August 31, 2026.
The US Census Bureau defines the Northeast region into two parts: New England (CT, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT) and Middle Atlantic (NJ, NY, PA). Across the Northeast, lending to real-estate investors has become one of the most dynamic corners of the mortgage market. There are well over 100,000 business-purpose loans originating in the Northeast each year. We define the BPL market as all originations where the borrower is a business entity, and private lenders’ share of the Northeast’s BPL market has grown nearly 40% since 2022. Within the Northeast we show who is lending, where volume is growing, and where the emerging lenders are active. This is the second installment of Forecasa’s Regional Spotlight series where we highlight a particular region’s BPL lending market.
1. Who is lending: the BPL market by lender type
Conventional lenders originate a little over 43% of Northeast BPL loans by count, with private lenders a strong second at more than 30%. Dollars tell a different story: commercial lenders write barely 2% of loans but nearly 19% of volume, while private lending’s small-balance loans are 30% of loans yet only 8% of dollars.
Trailing 12 months (July 1, 2025 – June 30, 2026). “Other” is lenders that are outside the four buckets above. Vermont has no covered records in the dataset, so New England figures reflect the region’s other five states.
2. Private lending in the spotlight
Private lending has been the Northeast’s fastest-rising BPL segment: its share of loan count climbed from 23% in 2022 to 33% in 2024. What distinguishes the Northeast is what happened next — the share stopped climbing, holding at 32% in 2025 rather than pushing higher. Measured in dollars the pattern is the same at a smaller scale, peaking above 10% in 2024 before easing to under 10% in 2025.
*2026 is a partial year and is not annualized.
3. Biggest movers by metro
Unlike the South, the Northeast was not a rising tide. Growth and decline split almost exactly down the middle, and the dividing line was geographic: Pennsylvania markets dominated the gainers, led by Philadelphia (+2,280 loans) and Pittsburgh (+750), with upstate New York’s Rochester and Albany joining them, while the region’s high-cost coastal metros contracted. New York and Boston each lost loan count even as their dollar volume rose — fewer deals, larger ones — and the sharpest percentage declines landed in Manchester–Nashua and the Hudson Valley.
Trailing 12 months (July 1, 2025 – June 30, 2026) vs. the prior 12 months (July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025), by loan count. Six largest gainers and seven largest decliners shown.
4. Emerging lenders by metro
Forecasa identifies and tracks emerging lenders. This is any lender who made their first business-purpose loan origination within the last 12 months and has originated at least three business-purpose loans in that time. Of 1,221 emerging lenders nationwide, 206 originated at least one of those loans in the Northeast. They concentrated heavily in the region’s two largest markets, with 68 active in New York and 44 in Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania’s secondary metros picking up much of the remainder; note that a few large commercial-scale entrants in Boston, Portland and Springfield push those dollar totals well above markets with far more loans. The table below shows the ten metros with the most emerging lenders:
Loans and dollar volume reflect what these emerging lenders originated within each metro during the trailing year (July 1, 2025 – June 30, 2026). Top ten metros shown; a lender active in several metros is counted in each, so these figures do not sum to the 206 regional total.
The Northeast is a two-speed market: capital moved decisively toward Pennsylvania and the region’s more affordable secondary metros while the high-cost coastal markets shed loan count, and it did so in a region where private lenders already write close to a third of all BPL loans. As the Regional Spotlight series continues, we will see whether that rotation toward secondary markets is a Northeast story or a national one.
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