About the Relationship
Iron Bridge made its first loan to Island Beach Properties in March 2012. At that time, Island Beach Properties was operating a successful residential rehab business in sunny San Diego. However, as the residential rehab market in California became increasingly competitive during 2012 and 2013, our borrower decided to move her business nearly 3,000 miles east to Connecticut, where she launched a mother-daughter real estate investment company.
As an experienced realtor and rehabber, our borrower knew all the key team members she would need to add to her real estate rehabbing business in the less competitive residential rehab market of Connecticut. With a little networking, she soon had a list of reliable realtors, contractors, and property wholesalers to help find, fix and sell projects. Also with experience as a licensed realtor in California, it didn’t take long for her to get licensed as a real estate broker in Connecticut. All she needed to complete the team was a local private lender to help finance her projects.
I moved my real estate business from California to Connecticut and couldn’t find a good east coast lender. To help me out, Iron Bridge made the decision to accelerate the launch of their loan programs in Connecticut. What lender does that? Thank you, Iron Bridge!”
Challenges
As our borrower puts it, “I really didn’t think it would be that hard to find a good private lender on the east coast. In some ways I was excited to find out what these east coast lenders might have to offer. But as I set up informational calls with these lenders, I quickly realized I had a problem—none of them offered a good solution for my business. Some lenders were charging ridiculous interest rates or adding junk fees to the loans, others were brokers trying to find an investor to fund my loan, some would ask to see my deal proposal and then would take days to respond, others wanted very large down payments, which would limit the number of deals I could do. But at the end of the day, the biggest issues was that none of the lenders I spoke to made me feel comfortable.”
During this time, Iron Bridge was just begging to offer its loan programs outside of the west coast states and was not offering loan programs in Connecticut. However, after our borrower told us how difficult it was for her to find a good lender on the east coast, Iron Bridge made the decision to accelerate the launch of its loan programs in Connecticut to support our borrower in her new business venture.
Conclusion
Our borrower successfully moved her business from California to Connecticut in June 2014. Iron Bridge has provided financing for all nine of her Connecticut rehab projects since that time, and we are happy to report that her projects have met or exceeded her profit projections.
Iron Bridge is continuing to expand its loan programs across the United States. If you are a rehabber or developer and don’t see your state currently active, please let us know. If it’s important to you that we come to your state, we’ll do what we can to accelerate the process. Because supporting our borrowers is a top priority.