The process for brokers to find and request a loan from private mortgage lenders can be very inefficient and exhausting, but it doesn’t have to be. In this guide, we’ll explain the Loan Request Experience we’ve created on Private Lender Link.com which is a great way for brokers to submit clients’ deals to multiple private lending companies, also known as bridge lenders, hard money lenders or non-conventional lenders.
When we launched PrivateLenderLink.com in 2010, our goal was to provide an open resource for brokers to learn about reputable private lending companies and provide an easy way to connect with them. It was essentially a directory, but with tons of information to help brokers determine which lenders may be a good fit. Without paying any fees, investors can browse the lenders’ profiles and contact each one directly by phone, email, or by visiting their websites. We take pride in giving our site visitors the option to connect with lenders however they choose, but manually contacting each lender one-by-one can be frustrating and time-consuming.
In February 2021, we launched a major upgrade of our platform and added a new system for brokers to connect with private mortgage lenders. We call it the “Loan Request Experience” and the concept is that you provide information about your deal just once, then share it with multiple lenders, but only a select number of reputable lenders, not every single lender you can find online.
How it Works
We spent countless hours creating a complex questionnaire which doesn’t take much time to complete and asks almost every question that all lenders would ask to determine if they can fund a loan. Instead of contacting each lender one-by-one and explaining the loan scenario over and over again, just provide it once to save yourself a lot of time and effort.
Once the loan request has been created and saved to your account, we offer 2 methods to share it with lenders.
- Self-Service
You can browse lenders on our website and choose which ones to invite. - Recommendations
You can request recommendations so that we can invite a few select lenders to view your deal.
You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can select both options.
The Self-Service Process
With the self-service option, you can see a list of lenders based on the loan type and property location, then review their profiles which are very detailed. We require lenders to provide all of their guidelines, rates, fees, company background and much more. If you think a lender may be a fit, click a button to invite them to the Loan Request. The lender will review the information you provided and indicate whether they are interested or not. Lenders can send you a message through our platform, and they can also call or email you directly. You can invite as many lenders as you want, but we recommend just a few at a time.
Lender Recommendations
If you don’t want to browse lender profiles and figure out which lenders to invite, you can leverage our extensive database, relationships, and knowledge about private lending. With a click of a button, you can ask us for recommendations. We’ll review the Loan Request and invite a few lenders that we feel are a good fit, some of which may not be listed in the public searches. In most cases, we limit the number of lenders invited to 4 at any given time.
If none of them are a good fit, just let us know why before we invite more lenders. If after reviewing the Loan Request, we determine that none of the lenders in our network will consider it, we’ll explain why, and you’ll get a shareable link to the loan questionnaire which you can provide to any lenders that you may find outside of our platform as you continue your search.
Loan Request Management
Our platform offers a clean and simple dashboard for you to manage multiple loan requests. You’ll have the ability to edit the loan details at any time, see a list of all the lenders invited to each loan, remove lenders if needed, view messages, invite coworkers, and get help from us whenever needed. Obviously, you must create an account in order to use the dashboard, but we do offer an option to create a Loan Request as a guest without having to sign up.
By choosing the Guest experience, you won’t have the ability to invite lenders on your own. You’d be selecting our Recommendations service by default.
Privacy Concerns
Whenever you’re providing information online to obtain financing for your clients, there is always a concern about disclosing a borrower’s personal information, who is looking at the information, and whether they are direct lenders. Regarding the client’s information, our loan questionnaire is fairly detailed, but it focuses more on the deal and less about the borrower. We won’t ask for your client’s social security number, date of birth, or your personal residence address, unless it’s the subject property. You can upload documents to the loan request, but we prefer that those documents don’t contain any sensitive information.
The subject property’s address is a critical piece of information that every lender will need in order to evaluate your deal and provide a quote. However, we understand that some brokers may not feel comfortable sharing it upfront, so it’s not required in our loan questionnaire. If you choose not to provide the address, we ask that you at least provide a zip code so that lenders can see the general vicinity of the property’s location. Once you’ve connected with a lender, you can provide the property address to them privately, outside of our platform.
As mentioned earlier, we don’t typically invite more than 4 lenders to view your loan request at any given time. We will never blast out your deal to every lender in our database. And we only share your loan request with lenders IF you request recommendations. You’re welcome to choose the self-service option so that you can invite whichever lender you choose, so you’d have full control in that case.
Direct Lender Policy
We have a strict policy to only connect brokers with direct private lending companies. Many lenders have multiple capital sources, so we’re not always concerned about where their money comes from. The way we qualify a lender being direct is their term sheet lists only one origination fee. If you receive a term sheet from a lender on our platform which lists two separate companies receiving points, we ask that you inform us so that we can address it and consider removing the lender from our platform.
There are a few exceptions to our direct lender policy, but only for consumer mortgages and small business loans, which is not the primary focus of our platform and isn’t typically relevant to brokers.
What does it cost?
If you find lenders on your own and invite them to your loan request, there is no cost on our end. All the private mortgage lenders that appear in the search results are paying us a monthly advertising fee to be listed.
If you ask us for recommendations, the lender that funds your loan may pay us a referral fee after closing. For most lenders, the typical fee is 25 basis points (0.25% of the loan amount), but it could be less, and it could also be a flat fee amount.
Our fee may or may not increase the overall cost to your borrower. It really depends on how each lender structures their origination fee.
Many times we’ll recommend lenders that won’t pay us a referral fee at all. And in some cases, it’s not possible for us to receive a referral fee. This mainly applies to consumer purpose mortgages, but a few states require a mortgage broker license in order to receive a referral fee for investment property deals, which we do not have. This includes Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and in a few other states, it depends on whether the subject property is residential or commercial.
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