Become an Irresistible Buyer: Win Over Lenders in Assisted Living
Jan 14, 2025
If you’re thinking about starting or expanding an assisted living business, securing funding is one of the most critical steps. But here’s the thing: lenders and brokers want to work with buyers they trust. So, how do you make yourself their top pick?
In this blog, I’ll share proven strategies to position yourself as the kind of buyer lenders love. Whether you’re new to the industry or already have experience, these tips will help you stand out, secure funding, and close deals confidently.
Check out the video, too:
Why Being “Buyer-Ready” Matters
Lenders aren’t just giving money away—they’re investing in your ability to run a successful business. To earn their trust, you need to:
- Show you’re knowledgeable about assisted living.
- Demonstrate you’re organized and reliable.
- Prove you have what it takes to manage finances and grow your business.
When you’re well-prepared, lenders feel confident giving you the funding you need to make your assisted living dreams a reality.
Highlight Your Experience (Or Borrow Some!)
Show Off Your Skills
If you’ve worked in senior care or healthcare, even briefly, make it a key part of your loan application. Lenders value experience because it shows you understand the industry.
For example, when I was putting together my bio on my business plan, I wrote about how I had worked as a CNA in high school over a decade ago. That was a long time ago, but it's relevant so I included it on my application, and lenders appreciated it. Even a small connection to the industry can go a long way!
No Experience? No Problem!
If you’re new to assisted living, consider partnering with someone who has industry experience. This can strengthen your application and reassure lenders that your team has the knowledge to succeed.
Frame Your Existing Experience as Relevant
Think outside the box! Even if you’ve never worked in assisted living, you probably have skills that translate.
Here’s how:
- Caregiving for Family: If you’ve cared for an elderly loved one, mention it. It shows you understand the challenges and rewards of senior care.
- Team Management: Running a team in any industry demonstrates leadership—an essential skill in assisted living.
- Financial Skills: Have you managed budgets or handled payroll? That’s gold when applying for loans.
You’re not exaggerating; you’re showing how your unique background makes you the right fit.
Be Extremely Responsive
Lenders and brokers want to see you’re organized and serious about the process. Responding quickly to requests for documents or providing quick updates is one of the easiest ways to build trust.
Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Send What You Have: If you don’t have all the requested paperwork, send what’s ready and explain when they can expect the rest.
- Over-Communicate: If there’s a delay, let them know. Lenders appreciate honesty and effort.
Being responsive shows you’re proactive and dependable—qualities every lender wants in a buyer.
Build a Strong Reputation by Closing Deals
Your reputation is one of your biggest assets. Following through on deals and keeping your word builds trust with lenders, brokers, and sellers.
- When Things Get Tough: Challenges happen. Working through them shows resilience and problem-solving skills.
- If You Back Out: Sometimes, a deal doesn’t work out. Be upfront about why and communicate clearly to maintain good relationships.
Closing deals—even small ones—proves you’re serious and reliable, opening doors for future opportunities.
Quick Tips to Stand Out
- Create a Strong Business Plan: Outline your vision, financials, and strategy for running your assisted living facility.
- Keep Your Credit in Check: A solid credit score makes lenders more likely to say “yes.”
- Research Market Trends: Knowing the assisted living industry inside and out will impress lenders and show you’re ready to succeed.
- Leverage Networking: Get referrals from industry professionals to boost your credibility.
Key Takeaways
Let’s recap how to become an irresistible buyer:
- Highlight Your Experience: Showcase relevant skills or partner with an industry expert.
- Frame Your Skills: Show how your background makes you the perfect fit.
- Be Responsive: Stay on top of communication and meet deadlines.
- Build Your Reputation: Follow through on deals and communicate openly.
By using these strategies, you’ll set yourself apart and become a top choice for lenders and brokers. With the right preparation and mindset, you’ll be one step closer to owning and growing a successful assisted living business.
Now’s your time—get ready to impress and make your vision a reality!
What’s Next?
