Nothing is wrong with your business. The lender does not like your building.
Special purpose properties get judged on how easily they could be sold, not on how well you run them. Understanding that changes how you approach the financing.
The situation as you experience it
The business runs well. The numbers are good, the operating history is there, and you can explain every line. Then the lender reads the property type and the conversation cools.
It reads as a judgement on you. It almost never is.
Why this happens
Lenders underwrite the exit as much as the borrower. The question sitting behind every commercial credit decision is simple: if we have to sell this, what happens.
A warehouse has hundreds of plausible buyers and dozens of plausible uses. A purpose built car wash has one use and a small pool of buyers who want it. That is a harder exit, and a harder exit means lower leverage and wider pricing no matter how strong the operator is.
The classes that draw this treatment in British Columbia are familiar. Gas stations and anything with environmental history. Car washes. Restaurants. Daycares. Churches and places of worship. Funeral homes. Marinas. Single tenant purpose built facilities of almost any kind.
Some of these have their own pages, because the underwriting detail matters: gas stations, hotels and motels and self storage.
What your options actually are
Lenders who know the asset class. The single biggest lever. A lender who has funded twenty car washes reads yours in an afternoon. A lender seeing the first one sends it to committee with questions nobody can answer.
Lower leverage conventionally. A conventional lender who would decline at higher leverage will often stretch at a lower one, because the equity cushion answers the exit question for them. Costs you cash up front and saves you rate for the whole term.
Private or alternative lenders. They price the risk rather than declining it, which is genuinely useful on assets the banks will not touch. The rate reflects that. Our private and second mortgage page sets out the cost.
Plan the equity, do not be surprised by it
The most common way these deals go wrong is not a decline. It is a borrower who budgeted standard leverage, wrote the offer on that basis, and discovered late that the lender will fund considerably less.
On a special purpose asset assume less leverage from the start and confirm it before subjects come off. If the equity is not there, that is worth knowing in week one rather than in week five, and sometimes the honest conclusion is that the purchase has to wait until it is.
What we would need to look at it
The property address and type, two years of operating statements, and any environmental report already in hand. That is enough to tell you which lenders in British Columbia will engage on the asset and roughly what leverage to plan around, before you spend money on anything.
Unusual assets.
Related situations
Send us the property and the numbers.
The address, the operating statements and what you paid or expect to pay. We will tell you which lenders take that asset class in British Columbia and what leverage to plan for.