The Fix-and-Flip Brokers Closing the Most Deals Use the Fewest Lenders

Most of the conversation about housing supply is about new construction. A quieter share of it is about the homes already standing. The median age of the US housing stock is 42 years, according to the National Association of Home Builders, and nearly half of all current homes were built before 1980. Those houses do not come back to market on their own. Somebody buys them, renovates them, and resells them, and that somebody needs a loan.

Brokers who serve those investors are not short of options. Bridge loans, DSCR products and hard money are offered by dozens of firms chasing the same deals, each with its own underwriting quirks and turn times. According to a lending executive who works with these brokers daily, that abundance is closer to a trap than an advantage.

Charles Goodwin, VP and head of bridge and DSCR lending at Kiavi, said the brokers who do best are not the ones with the longest contact list. "My general advice for brokers in this space is to focus on maybe three to five lenders that you can get to know really well in terms of their requirements and processes and outcomes that they can deliver," Goodwin told Mortgage Professional America. "As opposed to trying to have 25 lenders in your arsenal and shopping around to find the lowest leverage or the highest leverage or the lowest price on any given deal."

He described the pattern as consistent among top producers. "That is what we see for the very successful brokers in this space," he said. "They tend to stick to a couple that they know really well." The reason is the renovation clock. A flip carries holding costs from the day it closes, so a loan that arrives late, or arrives on different terms than promised, costs the investor real money. "What you want to look for in a lender is certainty and speed of execution," Goodwin said. "You just want to avoid those late-stage surprises or changes."

The business itself resists the kind of standardization that would make lender choice interchangeable. "It's just still so hyperlocal," he said. "When you saw some of the large iBuyers or institutions try to flip homes, a lot of them ended up shutting down in the post-pandemic era because it's really hard to flip homes at scale. Every street is different. There are so many different vendors that you could source your materials from, and the labor is so scattered."

The investors still doing well, he said, have turned their operations into a system. "It's been quite impressive to see some of the internal systems that our clients have built around project management, in terms of how they order materials and from what vendors and at what timelines, and how they've arranged their partners within the labor that they use," Goodwin said. His read on the wider market is less gloomy than the headlines. "A flat market is a market that you can operate in," he said. "Despite what some of the headlines say, you are still seeing many people realize their dreams, finish their first flip or finish their 100th flip, and are doing just fine with things."

One caveat belongs on all of this. Goodwin runs a lender that competes for exactly these loans, so advice to hold fewer and deeper lender relationships is not disinterested, and the observations about broker volume come from Kiavi's own book rather than an industry survey. He noted that broker-sourced investors tend to be less experienced than the firm's direct clients, which is a reason to read the volume comparison carefully.

For agents, the practical version of this is a question worth asking any investor client early: which lenders do you actually use, and have you closed with them before. A flip that funds on schedule becomes a listing on schedule. When it does come back to market, reaching the local agent community quickly matters as much as the renovation did, which is why tools such as HomeFlyer AI that put a property in front of every agent in an association have found steady use among investors working a flat market.