As a recap, I’m telling the reader about the hell we had to go through to get a bank to loan us money on this project…….
So that Agricultural bank that said they would give us a loan, told us that the loan would need to be a vacation home loan because they don’t do commercial loans. We said fine, we would qualify for the loan just based off of our income. We wouldn’t use the cash flow of our business to qualify for the loan, which makes things much simpler paperwork wise. We were used to that type of loan process since it was how we did it in Utah with our other vacation rentals.
This bank was and is great in a lot of ways, but speed isn’t one of their strengths. We started talking to them in November of 2024, and we finally signed the papers in June of 2025. First, they rejected us because Adam was a farmer and I wasn’t, so I couldn’t be on the application, because it’s an Ag bank. So then we sent the application through with just Adam as the mortgagee. Adam’s income alone was enough to borrow about 75% of the money we needed. We thought that would be the end of it, why would any bank give us money, but not enough to actually finish the job, isn’t that a huge risk? This same issue had killed the deal at other banks.
For some reason, this bank didn’t care, I just had to pledge some capital to the project and they accepted that. Then, near the very end of the approval process we had an appraisal done. The appraiser looked through the county property records and saw all of the operating agreements that the county had made us sign and record, stuff about how we were going to keep guests safe, and told the bank that this wasn’t a vacation home. The bank told us flat out that we weren’t getting the loan. Now keep in mind that I had told the first guy at this bank back in November that this was going to be a vacation rental, and he’d told me that we just weren’t going to bring that up to the underwriters, so it’s not like we were anything illegal.
At this point, we were almost positive that the deal was dead. So I immediately started calling other mortgage brokers and within a few hours of the bad news, I had another bank, let’s call them bank #2, that said they would do the deal and would lend us 75% LTV, which was 100% of what we needed to build!
As we were going through the approval process with bank #2, the loan coordinator at bank #1 kept sending us random stuff. At first we thought that she was just a low level administrative person that didn’t know that we’d been rejected. After a few more emails, Adam actually called bank #1, and learned that the deal was still on?!?! We decided to not tell bank #1 that we’d found another lender, just in case bank #2 didn’t work out.
Bank #2 started the process moving really fast, then as time passed, started moving slower and slower. At the same time, Bank #1 was telling us that they were ready to close. So, we slow played bank #1 as much as we could, and told bank #2 that they had a max of 2 weeks left to close on the loan. Specifically I told bank #2 that if bank #1 told us to sign now or never, we were going to sign, because the time to start building, June was only about a month away.
And then, all of the sudden, bank #2 just completely ghosted us. They wouldn’t respond to emails, phone calls, texts, nothing. At this point, I was so jaded by bank shenanigans that it didn’t even surprise me. I was just ready to be done with the financing. So we set a date to sign the paperwork with bank #1, and we signed, and we never heard from bank #2 ever again. Very weird and unprofessional!
So as of today, June 16th 2025, after 2 years of working on this, we are actually starting on this. Adam just arrived in Silverton on Friday, with his family where they’ll be living for the next year! When you move your family for a construction project, that is dedication!! The skid steer arrived on Friday and the Telehandler and Excavator arrive tomorrow.
Thanks for following along this far, I promise that this blog is about to get alot more exciting!!
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