The most-recent Fried On Business show was chock-full of actionable business information.
Our guests – from the online lending platform Raisal and from the leading real estate law firm Becker & Poliakoff – simply hit it out of the park as we talked about real estate financing and the recent ICSC Florida Conference in Orlando.
Raisal: The new way to finance commercial real estate
Raisal.com is changing the way borrowers and lenders do business. For starters, Joshua Young, founder/CEO, told me that the on-boarding process takes about 3 minutes.
That’s right – 3 minutes!
From there, a proprietary algorithm matches the borrower to the appropriate lender based on a number of criteria, including property type and geography.
Bank lending, bridge lending, hard money lending. It’s no problem for Raisal, Young said.
Hmmmm. That sounds a lot like what I do, but Young said I should have no fear that Raisal will put me out of business. The company, he said, works with dozens of brokers across the country, who use the software to help match projects to money.
“Part of this company was really founded upon the idea that it’s an inefficient process right now, and the inefficiency can be solved through technology. And we built that,” he said.
Manuel Huerta, senior commercial loan advisor for the company, said Raisal works across the entire capital stack to supply funds at any level.
The matching component is critical, Young said, as is the bidding process. Borrowers, he said, appreciate the opportunity to have some competition among the lenders for their deal.
“We launched this thing about January of this year, and it has just exploded. We have clients across the country. We’re doing hundreds of millions of dollars right now, and we really think we’ve hit the nerve on what is happening in commercial lending,” he said.
Young added that the rapidly growing company is looking to hire underwriters, analysts, processors, loan advisors, and residential mortgage brokers. They need people, fast.
Raisal can take a deal offline, if necessary, because the company is in fact a full-service lending solution that can handle the details from start to finish, according to Young.
And Raisal works closely with CCIMs, Huerta said, who often include Raisal term sheets in their packets when they go to see a buyer.
Visit raisal.com to learn more. And click here to listen to the full interview, including more information about:
– How the appraisal process works.
– The availability of construction loans.
ICSC Florida Conference update
I also had a chance to compare notes about the recent ICSC Florida Conference in Orlando with Phillip C. Rosen, a shareholder at Becker & Poliakoff.
Attendance was much better than in recent years, he said, and the number one question being asked was this: Are retail properties overpriced?
The answers, Rosen said, ran along two lines:
– Cap rates couldn’t get any lower, and prices couldn’t get any higher. Thus, it’s hard to justify these prices.
– Interest rates are incredibly low. This pricing is the new normal.
Now, personally, I think investors are still looking at retail properties because they need a predictable stream of cash flow. Rosen seemed to concur.
“I think that even though interest rates are kind of low, there’s no better investment for most of these people. They’ve got to deploy their capital somewhere,” he said.
Rosen said rents are rising, especially in Miami-Dade, which eases the blow of the low cap rates.
A lot of quality deals were being pitched at ICSC, added Young, but there seemed to be a shortage on the equity side when it came to financing.
Refinacing, he said, will continue to drive the market for loans in the near future, but lenders are hungry for quality deals. With property valuations rising, exit strategies are available even for class B and class C properties, he said.
We talked about a lot more, including a recent lease enhancement program for one of Rosen’s clients that resulted in some favorable financing options later.
