Since Feb 2024 we've worked on two searcher deals that are now under offer, and in both cases financing has been the bottleneck to closing. It's a huge pain to figure out which lenders to reach out to, and each one of them has a different intake process and slightly different requirements above and beyond what the SBA requires. We've wasted hours working with one lender before finding out a month in we're not going to get a term sheet from them, and it would have dramatically sped up closing if we had been running the process in parallel with many different lenders.

That's why we're launching a new software platform that helps searchers apply to and compare term sheets across many SBA lenders at the same time.


Here's how our new product (Beacon) works:
1. You submit all the documents required to apply for a SBA 7(a) acquisition loan in our online portal
2. Beacon sifts through our database of all 2000+ SBA lenders and the 250,000+ 7(a) loans they've done since 2020 to find the best fit for your deal
3. Beacon applies to 5-10 of the top matching lenders on your behalf, taking into account criteria such as your timeline and collateral requirements
4. We send you proposal letters from lenders so you can compare between multiple options. If financing falls through for one you still have other lenders that are ready to move quickly.

Unlike loan brokers, we use AI to do the matching so the pool of lenders we consider is much larger than a loan broker. And unlike the SBA's own lender match tool, we actively apply to lenders instead of passively waiting for lenders to reach out on their own timeline, after which you still need to submit an individual application to each one.

We're looking for a few searchers who are under LOI right now to pilot with, if you're interested you can sign up here: https://godealwise.com/beacon.

SBA Lender Info

If you're just curious about some stats on SBA lenders, here's some interesting data from our SBA lenders database. Happy to run some custom searches for you if you're looking for the top lenders for a specific industry, just email me at --@----.com Top Lenders by Number of SBA 7(a) Loans

Live Oak and Huntington came out on top with the most SBA 7(a) loans created between 2020 and 2024.


Concentration of SBA 7(a) loans among top lenders

Out of the 2109 active SBA lenders between Jan 2020 and April 2024, the vast majority of deals were done by the top 500 lenders. However market share within these top lenders is highly fragmented. The top 25 lenders account for only 38.4% of all SBA loans.




Top Lenders by Deal Size

These are the lenders with highest average loan sizes who have originated at least 20 SBA 7(a) loans since 2020.

Notable on this list is GBank - not only are the a top 20 lender by SBA loan volume, they also have the second highest average loan size out of any SBA lender! Way to punch above your weight GBank.