KossREsource.com, an online information portal for the commercial real estate industry, has gone live. Among the features of the site is an extensive database of debt and equity financing alternatives which is user driven.
The financing section provides access to information on thousands of debt and equity programs offered by lenders, which the people behind KossREsource said is information that in the past has been impossible or prohibitively expensive to obtain.
Owners or investors simply input the specific requirements of their borrowing need. The site’s database will then provide a sortable list of lenders offering financing for that type of project and display all of the available programs and terms.
The product is the brainchild of Michael Koss, who has been a developer and rehabilitator of commercial properties since 1971. In 1981, he started a commercial mortgage brokerage, Koss Financial, based in Los Angeles.
“I had an observation about that business, that everybody in our industry did it fundamentally the same way. Most of the people who work at a mortgage brokerage firm do sales, and they’ll typically have one or two people that have the responsibility of trying to identify commercial lenders.
“Finding commercial lender is very different than the residential business. Residential is a highly regulated business, there are a few programs and the parameters the lenders use to qualify a borrower are pretty consistent.
“Commercial is not like that at all. It is not a regulated business. Commercial lenders decide what kind of loans they want to do, what kind of terms they want to provide, what kind of properties they want to loan, what kind of loan-to-values they’re going to have, whether they will do fixed or nonrecourse and all of that,” Koss said, making the analogy that it is like the “Wild West.”
Lenders try to attract customers through niches rather than rate, he added, which makes commercial lending a highly fragmented business.
But, those who need a loan, whether they do it through a mortgage broker or source it themselves, have limited access to finding lenders.
“So it occurred to me a couple of years ago that this is a business that has not yet been put on the Internet and I had the vision of creating a website where somebody would be able to in their and find the specific lender that they needed that would do the kind of loan that met their requirements,” Koss said. He also wanted to establish a place where the borrower could competitive shop to find the loan best suited for them.
He reiterated his point that on the residential side, whether it is conforming or nonconforming, it is the same basic information being entered into a point of sale and/or loan origination system.
Different commercial lenders can look at different pieces of information and consider them differently before making the decision if they are going to originate the loan.
KossREsources.com has information on over 4,000 U.S. commercial lenders and their programs. Lenders can go on the site for free and either provide the company the information or enter it themselves.
This allows property owners and mortgage brokers to view financing alternatives based on their project’s specific requirements and needs. Thus because of the information put into the system by the borrower and/or broker, loan requests are not made to entities that are unlikely to fund the loan (and wasting everybody’s time), but rather to those that will.
Borrowers can also go on the site for free to do the lender search. They put in the parameters of what they need into a “very simple, user friendly menu,” Koss said, noting they can be very specific about what terms they are seeking financing under.
When the programs are returned, the user can link to the lender.
Koss said the site would be monetized through lenders paying for premier presentation; there will also be banner ads, and areas and features on the site that users could access only for a fee.
Such features include notifications of when a new program is entered into the system that meets their search criteria.
Other sections in KossREsource.com include a documents area and an area where users can connect with each other.
