If you’ve been following the blog for a while you know that finding financing has been one of the toughest items to accomplish on this project. We have now gone through three different lenders and finally found a company willing to commit to the project in our fourth lender visited – Independent Mortgage Company.
This struggle has more to do with this being the first new construction project for our development company, Postgreen, than it does with the affordable, modern or green nature of the project. We have gotten enthusiastic responses from many loan officers at banks, but when it comes to crunch time, the higher ups want unreasonable terms that we can not afford. These are people we never get a chance to meet in person and seem to not take our business concept or media success into the equation at all.
Well, today we went back to one of the original lenders that we put our project out to months ago, Independent Mortgage Company. We took a few members of our team including Nic Darling, my wife Courtney and her business partner Tim Stokes of The Stokes Group who is handling the sale of all of our developments.
We had the privilege of meeting with Alex Zetick, our loan officer, and Paul Catinella, the President and CEO. This is the first time we have been able to meet with an actual decision maker from a bank that took the time to meet with us and hear our business plan and long-term goals. It was clear that this was a different kind of bank from the others we have met with and that we should have been dealing with them all along. We discussed a lot of details about the project, but what we got out of the meeting that we have not recieved from anyone else is a hand shake agreement from Paul that “we will get the deal done.” This was priceless.
We are now working out the details with Independent to both settle ASAP on the 100K project and to fund the second project down the street. If you have been a fan of the project and want to do something to help us out, consider emailing IMC and thanking them for supporting Postgreen and their 100K House project. Nothing too long in necessary, just a short note like, “Thanks for supporting the 100K House project. You guys rock!” will suffice. Imagine if they got 50-100 emails from supporters of the project in the next couple of days. I bet that’s never happened for a lender before…
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Good luck! We had a tricky time getting financing as well. Any construction loan right now is difficult to get. Lots of hoops to go through. Then once you get approved, you need to find a closing company who will work for you, which was even harder in our case.
Kyle,
Could you clarify ” need to find a closing company who will work for you”?? I have always been under the impression that closing was just a formality.
What happened was after we found a bank that would do the loan, the title insurance companies balked at it. I think one of the main reasons though was that we had dug some test holes to see soil conditions and this triggered “early start” problems. It was a huge mess and almost derailed the whole project. Multiple companies all said no to it and was almost a matter of luck and finally a company decided to jump on board.
I think if the early start wasn’t there it would have been a formality but what our lender said was everything is being tightened and scrutinized to a greater degree.
Is this just standard construction loan or are you trying to get a permenent loan attached. Your home will easily qualify for an energy efficient loan. I hope I am not telling you anything new.
What if the seller does not want to do the seller assist ?