Competitive Strengths

Significant Advantages Over Competitors

We believe our competitive strengths include:

Experienced management team

Our management team has successfully originated and serviced a portfolio of real estate mortgage loans generating attractive annual returns under varying economic and real estate market conditions. We expect that the experience of our management team will effectively deploy our capital in a manner that will provide for attractive risk-adjusted returns with a focus on capital preservation and protection.

Long-standing relationships

A significant portion of our business comes from repeat customers with whom we have long-standing relationships. These customers are also a referral source for new borrowers. As these customers remain active real estate investors they provide us with an advantage in securing new business and help maintain a pipeline of attractive new opportunities. Building relationships with our borrowers gives us a first look at any potential lending opportunity.

Knowledge of the market

Our intimate knowledge of the North East and Southern Florida real estate market enhances our ability to identify attractive opportunities and helps distinguish us from many of our competitors.

Disciplined lending

We seek to maximize our risk-adjusted returns, and preserve and protect capital, through our disciplined asset based approach. We utilize rigorous underwriting and loan closing procedures that include numerous checks and balances to evaluate the risks and merits of each potential transaction. We seek to protect and preserve capital by carefully evaluating the condition of the property, the location of the property, the value of the property and other forms of collateral. We often request additional real estate collateral to strengthen our loan to value position.

Vertically-integrated loan origination platform

We manage and control the loan process from origination through closing with our own personnel or independent legal counsel and, in the case of larger loans independent appraisers, who together constitute a team highly experienced in asset evaluation, underwriting and loan structuring. We also believe that our procedures and experience allows us to quickly and efficiently execute opportunities we deem desirable.

Structuring flexibility

As a non-bank real estate lender, we move quickly and have much more flexibility than traditional lenders to structure loans to suit the needs of our clients. Our ability to customize financing structures to meet borrowers’ needs is one of our key business strengths. We are opportunistic lenders.

No legacy issues

Unlike many of our competitors, we are not burdened by distressed legacy real estate assets. We do not have a legacy portfolio of lower-return or problem loans that could potentially dilute the attractive returns we believe are available in the current liquidity-challenged environment and/or distract and monopolize our management team’s time and attention. We do not have any adverse credit exposure to, and we do not anticipate that our performance will be negatively impacted by, previously purchased assets.