One of my agents, Marcus, is closing on a really sweet FHA fourplex deal today for a client. It’s so attractive that I’m still kicking myself for not buying it for one of my funds (I tried, believe me).
This deal was not without hiccups, to put it mildly.
The client came to us with his own lender. In those situations, we generally agree to work with the client’s lender, rather than trying to push the client to use a loan broker we trust.
In this particular instance, the lender puked all over the deal.
It’s not really worth getting into specifics – it suffices to say that they jerked our client (and, by extension, us and the seller) around for a few weeks, asking for endless reports / evaluations / bids / etc. for what should have been a straightforward deal. Marcus tenaciously fought for the deal, jumping through each and every hoop, until we finally realized the lender had no intention of closing.
When Marcus finally told the lender we were pulling the deal and moving it somewhere else, they told him that any other lender would have the same issues / concerns.
Enter Justin Brown, our go-to loan broker. Justin assured us he could close, despite what the other lender told us.
In a genuinely heroic bit of loan brokering, Justin closed it two weeks from the day on which we pulled the deal from the first lender. As you can imagine, everyone is pretty freakin’ happy around here.
And, as you can also imagine, we are going to be a bit more skeptical when clients come to us with a lender already picked out. Closing any apartment deal in this environment is tough. When it’s an FHA deal, it’s tougher still. You really need to have the loan side working with you in order to have a clean shot at closing.
Anyway: Bravo, Marcus and Justin!