Obtaining a commercial loan while living overseas

[Don Owens]

Hello BP community, 

I have a somewhat unique situation and wanted to see if any one had any experience or could offer advice on how to approach my particular situation.  For the last 3+ years I have been living and working overseas in the Middle East.  This expat assignment has given me an excellent opportunity to earn and save money and I have begun looking at ways to better deploy that capital beyond just the stock market.  Last year I purchased a couple of single family homes in the Mid-west for around $100k in total for both.  I paid cash for both and I have fantastic property manager in place and the homes are rented and providing a good return.  What I would like to do now is obtain commercial loan(s) on those properties so that I can free up some capital to purchase additional properties.  The issue I am having though is I can not find any leaders to work with remotely.  I was hoping that especially with what is occurring globally with the Covid-19 lockdowns and social distancing that banks would start becoming more comfortable with doing virtual loan processing, but so far I have not had any luck.  I also unfortunately did not have an already established relationship with any small banks before I moved overseas to fall back on and all my accounts are with one of the major banks in US, which could careless about tiny single family rental property loans.  Finally, I only make it back to the US for about 10 days out of the year around Christmas time and most of that time the banks are closed and I don't have the time to take 2 days away from family to fly down to where the investment properties are located.  So long story short does anyone have any advice or guidance on how to approach a situation like that?  Are there any forward thinking banks getting into this space?  I tried rocket mortgage but they seem to only want to deal with primary residence mortgages and not rental properties.  Thanks in advance for any help or advice especially if anyone has had success obtaining mortgages remotely from abroad and can share how they did it.