Five weeks trying to find anyone to write a loan on an $84,000 house

I had a small house under contract at $84,000 in a working town about an hour out. Cheap, tenanted, nothing exciting. I thought the financing would be the easy part because the number was so small.

It was the opposite. I called four brokers. Two never called back. The third told me straight away that at that loan size his compensation would be somewhere around $1,300 and he was not going to do the same amount of work he does on a $400,000 file for that, which I actually respected. The fourth said yes, took my documents, and went silent for eleven days before telling me his two portfolio lenders both have a $100,000 minimum loan amount.

So the problem was never my file. It was that the loan was too small for the people I was calling to make money on, and too small for a chunk of lenders to bother writing at all. Nobody told me minimum loan amounts were a thing. I assumed lenders wanted volume and a loan was a loan.

I lost the deal. Seller extended once by ten days and then went to a cash buyer at $80,500. Out of pocket I only lost the inspection at $425 and five weeks I will not get back.

What I would do differently. Ask about the minimum loan amount in the first two minutes of the first call, before I send anyone a single document. And on a purchase that small, talk to the small local banks and credit unions in that town directly instead of going through a broker who has no reason to want the file.