Bridger Commercial Funding Powers
Online Loan Quotations

Money to Go... As the Internet "revolution" dawned five years ago, mortgage brokers wondered if online intermediaries might supplant their services.  After all, why couldn't borrowers simply browse the net for the best mortgage rate and complete a transaction online?  Uh-uh.  No way.  It turns out that borrowers were reluctant to abandon long-standing personal relationships and leap at a new paradigm.  Just look at the defunct MortgageSelector and Redbricks web addresses.   But the web can play an important role in streamlining an existing "bricks-and-mortar" lender's financing process.   

Bob Schonefeld, CEO of Bridger Commercial Funding, based in Sausalito, CA (San Francisco), recently showed me how the Internet is helping to power his lending business.  In a nutshell, Bridger enables small and medium-sized banks to participate in the CMBS (Collateralized Mortgage Backed Securities) market -- thus, enabling them to strengthen relationships with their local customers.  This year Bridger expects to place over $500 million of fixed-rate, long-term, non-recourse commercial real estate loans -- mostly closed the old-fashioned way (phone, fax, FedEx).  But each bank now has its private web site through which it can offer real time pricing and actually process all documentation.  Very slick.

Bridger also enables banks to offer real time pricing at their own web sites -- although the public submittal form isn't nearly as powerful as the form available to a bank at its private site.  But for a barebones example, click the Loan Quote tab at Bridger, register (pretty painless) and enter your data for a live quote.  Got questions?  Click Bridger University for helpful information on the CMBS market and securitized lending. ... Yes, there are many other commercial lending web sites that should be on your radar screen, including CapitalThinking, eMortgageDesk, LoopLender, MortgageRamp, Precept, and Realpoint.  Each has a different business model aimed at a solving a piece of the commercial lending puzzle.  Stay tuned.

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com