July - South's Business-Purpose Lending Market | The Elite Officer

The US Census Bureau defines the South region into three parts: South Atlantic (DE, MD, DC, VA, WV, NC, SC, GA, FL), East South Central (KY, TN, MS, AL), and West South Central (AR, LA, OK, TX). Across the South, lending to real-estate investors has become one of the most dynamic corners of the mortgage market. There are hundreds of thousands of business-purpose loans originating in the South each year. We define the BPL market as all originations where the borrower is a business entity, and private lenders’ share of the South’s BPL market has grown over 40% since 2022. Within the South we show who is lending, where volume is growing, and where the emerging lenders are active. This is the first installment of Forecasa’s Regional Spotlight series where we highlight a particular region’s BPL lending market.

Conventional lenders originate roughly half of all Southern BPL loans by count, with private lenders a clear second at just over a quarter. Dollars, though, tell a different story: commercial lenders write under 2% of loans but nearly 20% of volume while private lending’s small-balance loans are 26% of loans yet only 8% of dollars.