A sponsor was planning a 131-lot residential development in Bullhead City, Arizona, and needed a construction lender comfortable underwriting a programmatic build-out, draws tied to phased completion, not a single-asset construction loan. Ground-up construction is one of the harder placements we see: fewer lenders compete for it, and the ones who do underwrite the exit as hard as the build.
We sized the request against the debt yield and coverage a construction lender would actually hold to at each draw milestone, not a rough estimate based on the total project budget. The package included a phased draw schedule and a stressed absorption case for lot sales, the two questions every construction lender asks first. That level of detail is what let the file move fast once it reached the right desk.
"Construction lenders don't move fast on an incomplete draw schedule. They move fast on a complete one."
Fifty-two lenders were reviewed against the file's profile. A term sheet came back in two days at 9.75% and 75% loan-to-cost, a fast turn for ground-up construction, where two to three weeks to a term sheet is more typical when the draw schedule and absorption case need to be built after the fact.
The lesson generalizes beyond construction: a complete file, the right documents, spread from source, stressed before it ships, gets read by more lenders, faster. Our note on why a complete file gets a better quote covers what that completeness is actually worth in basis points and speed.