Understanding your investors, borrowers, and platforms is critical to achieving growth during turbulent times.

During the past few years, the landscape for private lenders has changed dramatically. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, this probably is not news to you. Even before the current challenges businesses are facing, the private lending industry was experiencing an influx of capital and new players seeking to gain from private investing.

Many private lenders are struggling to figure out how to continue growing their operations responsibly in this new environment. Here are three perspectives from which you should be constantly evaluating your business in order to achieve ongoing, responsible growth: your investors, your borrowers, and your platform.

Your Investors
Communication with your investors and other capital partners is always important for growing your business, but it is paramount in times like these. You should set a regular schedule for communication with your capital providers in any environment, but especially when there’s a market downturn. Whether the outlook is good, bad, or ugly, you must be transparent about the performance of their investment and how the economic outlook will impact the expected outcome.

Your investors should understand your current business strategy. Though many processes and protocols for securing their investments may already be built into your investment strategies, it never hurts to reiterate these safeguards. Even your longtime investors may not recall or fully understand them. You need to not only communicate your current business strategies but also have a clear plan for adjusting it to compensate for anticipated market changes in the upcoming months or years. This will help preserve, or even boost, confidence among your investors and capital partners.

Reporting is the most critical aspect of communication with your investors. Their No. 1 priority is the performance of their investments. Even when results for the reporting period aren’t positive, providing regular reports shows both transparency and accountability.

Reporting can cover a lot of ground, including data about investment performance, diversification, asset-level detail, market data, or business forecasts. The type of reporting your firm does should align with your business’s and your investors’ expectations.

The frequency and regularity of your reporting is also important to investors. Whether you report quarterly, monthly, weekly, or all the above, adhering to a reliable reporting schedule brings peace of mind.

Your Borrowers
Your relationship with your borrowers is a partnership, and they should know you’re there to help. Communication, of course, goes both ways. Your support can help make their investment successful and make them a client for life, so listen to them. If you’re not in tune with your borrowers and their pain points, then your offer is just another number. Knowing their pain points and solving for that is the key. Always aim to deliver high-touch loan servicing and understand your processes from the borrower’s perspective.

You may even lose clients if they perceive your servicing processes to be too burdensome. As lenders, it can be hard to put yourself in your clients’ shoes, but you must.

One way to live through the borrower’s journey is to submit a draw request and work through the process. You may learn that the burden of submitting a draw request is so high that borrowers may avoid it—to the detriment of their project. Piecing together dozens of documents, reconciling a spreadsheet and obtaining notarized signatures can be intimidating, so borrowers may procrastinate. If this is your case, develop a streamlined process that takes borrowers no more than a few minutes to complete and delivers their money within days (if not hours).

Conducting periodic borrower surveys can give you insight into the challenges your borrowers are facing. That, in turn, will better equip you to identify and address potential problems in your loan portfolio, treat problems individually, and minimize the likelihood of foreclosures and other issues.

Communication with your borrowers can be instructive for your business strategy as well. Your borrowers’ success is your business’s success. In times of economic turmoil, you have as much responsibility to your borrowers as you do to your investors and your own business to ensure the success of every investment in your portfolio.

When you have more accurate expectations for your portfolio, you can work them into its performance projections. Every real estate project has its own unique set of circumstances. You won’t know what to expect unless you communicate early and often with your borrowers.

Your Platform
When it comes to building and growing a successful investment platform, offering the right product mix is crucial. Over the past few years, there has been a flood of new private lending operations washing across the country. This is good news because it’s an indicator there is more capital available for real estate investors.

This means lenders must try harder to compete. Lenders can compete on a number of fronts (i.e., service, pricing, and marketing); however, a key strategy to competing in the current landscape is to differentiate your product. Developing unique offerings that capture uncontested loan opportunities makes the competition irrelevant. For example, if most lenders are financing fix-and-flip projects, aim for a different market segment, such as new construction or community development.

In addition to developing the right products for your market, it’s important to develop the service side of your platform, especially your loan servicing processes, to ensure the greatest chance of success. Although we’ve mentioned loan servicing from the borrower’s perspective, you should ensure the speed and accuracy of all loan servicing protocols in order to guarantee the ease of the borrower’s experience and protect the underlying asset. Monitoring construction progress, insurance, taxes, and a variety of other indicators can help your loan servicing operation proactively minimize delinquencies and loan defaults.

All these efforts are bolstered by having the appropriate technology platforms in place. Integrated technology platforms keep everyone in your business on the same page, and the increase these platforms bring to the speed and accuracy of your processes gives you a competitive edge.

If you’ve developed your own technology platform such as a dedicated app for reporting or making and managing investments, you’ve created an even bigger differentiator.

Finally, if knowledge is king, business intelligence gives you a competitive advantage, if you use it properly. Consolidating and accessing data from your business systems and a well-defined business intelligence reporting process can uncover and inform much about the operation of your business.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list of how your business can achieve growth in a highly competitive environment. What’s important is that you remain persistent and creative in your approach to improving and evolving your business as you scale.