I just found out a nice little tidbit today that may be helpful for your or for others trying to navigate the SBA secret society..... OK, so it shouldn't be a secret, but, I recently helped a client obtain the coveted SBA 504 loan program. Yep, we actually closed on the deal, so I am speaking from real experience. We closed the deal on December 31, 2007 so this is pretty real time information. After getting several inquiries from individuals like yourself trying to find an SBA lender in their state (my deal was in California), I contacted my SBA Lender in San Francisco today and here is what I found out. In order to be an SBA lender, you must be a "Certified Development Company" (CDC). Just because your name is Bank of America, or Wells Fargo does not a CDC make you.... in fact, I was told that these companies also use a CDC when making an SBA loan. That's right, they use an outside agency that is certified in the process, even though they may have local "in-house" experts that do the majority of the loan processing and the client interface (i.e., you'll probably never talk directly to the CDC responsible for underwriting the loan). The banks, like Wells Fargo, B of A, etc. of course get a referral fee from these CDC's but they'll never tell you that, or if they do, it'll be so fast and the disclosure buried in so much paperwork, you won't realize that this was the case.
Anyway, I have a great website for anyone interested in an SBA loan who wants to go straight to the CDC and skip the middleman bank. You won't have to navigate the SBA Loan process through an interpreter who may or may not be able to properly translate the sometimes tricky program guidelines. You will be talking to THE actual lender who will be underwriting your loan directly with the SBA. Personal experience has shown that the more people you have involved in any loan transaction, the longer it takes, and the more confusing the process is not to mention the odds that it gets canned in the process increase exponentially.
OK, now for the website www.nadco.org/nadco/welcome.html then just click on the CDC directory icon and select the state that your project is in and a list of CDC lenders will come up w/ contact info. I have no idea why at 40 years old, and a seasoned CPA I never knew this until today. It is amazing the SBA doesn't let you know any of this on their own website, or that it is buried to where it is un-intuitive as to how to find it. My rant with having "government" sponsored programs like SBA and FHA is when people just glumly pop-off that these are the simple solutions, when in fact, unless you are fortunate enough to get connected with someone who is actually halfway intelligent in the business lending community, you will be SOL when it comes to getting into one of these programs that you, the taxpayer, actually make possible. Sorry for the rant, its just upsetting that us working class self-employed are actually in the highest tax bracket most of the time and are largely responsible for these FHA and SBA programs being in existence (i.e, our tax $$ fund them!), and yet we must be further humiliated by the process of trying to extract these monies (our monies) back out of the government SBA & FHA programs on the back-end to try to support and grow these very same businesses, our businesses.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
