From New Frontier to Established Markets
Midwest and Southeast markets capture capital that coastal markets used to command. The 2025 data shows a private lending industry transitioning into a new normal after years of rate-driven disruption. Expanding the map Growth occurred [...]
This Is What Progress Looks Like
As we look ahead to the 17th Annual AAPL Conference, I am proud of what our association has accomplished this year. The conference is always a highlight, bringing professionals from across the private lending industry [...]
Leadership Without Permission
Industries mature when the people who create opportunities stop treating access as something they personally control. Leadership is measured by what others can build after you open the door. I recently spoke with an executive [...]
End of the Breakaway
The industry’s fastest-growing segment is slowing, rates are becoming more reactive, and competition is shifting from expansion to market share. This year has introduced a more nuanced lending environment than many expected coming out of [...]
Urban Institute Report Validates Private Lending’s Housing Role
A new report repositions residential transition lending as a measurable, market-driven force in U.S. housing production. The Urban Institute’s newly released report “The Evolution of Residential Transition Lending: From Hard Money to Housing Supply?” reframes [...]
The Guy He Wasn’t
Huy Do never chased the version of success everyone expected him to want. Gary Wallace, PrideCo’s head of originations, was finally taking an actual vacation. His usual version of time off meant the golf course [...]
Lessons That Outlast the Uniform
On September 16, 2001, after a Saturday night out with friends, I was awakened by a phone call giving me until Sept. 23 to report for active duty following the 9/11 attacks. I was 30 [...]
The Data Trap
Private lending has entered an era where information abundance creates both strategic advantage and ethical instability. Lenders today can access traditional public records, aggregated datasets, scraped online content, behavioral indicators, predictive risk models, and vendor-generated [...]
Your Trail Guide for Troubled Loans
In 2021, a private lender extended a three-year construction loan. The plan was to get taken out by a commercial lender at stabilization. In 2023, interest rates rose, which means cap rates shifted. And the [...]
Member Spotlight | Res/Title
Our October Member Spotlight shines on Res/Title! What should we know about Res/Title? Res/Title is a nationwide title and settlement company that has been helping clients navigate the title and closing process since 1994. We [...]
Multifamily RTL Is Ready for Its Own Track
Anyone active in the Residential Transitional Loan (RTL) securitization market is familiar with the question that comes up when a portfolio is being assembled for a deal: “What do we do with the loans backed [...]
Claim Your Own Pond
At some point in your lending career, you will be tempted to grow just because you can. An unexpected deal lands in your lap, capital is available, and the logic seems airtight. More loans mean [...]
Defensive Driving for Appraisals
Most valuation risk hides in predictable gaps, if you know where to look. Defensive Driving Rule #1: Check your blind spots. All drivers have them—areas outside our natural line of sight. The risk isn’t their [...]
Loan Participations: There’s More Below the Waterline
Did you sell the loan, or finance it? Every private lender entering a loan participation should answer that question upfront, but it often surfaces later in an audit meeting, when the accounting treatment does not [...]
Steer Through the Fog
AI-driven systems for nonconsumer lead generation, underwriting review, and credit decisioning are becoming embedded in how private lenders source business-purpose borrowers, assess risk, and deploy capital efficiently. But the more these systems become integral to [...]
New AAPL Member Discount: Alefy
The American Association of Private Lenders (AAPL) is pleased to welcome Alefy as its newest Member Discount partner, providing private lenders with a way to monitor portfolio risk and identify new property, borrower, and entity-level [...]
Protect the Plan with Prepayment Penalties
You price risk, allocate capital, and build a return model around a specific timeline. When a borrower repays early, however, while you may recover the principal, you won’t recover the full return you and the [...]
The Sugar High Is Over
Three years into a slow-motion correction, local market experts see more softness ahead before conditions improve. Spiking mortgage rates in the second half of 2022 shocked the housing market out of its pandemic-triggered sugar high [...]
Raising the Bar
As we enter a new year in private lending, our industry continues to operate in a landscape defined by both complexity and opportunity. Shifting market conditions have required lenders to exercise greater discipline, sharper risk [...]
Private Lenders Can’t Ignore AML
The private lending industry has watched the rollout and then recission of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Residential Real Estate Rule with understandable concern, if not outright whiplash. A federal-district court has temporarily taken [...]
