7 Key Differences Between Residential & Commercial Real Estate Financing

My previous piece, “How to Finance Your First Commercial Real Estate Deal”, discussed what you should expect to know when you’re looking to finance your first CRE deal. It’s helpful to those that are familiar with residential financing and want to cross over into commercial real estate investing.

This piece provides specific differences between the two sides of real estate finance: Residential vs. Commercial.

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• 7 differences include: borrower, government sponsorship, payment term, interest rate / credit score, LTV ratio, down payment, and closing time.
• This is only an initial guide and NOT a comprehensive list.
• Please contact me or another capital advisor (for commercial) or a loan originator (for residential) for additional advice.

Commercial vs. Residential Financing

1. Who is the borrower?
2. Does the government back/sponsor these loans?
3. What are the payment terms?
4. How do interest rates compare and do credit scores matter?
5. What are my max leverage ratios?
6. What are the typical down payment amounts?
7. How fast do these loans close?

The Breakdown

Disclaimer

The inspiration for his table came from Mortgage Calculator as they do a great job highlighting high-level differences.

I pared it down to simply and updated it with more current data.

Please note that this is only an initial guide and NOT a comprehensive list of all the differences, all the options, and all the potential exceptions. Please contact me or another capital advisor (for commercial) or a loan originator (for residential) for additional advice.