If you're interested in diving deeper into the assisted living business, download our free Business Plan Checklist to help you create a successful business plan for your assisted living facility.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:01
[Music] hey everybody thanks for getting back to assisted living investing we're happy to have you on the channel today i'm brandon gustafson i have an exciting announcement for you i'm going to be launching a new website assistedlivinginvesting.net.com has already taken so assistedlivinginvesting.net i'd love to see you over there you can subscribe i'm going to be putting out a newsletter i have some free resources out there on on the website so i'd love to see you over
00:00:40
there assistedlivinginvesting.net just a really quick recap of our last four videos uh we've been talking about my calculator reviewing that and going through it and and kind of teaching you how to use the calculator i really hope that that was valuable i'd love to hear from you please comment down below let me know if if that was helpful if that type of a tutorial was helpful to you and if you're interested in other resources that i've mentioned in other videos or there's something that you'd like me
00:01:09
to go through tutorials or how to's or or different things like that different resources please comment down below i'd love to to teach you and kind of give you a real-time perspective on what it looks like and how those types of tools might work and i can kind of go through those with you at the same time i just want to make sure that you are ringing bell to make sure you get notified of that content when it comes up make sure you like uh like the video give me a big thumbs up uh comment uh
00:01:39
and subscribe to the video uh and make sure you're following me on all my other social media i'm on facebook instagram twitter and putting out uh short tic toc videos as well so make sure you're following me and uh getting all the information that you need so you can be a successful investor i'd love to hear from you and i hope that you're finding this content valuable so today we're going to get into how to make yourself an attractive buyer to a lender and as i'm getting into it a lot of this stuff
00:02:06
also applies to how to make yourself an attractive buyer to a broker and how you can work with a broker and we'll get into that a lot more here in the next few videos but that's something i really wanted to touch on because making yourself an attractive buyer to a lender is going to be key in allowing you to close on a deal but the first thing that you want to do is highlight your experience in the industry or if you don't have any experience make sure you're partnering with somebody who
00:02:31
has that experience being interested in an asset class really isn't enough for a lender they want you to to have some experience in it now that experience doesn't necessarily need to be in-depth 20 years of experience working in in you know assisted living or something like that it doesn't need to be that but they do want to see some experience something a little bit more than just a really deep interest in the asset class so you just want to make sure that you are articulating uh the
00:02:58
type of experience that you have or that you're partnering with somebody that has that experience so you can put that on your application as you're going through things with the lender and and talking with the underwriters and and getting everybody kind of comfortable with your experience and and your ability to uh to close the deal and then operate the business is what they're going to be looking at especially if you're doing an sba loan that's going to be really key for you
00:03:21
you're going to want to learn how to frame your existing experience into relevant experience something you can do to to frame your existing experience into relevant experience is have you done caregiving for a loved one have you done any volunteer work is it work that you did several years ago so i think i talked about this in a past video i worked as a cna when i was in high school so you know 10 15 years ago a long time ago not extremely relevant experience given the length of time but i've had that
00:03:53
experience and so i was able to put that on my application put it on my bio put it in my resume and just kind of highlighted those things obviously i have more experience in healthcare but actual caregiving experience is something that that lenders really wanted to see from us and i was able to put that on there my dad had worked with kind of caregiving for his mother and those types of different things so highlighting those things on your application is going to be important so that's a really good way that you can
00:04:22
kind of frame your existing experience you're not lying about things but you're kind of putting out the information that that makes it relevant to the type of asset class that you're going to be looking at the next tip is going to be that you you be extremely responsive to lenders and brokers this one is really important for both of them so you're going to want to make sure you get a list of of things that the brokers or the lender needs and then you get that information to them as quickly as possible like they
00:04:48
ask for it and you get it to them the same day next day but the other thing is you want to make sure that you are over communicating you are talking to them uh you're letting them know oh yeah here's here's you know you asked me for ten documents here's eight of them i'm working on the other two i should be able to get them to you um you know in the next two days um that's something that you want to do make sure you're over communicating make sure you're working with them make sure
00:05:11
you let them know that you're working on getting an item don't let there be any radio silence there they really appreciate when you're able to kind of talk to them about things and and just get them the information that they need so they can be successful sometimes it's going to take you a few days to get a certain document and they're fine with that like it's not a big deal but you want to make sure that you're communicating with them so that you're top of mind things don't fall by
00:05:34
the wayside and the more that you do that the more success that you're going to have the better experience that you're going to have with them so the next thing is to close the deal as this is going to be extremely important to lenders and brokers if you want to start building a good reputation so that you can find more deals find off-market bills continue to build your portfolio building that reputation and closing a deal is going to be extremely important so it's one of the most important things that you can do is
00:06:00
close the deal once you commit to something unless something just like horrible the huge roadblock um comes up it's probably gonna be in your best interest to go through with the deal as long as it's not something that you're gonna you've found through more due diligence you're gonna actually lose money or it's just like not giving you any kind of return um realistically and and just the process just isn't going to fit for you in that case like you don't want to just close a deal just to close
00:06:25
a deal to maintain a relationship um but if it's something that you you know just kind of tired of working with the seller which can happen um you're running into some barriers working with the state to get your license in place like those that's part of of the process of purchasing an assisted living facility you're going to run into some hard things it's not going to be easy it's going to be difficult there are going to be some roadblocks some bumps along the way and that's okay
00:06:52
don't let those things derail you just make sure that you're able to overcome them and and get the deal closed it's going to be in your best interest to just overcome those those trials that come up those bumps in the road just making sure you get through them it's going to be in your best interest so just just do it make sure you're not wasting anybody's time the broker the lender anybody that you're working with your attorneys your cpa i think that's really good advice just in general don't
00:07:16
waste people's time make sure that you are doing what you have committed to doing um it's really not going to work out for some reason make sure that you are over communicating on why you're backing out don't just back out stop emailing everybody fall off the face of the earth don't do that make sure you are communicating communication is is such a big part of this business and you got you have to make sure that you are over communicating on everything that you're doing so that everybody knows what's
00:07:40
going on you're transparent uh my experience in doing that people just they they really appreciate it it makes your conversations just go so much more smoothly so that that one's key just don't waste people's time over communicate and if you are gonna back out then like be consistent communicate it and and do it don't waffle don't go back and forth on things make your decision and and go for it and if you do that you're gonna just have a much better experience you're going to
00:08:08
just develop a lot better relationships so as a recap today we were talking about the biggest ways that you can make yourself an attractive buyer to a lender and also to brokers and make sure you're highlighting that industry experience make sure that you're being extremely responsive and over communicating and make sure you close the deal next time we're going to get into how to make yourself an attractive buyer to a seller so the the other person that you're going to be working with a lot as
00:08:33
you're going through the purchasing process is going to be the seller you got to make sure you have that relationship we're going to get into our next video so make sure you're liking the video comment subscribe follow me on my other social media platforms i'd love to see you over there and then make sure you visit assistedliving.net for free resources and to join my mailing list for future free content i i'd love to see you over there i'd love to have you join the community and i'm excited to
00:08:56
see where we go with things thanks for watching assisted living investing today and hope to see you next time [Music] you
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