The process for property owners to find and request a loan from private mortgage lenders can be very inefficient and tedious, but it doesn’t have to be. In this guide, we’ll tell you about the Loan Request Experience we’ve created on PrivateLenderLink.com which we feel is the most efficient method to submit your deal 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 property investors 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 investors 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 property owners 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 your 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 your 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 also ask us for 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 first option, you can see a list of lenders based on your loan type and property location, then view 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 your Loan Request. The lender will review your loan details and indicate whether they are interested or not. Lenders can send you a message through our platform. They can also call or email you directly. 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 your information, we determine that none of the lenders in our network will consider your loan, 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 your loan requests. You’ll have the ability to edit your loan details at any time, see a list of all the lenders invited, 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, there is always a concern about who is looking at your information, so I want to address a few things about privacy. Our loan questionnaire is fairly detailed, but it focuses more on the deal and less about the borrower. We don’t ask for a social security number, date of birth, or your personal residence address, unless it’s the subject property.
We ask for your average credit score, but we’re not running a credit report. Even if we add a credit reporting integration in the future, it would be optional, and the data needed to pull your credit would be collected by a third party company. We offer the ability to upload supporting documents, but we prefer that the documents don’t contain any of your personal information. It would be best if you provide this to the lenders directly.
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 people 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 I 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 information to every lender in our database. And we only share your loan request with lenders IF you request recommendations.
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 fee ranges from one quarter of one percent (0.25%) to one half of one percent (0.50%), but it could be less, and it could also be a flat fee amount. Our fee may or may not increase your overall pricing. 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 at the time of this recording. 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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