Hard Money Lender Feedback: Certain Lending

[Toni Husbands]

Has anyone worked with CertainLending.com yet? I can't seem to find anything about them. Someone reached out to me on BiggerPockets directly. Would you try to work with a  new-ish hard money lending firm?

[Nghi Le]

Disclaimer: I joined the Certain Lending team last week.

I've been an independent hard money broker up until last week. I met with the founders, Charles and Shreyas, and was actually more impressed with them than the software they were building. One used to work at Freddie Mac and the other was at Palantir Technologies. I actually left my software/consulting job a couple of weeks ago and was planning to work as an independent broker full-time, but found that a lot of my values and goals lined up with theirs, so we decided to join forces and create synergy. Another team member joined recently (from LendingHome) before me. We all plan on drastically changing the entire hard money industry and lowering rates overall.

Certain Lending is a digital brokerage platform that aims to simplify real estate financing and realize competitive pricing. It is backed by VC Investors (which you can find on the website). The basic idea is that we believe it should be much easier for investors to understand their options, compare alternatives, and that lenders should feel some competitive pressure to present their best offer to a client. We also think it takes too long to arrange financing and that a lot of this time could be saved (e.g. phone calls sharing the same information with multiple lenders).

Our platform provides a common application that lets an investor describe their project once, and then presents that application to multiple lenders on our platform. Our software guides you through the whole process (including what documents are needed) and we stay involved until you close. We also have something called a Funding Backstop - if something goes wrong and the lender doesn't close on time, and it's not the borrower's fault, we may step in and fund the deal directly (assuming they are eligible).

The company is a startup, and we are still a couple of months away from the launch of the software, which is why we haven't been putting our names out there yet. Right now we are brokering loans in most of the United States, but very manually (a process that I'm used to). We work with a lot of the big name lenders like LendingHome, Lima One Capital, LendingOne, Civic, etc, as well as some smaller ones. Fees are usually charged to the lender, so the borrower can often get the same pricing as if they had gone directly to the lender (and sometimes even cheaper pricing).

We had a booth at the PNW Real Estate Wealth Expo to showcase the application (although I wasn't with the company at the time). @Jay Hinrichs you missed out at the Expo! But we'd still love to spend some time to show you the software and get your feedback since I know you're well-versed in the hard money world.