offer personalized and attentive service to consumers of the store’s versatile athletic apparel, while the friendly and eccentric staff of Trader Joe’s keep check-out lines flowing and add as much character to the aisles as the grocer’s self branded offerings. Upscale department stores like Nordstrom’s and Bloomingdales offer free personal shopping services to all consumers, and fellow mall tenant Lush, a seller of organically produced cosmetics, offers private events and makeup consultations."

Millennials actually spend materially more money on "shopping experiences" than they do on plain 'ole shopping.  For Millennials, the experience-to-stuff ratio (yes, there actually is such a ratio!) is 1.14.  For Baby Boomers and Generation Y, that ratio is closer to just 1.0.

Experience-based retailers can be found in malls and lifestyle centers, and in terms of retail success, such retail centers are far more successful these days than retailers in strip centers or power centers.  Do you remember what a lifestyle center is?  Think of a lifestyle center as a mall for fat people who are too lazy to walk an enclosed mall.  Ha-ha!  You can drive right up to each store.  Most lifestyle centers also enjoy several popular restaurants that add importantly to the experience.

I used the term "power center" above.  A power center is a huge shopping center consisting of six to twelve big box retail stores.  Examples of big box retailers include Abercrombie & Fitch, Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, Costco, Dicks Sporting Goods, Dollar Tree, GAP, Home Depot, JC Penney, Kohls, Lowes, Macys, Michaels, Nordstrom, Office Depot, Office Max, Old Navy, 
Rite Aid, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sears, Staples, Target, Trader Joes, Walgreens, and Wal-Mart.

Don't forget, however, that power centers are not doing nearly as well as the experience-based retailers found in malls and lifestyle centers.  As I was compiling the above list of big box retailers, I had to delete one-third of the names because the companies had already gone bankrupt.   

Now if you own a shopping center, you definitely want more experience-based retailers in your center.  Experience-based retailers bring in far more money per square foot than normal retailers, so such stores can afford a higher rent.  In addition, they are less likely to go bankrupt, like so many of the big box retailers (think: Toys R Us.).  

"The attractiveness of malls and lifestyle centers is further compounded by their defensive positioning against e-commerce. The experienced based nature of the goods and services their tenants offer are extremely difficult to replicate online, and thus their competitive advantages over other brick-and-mortar retailers transfer to online retailers as well. Dining establishments lack online competition and live entertainment by its very nature cannot be replicated digitally, nor can the ability to meld shopping, dining, and entertainment into a series of cohesive and related experiences."

Today we learned about experience-based retail, lifestyle centers, and power centers.  I write these training articles to train my sons and my staff in commercial real estate finance.  By subscribing to this blog, you can effectively audit these training classes for free.