Seven questions introducers should ask any private lender
Your client relationship outlives any single transaction. The lender you introduce is a statement about your judgement — here is how to test ours, or anyone else’s.
When a broker introduces a client to a private lender, they are lending something of their own: the relationship. A facility that settles late, re-trades at the eleventh hour or turns hostile mid-term costs the introducer more than the deal was ever worth. So it is worth knowing which questions separate lenders before the first deal, not after the third.
First: where does the money actually come from? A lender who cannot explain their funding — whose capital, on what terms, with what concentration — is asking you to take settlement risk on faith. We manage origination and execution for a selected network of funding partners and are direct about that structure, because it is a strength: capital is matched to transactions deliberately, not warehoused and hoped for.
Second: who makes the credit decision, and have you spoken to them? If the person quoting terms has never met the person approving them, the indicative is a marketing document. Our scenario feedback comes from credit-experienced staff working in the same system the approval will run through.
Third: what happens to the terms between indicative and formal approval? Ask for the lender’s re-trade rate. Ours is designed to be near zero, because the hard questions are asked before the indicative is issued — the quote reflects an assessed position, not an opening bid.
Fourth: what does the condition schedule look like, and who tracks it? Fifth: how are settlements coordinated — by a person chasing five parties by phone, or by infrastructure every party can see? Sixth: what does the lender do in month nine of a twelve-month facility — silence, or a conversation about the exit while options are still wide?
And seventh, the question almost nobody asks: how does the lender behave when a loan stresses? Enforcement posture is easy to hide in good markets. Ask for the story of a facility that went sideways and how it ended. A lender with real oversight infrastructure catches divergence early and engages early; a lender without it discovers problems late and reaches for lawyers, with your client on the other side.
These questions have a pattern: they all test whether the lender is a process or a promise. Introducers who work with us are choosing a process — one built so that the answer to every question above is visible in the way the transaction runs, from the first scenario call to the discharge.