Commercial Loans and Fun Blog

At the end of this blog article, I am going to give you the correct link to our free commercial loan software.  Many of you were probably caught in an endless loop on our landing page when you tried to access it.  We had a bug.  Sorry about that.  It's fixed now.  At the end of this article, I am going to give you a link that takes you directly there, without the need to fill out any form.

But first I have some good news and some bad news about the coming war.  I am sorry if I seem obsessed with the possibility of an imminent war with China; but it is a very real threat.  It is what is known as an existential threat.  Our very existence - your life and mine - is in danger.

The Good News:

In my last blog post, I outlined a line of dominoes that might have fallen if China had rolled tanks into Hong Kong -

"If Chinese tanks roll into Hong Kong, you need to start storing some long-term survival food.  After that, the dominoes may start to fall quickly - world economic sanctions on China, extreme economic distress in China, protest and riots against the rule of the Communists in China, the rallying of Chinese public opinion against America and its allies, the attack on the 7th Fleet, the invasion of Taiwan, the island hopping, the new island missile bases, the fall of Midway, the fall of Hawaii, the pinpoint destruction of our missile-making and ship-building capacity on the West Coast, and finally the capitulation and occupation of the United States."

The good news is that the massive student protests in Hong Kong have now largely been broken up.  There are fewer than 500 remaining student protestors barricaded within a university.  They will, almost certainly, be rounded up and sent to jail within the next few weeks.  

Make no mistake.  I sympathize with the protestors, but they were a very dangerous provocation.  World War I started when a lone Serbian anarchist assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, after their car made an unscheduled stop.  (See picture at the top.)  Seventeen million people died in World War I, all because of that lone assassin.   The world dogged a bullet this week.  Phew!

The Bad News:

I read this week a terrifying article entitled, In Future Wars, the U.S. Military Will Have Nowhere to Hide.  The premise that that the Chinese will be able to reach any military base in America and hit it with swarms of missiles and drones.

"Advances in the fields of aerospace, robotics, machine learning, 3D printing, and nanomaterials are creating new classes of missiles and lethal drones that can be launched discreetly, travel great distances, and hamstring massed forces—all for a fraction of the cost of traditional manned weapons."

"New hypersonic missiles, for example, combine the speed and range of ballistic missiles with the maneuverability and accuracy of cruise missiles."

"Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and underwater gliders have achieved transoceanic range."  This means the Chinese can even hit you at your ranch in Wyoming, assuming they want to spend a few hundred dollars.

"Now, however, China and Russia can send hordes of conventional missiles and expendable drones to wreak havoc on America’s networks, destroying U.S. weapons platforms while they are on base, cutting U.S. communications links, and wiping out vital fuel and ammunition dumps."

"Both countries (China and Russia) may have put advanced cruise missiles in shipping containers that could strike the future home of the B-21—Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri—from the Gulf of Mexico."  Cruise missiles in shipping containers?  They can even hit Missouri?  

Algorithms can coordinate swarms of more than 1,000 drones. Carbon 3D printers can produce 1,000 drone bodies a day for less than $10 per copy, and nanomaterials can equip drones with warheads that are twice as powerful as conventional explosives."

"Isn't that special?"  --  The  Church Lady

Enough of this depressing stuff.  Let's get back to my usual whacky and fun stuff.

Here is that link to our wonderful, free commercial loan software.  There are no forms to fill out.

You should never-ever submit a commercial loan package to a commercial real estate lender without at least one picture of the subject property.

On Tuesday, I released an important blog article about how to use C-Loans.com to create a handsome PDF of your commercial loan package.  This commercial loan origination software is 100% free.  Even if you don't find the perfect lender for your deal, you walk away from your four minutes of sweating and slaving (not!) with a professional PDF that you can easily blast out to thirty banks.

Using our new free commercial loan software, you can easily upload pictures of the property to your commercial loan application.  These pictures serve to accomplish four things:

1. Pictures show the lender that this is a serious commercial loan application.  Borrowers and brokers who are just poking around seldom bother with pictures.
   
   
2. Pictures also show that the borrower or broker is not a complete newbie.  Only an intellectually-challenged mortgage broker would ever submit a commercial loan application without at least one picture of the property.
   
   
3. If the property is attractive - or if the picture was taken on a sunny day with lots of blue sky - commercial lenders will swarm all over your deal.  We sell trust deed investments to about a thousand private investors by email, and we always include three pictures of the underlying property.  I can tell you that blue sky really sells.  Deals with pictures taken on an overcast day tend to linger unsold.  Hence the securities law term, "blue sky".
   
   
4. Pictures also greatly help to explain the property.  For example, you might have have a real estate office on the street, with several apartment units behind it, plus 60 mini-storage units in the very back.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  Here several pictures would really help.

"But George, I am a New Jersey commercial loan broker, and my commercial property is in Alabama.  How on earth can I get pictures?"

You can always ask the borrower to send you some pictures; but I would wait until the borrower has gotten the ball rolling by sending you an old financial statement, a rent roll, and his actual income and expenses on the property.

Asking for pictures right up-front might cause the borrower to procrastinate and, in the meantime, entertain competing offers.  In other words, you will lose the deal to a competitor.  I would wait to ask for pictures until after the borrower has sent you a package.  Let's make him work a little and commit to working only with you, before asking him to fetch the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.

One way you might handle this is to ask him whether he has ever sent pictures by email or text.  If he stammers and stutters, you should resolve to get your pictures another way.

The easiest way to get pictures of your commercial property is to simply google the address of the property.

Google has now photographed at least 90% of the standing commercial properties in America.  When you google the property, you can almost always find one picture of the property.  Guys, there really is no excuse - other than laziness or a desire to remain poor - for not including a picture of the property in every one of your commercial loan packages. 

Get commercial loan leads for less than the cost of two cups of coffee.

Now Google went to a lot of expensive work to photograph those 30 million commercial properties, and they would prefer if people didn't just steal their pictures.  You and I are only using the picture - not to mass market the property - but rather to just show our commercial loan to twenty of so lenders.  Using their picture is really not taking any money out of the hands of Google.

But Google doesn't make it easy to download their pictures.  You can't right-click on a picture and download it to your desktop.  Google has programmed their pictures so they cannot be downloaded.

What I discovered personally this week is that you can simply take a screen shot of the picture and save the screen shot to your desktop.  Voila!

To take a screen shot on my Mac, I simply hit Command-Shift-4 at the same time, hold down my moose, and drag the curser from the upper-left to the lower-right.  When I release my mouse, the screen shot of the property picture saves to my desktop.