Hello, I'm looking for some ideas around how to get at some of my

[Christina Lucas]

Hello, I'm looking for some ideas around how to get at some of my building's equity which I'd really like to use for a condo conversion and maybe also to fund a new business venture. Glad to be here! Looking forward to learning lots. In case you might have any ideas about ways to go about getting at that equity, I'll share some details below.

We've got a 1st and a HELOC with our local credit union. But because my partner works on contract and because he has taken some time off to work with me on our new business, he hasn't worked for a couple of months and hasn't been looking for a new gig because we planned to move early 2017. When we refi'd our original hard money purchase loan and then later got the equity loan via the credit union they were really uptight about his contract employment so we know they won't let us extend the HELOC or do a refi right now.

Something recently shifted with our new business and in order for it to avoid any appearance of being illegal gambling, we need to prove the business has $300k (which will not be spent, it will just sit in an account to prove its existence). Initially, we thought we could do that by placing our property into an LLC and then placing a $300k share from that LLC into our business LLC. We've since learned that once we place the property into an LLC we'll lose the hard-won opportunity to condo convert, we may trigger a prop tax reassessment, and/or a due on sale clause. So we decided to avoid the LLC situation but to go ahead and condo convert now to take advantage of the timing and our ability to legally get that done in SF, where it would be stupid of us not to do it.

Because SF's Building and Planning Departments are suffering staffing turnover and/or shortages, we've been told it might be up to a year before we get the conversion completed and finally have a unit to sell. Given that, it may end up being best for my partner to seek out a new long-term contract gig that will appease our credit union and allow us to extend our HELOC, or we may just decide to sell the building instead of doing the conversion and waiting a year to access the money we need to launch our new business.

For now, we're looking for other options. We used a hard money loan to buy the place so we have some familiarity with them, but not really with how they might be put to work to help us in this particular situation. I've begun reaching out to hard money/private equity folks to see if they might be able to help us. But now I'm wondering if there might be any potential options I'm just not thinking about.

Our property is a 2-unit in SF that we're ready to convert to condos. Once the conversion is complete, we'll sell the upper unit to pay off the debt and fund our new business. We have more equity than we need to do the conversion (and fund the new business), but we'd be happy with just getting enough to do the conversion, $50-$75k. Using zillow's current estimate of our building's value (after knocking off 130K for padding) I determined our current LTV is ~ 49%. Our current interest rates are 3% on the 1st and 3.25% on the HELOC. I'd be happy to have one new loan that rolled these two together and gave us the option to take some cash out, but I don't know if that's an option.

I'm continuing to read and research, but in the meantime, if you have any thoughts for me about ways I might be able to get at that equity, I'd love to hear them.