Verify a lender

There is no answer to this question, and any page that gives you one is almost always compensated for it. Hard money is local, product-specific and experience-tiered: the best lender for a $180,000 flip in Ohio for a first-timer is not the best lender for a $2m ground-up in Los Angeles for a builder with twenty projects.

What you can do is compare three quotes on identical assumptions and pick on all-in cost and on how the paper is written.

We do not publish a best-lenders list and never will, because the honest answer is "it depends on your deal" and a paid answer is just an advert. We should also say plainly that we are a lead generation service and are paid when we introduce you to a lender - so treat our introduction as one of the three quotes you get, not as the answer. How we get paid.

For the right deal, yes. The test is whether the loan is buying you something - speed, access, or leverage you genuinely need - rather than simply being the only lender who said yes. "They were the only ones who would do it" is a warning, not a recommendation.

Four checks, all free, all doable in about twenty minutes. Look the entity up on NMLS Consumer Access if your state licenses this kind of lending. Confirm the company is registered and in good standing with the Secretary of State where it claims to operate. Ask for two recent borrower references and actually call them. And insist that any money you send goes to a licensed title or escrow company, never to the lender directly.

The single strongest signal is the last one. A legitimate private lender is paid at closing out of proceeds. See how to verify a lender.

Guaranteed approval before anyone has looked at the property. A fee demanded before closing, especially by wire, gift card, crypto or a payment app. Pressure to decide today. No physical address, or an address that is a mail drop. A name that is a near-miss for a real lender's. Contact only through a free email domain. Documents with no entity name, no state, and no signature block. And an unwillingness to route funds through title or escrow.

The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on advance-fee loans is the plain-language reference, and it applies squarely here.

Legitimate third-party costs - an appraisal, a credit check, sometimes an application or underwriting deposit - are genuinely paid up front by real lenders, and that is normal. What is not normal is a fee that must be paid to the lender, by irreversible means, as a condition of releasing funds that have supposedly already been approved.

The distinction that matters: a real cost is payable to a named third party, is documented, and is disclosed before you commit. A scam fee appears late, goes to the lender or an individual, and is urgent.

Enough that the FTC publishes standing guidance on advance-fee loan fraud, and enough that multiple legitimate private lenders run pages warning about impersonators using their names. The vulnerability is structural: this is a lightly regulated corner of lending, borrowers are often in a hurry, and the product normally does involve fast wires - which is exactly the cover a fraud needs. See advance-fee loan scams.

It depends entirely on the state and on the purpose of the loan, and this is one of the most commonly misstated facts in the whole vertical. Broadly: business-purpose loans secured by investment property are exempt from most consumer mortgage licensing in many states, while several states license this activity regardless of purpose, and a loan secured by a borrower's own home is a different regulatory animal almost everywhere.

We are not going to publish a fifty-state answer we have not verified state by state - that research is underway and will be published with citations. In the meantime, the reliable move is to check the specific entity on NMLS Consumer Access and ask the state regulator directly. Here is how.

As a matter of law, whatever the state where the property sits requires - which varies from nothing beyond ordinary business registration to full mortgage lender licensing with bonding and examination. As a matter of practice, a legitimate lender will have a registered entity, a real address, named principals, a track record you can verify, and no objection to you checking any of it.

Commercial and business-purpose lending licensing is genuinely inconsistent across states, and the answer also turns on whether the loan is secured by a dwelling, who the borrower is, and whether a broker is involved. Rather than guess, verify the entity on NMLS and contact the state regulator - our state regulators guide shows the process.