Beyond the banks. 57 mid-size non-bank lenders, and what we can count about them.

165 non-bank lenders in four countries, and 57 of them are mid-size.

A bank is easy to find: it holds a charter and files a quarterly report. A non-bank lender is not. We built a list from the membership of the agency lending programs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, CMHC), the commercial mortgage REITs and mortgage investment corporations, known debt funds and bridge lenders, and the insurers that hold commercial mortgages. It has 165 firms in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

We then sorted them by estimated staff. 57 have 100 к 999 people, 55 have fewer than 100 и 53 have 1,000–4,999. 57 are the same size as the banks of Review No. 4: big enough to lend on property at scale, too small to have a department that reads every loan file. By country they are 32 in the US, 10 in the UK, 8 in Australia and 7 in Canada.

Two cautions. The staff figure is our estimate for the whole firm, not a count, and for insurers and for REITs with an outside manager the size of the property lending team is a different number. How we sized them

Debt funds and agency lenders are 38 of the 57, and they lend on different things.

Debt funds and credit managers are the largest group, 23 firms. Their loans are mostly transitional: a property that is being built, repositioned or refinanced, where the borrower needs money for a few years and the plan, not today’s rent, supports the loan. The list describes their books as construction, bridge, hotel, apartment and medical office debt.

Agency lenders are 15 firms, 14 of them in the US. They originate apartment loans that are then sold to or guaranteed by a government-backed program. The loan has to fit the program’s standard, which is why their files look alike.

Это 12 private and bridge lenders split into two kinds. One lends to investors on rental homes and small commercial properties, many loans of small size. The other lends short-term for acquisitions and development. Tap a country to see how the 57 divide by type where you work.

For banks we can count the risk. For these firms we can only count the firms.

Review No. 4 used the quarterly reports banks file. They give employees, equity and four kinds of property loan for each bank, so we could say that 264 of 1,192 mid-size banks hold investor property above 300 percent of capital, $283.0 billion in all.

We found nothing like this for the 57. The five types have different parties to report to, and we did not look for each firm’s reporting duties, so this is a statement about what we could count from one place, not about what the firms disclose. The list carries a description of each firm’s book and no amounts. What we did not measure

The practical result is a gap in the second look. A bank over the line knows an examiner may ask how it reviews its loans. A mid-size non-bank has no single trigger that we found, so the question of how every loan file is checked is left to each firm. Switch between the two groups below.

We do not claim non-banks lend worse. We claim only that the evidence to say so, or to say the opposite, is not collected in one place. Where it is missing, the file in front of the credit committee is the only check, and it is worth reading against the property’s own numbers.

Что с этим делать

If you lend against property in one of these five types, the useful step is to see your own files the way a second reader would: the offering memorandum, rent roll, operating statement and collateral, read against each other.

Реалист reads the credit file of a commercial property loan and returns the issues and the questions for the borrower. It does not replace your underwriters, your appraisal or your legal review. It makes sure the same checks are made on every loan, not only on the large ones.