Should I be pursuing a private lender for this property?

[Libbie Grant]

Hi, everybody!

I'm new enough to RE investing that I can't figure out how to solve this head-scratcher. I thought you guys might have some advice on how I can proceed.

Here's the shortest version of the story I can manage... :)

We had been interested in a particular property, a house on 16 acres with two vacation  cottages also on the property (to be used as STRs while we lived in the main house.) As we were preparing an offer, somebody beat us to the punch and the property went under contract, so we shrugged our shoulders and decided to just buy our first investment property instead. It's a two-family unit which we planned to house-hack in until another chunk of acreage came on the market that we liked. (We want to have a small hobby farm for our permanent home.)

Well, the prospective buyers on the 16-acre farm had to walk away, because they couldn't find a lender who would give them a residential mortgage on the place. Apparently the reasons ranged from it having too many kitchens (with the two vacation rental units) to the acreage being too large. So the farm is back on the market and we are determined to get it if there's any way to do it. And there must be some way!

I called a few lenders over the past week and discussed the property with them. The most flexible one I found (NFCU) couldn't guarantee they'd give me a loan on it, because properties over 10 acres had to be approved based on "average lot sizes in the area." How they're determining "average" and "area" was something they couldn't tell me. :(

So I'm wondering if a private lender would present less of a headache.

Info on the property and on us: the farm is listed at $799K currently, which is in line with comps for this area. The two STRs on the farm should give us cash flow of at least $24K annually; combined with our two-family unit, I'd expect our annual cash flow from REI to be over $40K if we held both properties. Virtually all of this county's economy runs off of tourists and STRs, so I feel very confident in my ability to accurately project cash flow from these properties and could present comps to back up my projections. We are self-employed, but have good income at $130K for 2016 with projected growth in 2017 of 33%, bare minimum (maybe a lot more; in 2016 we grew by 67% over 2015.) We have been in business going on four years now, so we have a trail of tax returns to support our business's strength. FICO is 760. So I don't even know if we're the type of clients private lenders would be interested in!

I have never looked into private lending before, and have no idea where to start. I have no idea if I should even give it a shot with this property, or if I'd just be wasting time by pursuing it.

Any other options you guys can think of for financing a property that corporate lenders keep disqualifying for too many kitchens and too many acres?

Thanks!