Financing Options for a Motel

[Sarah Kensinger]

We are under contract to purchase a motel in the Black Hills that has unfortunately become difficult to finance. The main hang-ups are that we are new to the boutique hotel world and the biggest, is the motel is only open 5 months of the year. We plan on operating the motel the entire 12 months of the year, but to lenders the numbers now are not enough for 12 months. The seller is not completely open to seller financing because they want to start up another business venture. We plan on meeting with the seller next week and hopefully try to work something out between us. But if the seller is completely against seller financing is there another option that we aren't aware of that could work for this instance? Even though this motel has excellent numbers and beautiful underwriting if we can't get lending, we'll need to move on to a property that would offer seller financing.  

[Mason Liu]

Hey Sarah,

First off, congrats on getting under contract on what sounds like a great deal. Assuming you have spoken to multiple lenders (credit unions and local banks included) and are not getting any traction there even after presenting the underwriting details to them, I would say the next course of action would be to raise private money. If you truly have a great deal and an execution plan in place to take down and manage this deal to bring up revenues, you should be able to raise money from private investors via networking.

If that doesn't work either, another option would be to present this to another larger scale vacation rental or motel operator whom would be able to fund the deal, and you can work either an equity split and you manage it, or you pass it off completely to them for an assignment fee.

Good luck with everything!