The Lending Commons
Ground-up construction

The only collateral that doesn't exist yet.

Every other loan in this directory is secured by a building you can walk through. Construction lending is underwritten against a drawing, released in pieces, and priced on the gap between the two. 444 lenders here fund it.

See all 444 construction lendersSearch the directory
lenders fund it
444
lenders fund it
lend nationwide
144
lend nationwide
highest published LTC
100%
highest published LTC
states reachable
51
states reachable
Aerial view of wooden roof trusses on a house under construction
Draw 1 of 5
How the money arrives

Nobody hands you the whole loan on day one.

Construction money is released against inspections, in a sequence written into the loan documents. Scroll to move the build along.

  1. Lot & site~10% of budget

    Land usually goes in before the loan does. Most lenders advance a share of lot cost at closing, then nothing further until permits are pulled and the site is cleared, graded and staked.

Illustrative. Draw schedules, inspection triggers and holdbacks are set by each lender in the loan documents and vary by project; the directory does not collect them.

What actually caps the loan

Three ceilings apply at once and the tightest one wins. A lender quoting “90% LTC” is quoting the one that binds least often.

Loan-to-cost (LTC)

Share of the total project budget — lot plus hard plus soft costs — the lender will advance. The headline number, and the one that decides how much cash the borrower brings to closing.

Loan-to-completed-value

Share of the appraised value of the finished building. Set against a valuation of something nobody has seen, which is why it is usually the tighter of the two and why the appraisal is the real underwriting event.

Term, and the exit

Interest-only, typically measured in months rather than years, with extension options priced in points. The loan is not underwritten on the build — it is underwritten on the sale or the refinance waiting at the end of it.

Lenders that publish construction numbers

All 444 →

The 12 most completely documented of the 444 construction lenders in the directory. Blank means the figure was never published, not zero.

Footage: Pexels (free licence, no attribution required) — credited by choice. Draw stages are illustrative and are not drawn from the dataset; leverage figures are.