What Is A Bridge Loan
Many people call and ask if we do 'bridge loans'. The short answer is, 'Yes' but a bridge loan means a lot of different things to different people. Commonly we see a bridge request as short term money to be used as a portion of a larger sum of money for a monster project. For example, a client would call and say they are building a mall somewhere and they need $750,000 for one year in order to acquire the property and take it through zoning. The total project is $25,000,000 but they only need this piece right now. They also need it in a week because the seller is putting pressure on them. I would then ask if the buyer or buyers partners have a bunch of residential investment properties they can put up as collateral. We aren't in the business of lending on malls, so we would need the cross collateral to make this work. They send over 20 properties that we can then put a first position on and we supply the $750,000 to act as a bridge loan for them. Regardless of the actual definition, this is the common way we see or refer to bridge loans in our lending world.
Ian Walsh
215.839.3271