Financing construction with a loan from an American lender
Entrepreneur of the Week Noam Segal # Post 5
Hi everybody,
Today I want to talk about getting a construction loan from an American lender.
Okay, so I'll start by saying that this is a really not a simple process for an entrepreneur who does not have an SSN or an American partner.
If you are able to find a body that is willing to give a foreign investor a construction loan, the lender will want to check on you both financially and in terms of real estate experience for you. This will directly affect the terms of the loan he will be willing to give you.
In addition the lender will also require to check with the operating contractor,
He will ask for:
• His company name
• Contractor's license
• Experience
• Examples of projects he has carried out in the last two.
He will ask you for tax returns from previous years, your and your company's capital statement, a printout of your bank account and more.
After you go through this step you will need to view the project details:
• House data you want to build such as size, number of rooms, baths, parking and more
• Architectural plan of the house you will build.
• An orderly budget for all construction
• General insurance of the contractor
• BUILDER RISK specific insurance for the current project
• The lender will send an appraiser who will assess the value of the home after it is built.
After going through all this bureaucracy usually anyone who has over 20 percent in the company will need to sign the loan, if you are not in the US you will need to use a POA and apostille power of attorney or find an American notary in the country (there are a few).
The lender will never give you the full cost of the project usually between 70-80 percent and will require you to put your money first before he puts his money.
There is no doubt that the process can be exhausting and sometimes everything seems to fall apart (it happened to us several times especially during the Corona period due to bureaucratic matters) but when it succeeds it fundamentally changes the returns of the project.
Two other aspects that I really like to get loans for are:
• The lender is actually another layer of protection in my tests and usually the appraiser is pessimistic, we almost always sold well beyond his forecast. If the lender is willing to give money then the deal makes sense.
• The loan is never given in advance, the money you will receive is against the things actually done and the correlation to the budget you submitted to them. This is another way to monitor the contractor's progress.
In the photos - one of the projects I did with a loan from an American lender.
In my next post I will give a numerical example of a project taken with an American loan without investors.
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