The Truth About Funding Your Assisted Living Business!
Sep 03, 2025
Starting your residential assisted living business can feel exciting... until you hit the big question:
How do I pay for this?
If you’re stuck wondering how to fund your assisted living business—you're not alone. In this post, I’ll break down the truth about funding, share real numbers, and give you clear steps to move forward.
Let’s get into it. 👇
Check out this video, too:
Why Funding Feels So Hard
Funding your assisted living business is one of the hardest parts for beginners. Maybe this sounds familiar:
You don’t have enough for a down payment.
You don’t even know where to find a lender.
You’re unsure if you’ll even qualify.
If that sounds like you, take a deep breath—we’re going to walk through all of it, step-by-step.
3 Main Ways to Fund Your Assisted Living Business
1. SBA Loans (Small Business Administration)
SBA loans are one of the best tools for beginners.
✅ Lower interest rates
✅ Long repayment terms
✅ Can be used to buy a business and real estate
✅ Often include operating capital
Some lenders may say 10% down, but plan on 15% to 20%.
If you’re buying an existing facility or want funding for both real estate and business operations, SBA is a great option.
2. Conventional Mortgages
This works more like a regular home loan, but it gets tricky because this is a business—not your residence.
Most conventional lenders treat this as an investment property, and that means as much as 25% to 30% down.
Also, unlike SBA loans, conventional loans won’t give you operating capital. You’ll need a second loan or personal savings to cover those expenses.
3. Hard Money or Private Loans
These loans can actually be super helpful.
Hard money is best if you:
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Can’t qualify for traditional loans yet
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Need short-term funds quickly
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Plan to refinance later with the SBA once your business is up and running
Terms are usually 12–24 months, then you refinance.
Loan-to-value ranges from 70% to 100%, but you’ll likely need 20% to 30% down.
Where Do You Even Find a Lender?
Here’s how to take the guesswork out of lender shopping:
✅ 1. Use a Lending Broker
A great broker can help you:
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Save time
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Shop multiple lenders
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Find creative financing options
✅ 2. Do an Internet Search
Search for SBA lenders in your state or other related terms. You’ll likely find a registry or list of active SBA lenders. That will give you a place to start reaching out.
From there, you start sending out your business plan and making connections.
✅ 3. Talk About What You’re Doing
Post about your goals. Join a Facebook or real estate group. Attend meetups. Or, just talk.
You never know who’s listening or who they know. Someone in their network might have the funding help you need.
How to Qualify for Funding 📝
Lenders want proof that you have a solid opportunity. Here’s what to prepare:
🧱 Build a Solid Foundation
You need a business plan. You need to know your underwriting.
Lenders expect:
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✅ Clear profitability path
💡 Don’t have that yet? Download my Business Plan Checklist to get started.
📁 Gather Your Documents
Set up a Google Drive folder and keep these ready:
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Personal bank statements & tax returns
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Seller’s financials (if buying an existing facility):
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P&L
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Rent rolls
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Balance sheets
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Property tax docs
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This will save you a ton of time when lenders request them.
💳 Know Your Credit & Build Partnerships
Lenders will check your credit. If your credit isn’t great, build a partnership with someone who has strong credit to improve your chances.
What About Grants?
Grants sound amazing—but they’re rarely the full answer for beginners.
Grants work best if:
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You already own the property
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You’re a nonprofit
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You’ve been operating for a while
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You need funds for renovations, improvements, or specific programs
Grants are a great supplement, but not a reliable primary funding source for startups.
💡 Want help understanding how grants actually work? It’s all inside the Launchpad bundle.
Final Thoughts 💡
Funding your assisted living business can feel confusing—but now you’ve got the roadmap.
Here’s what to do next:
✅ Choose the right funding path (SBA, conventional, or private)
✅ Build your foundation—your business plan and financial model
✅ Start reaching out: lenders, brokers, social media
✅ Don’t wait for “perfect”—take the next step
Free Resources to Help You Start Today
🚀 Need a business plan?
Download the Business Plan Checklist to get a step-by-step guide for building your assisted living foundation.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00 - 00:00:54
Hey friend, I'm Brandon Gustafson with Assisted Living Investing. I help beginners like you launch their assisted living business in the next 12 months. And today's video, we're going to be getting into the truth about funding your assisted living business. If you're trying to figure that out, make sure you stick around for today's [Music] video. Hey friend, welcome back to Assisted Living Investing. Excited to have you here with me on the channel. Before we dive in and get started, make
00:00:30 - 00:01:22
sure you go and grab your free underwriting calculator at assisted livinginvesting.net. It's going to be the big blue box in the top right corner. When you get to the site, grab that free resource. It will help you along your path, especially for our topic that we're discussing today, which is the truth about funding your assisted living business. as I have been working with people in this world of assisted living and and trying to coach people and help them understand what they need to do and how to make progress and
00:00:55 - 00:01:47
things as they're trying to just you know figure out how to do this. I have found that funding is one of the things that is the most difficult. Funding can be confusing. It can be hard to understand. It can be hard to know, you know, what's your down payment? Who should you be talking to? How do you build your base of of information so that you know how to get it to the people that are going to need this and approve it? So, we're going to get into that in today's video and talk a little
00:01:21 - 00:02:13
bit deeper about the specifics of what you can expect there. Now, the first thing I want to talk with you about is some of the major funding concerns that are out there. I don't have enough for a down payment. I don't I don't know how to even find a lender. Or you're worried about qualifying for funding. If that's you, if if it's one of you, I'd love to hear from you. Now, let's talk a little bit about specifically what does that down payment look like. And really, it's
00:01:47 - 00:02:40
going to depend. The down payment that you're looking for is it's going to depend on the loan type that you are going to be going after. One loan type that you should definitely be aware of as you're getting into assisted living is SBA. Now, SBA, it's a small business administration. Typically, the SBA is going to have some pretty favorable rates, some pretty favorable terms. You can use it to buy a business. You can use it to buy the real estate. It can be really flexible. It's a really good
00:02:14 - 00:03:10
product. But what's the down payment there? Some lenders are going to tell you that it's as low as 10%. In my experience, you're probably going to be looking at 15 to 20% when you're looking at working with an SBA lender. Now, another one that you want to be aware of is conventional mortgages. Conventional mortgage, think, you know, just like a normal mortgage that you're going to use when you go and buy a house. This could be an FHA loan, could be a VA loan, could just be, you know, a normal
00:02:42 - 00:03:39
conventional mortgage. But when you're doing this with assisted living, because this is not going to be your personal residence, what you're going to need to do is it's going to be classified as an investment property. And typically, when you're working with an investment property on a conventional mortgage, what that's going to entail is about a 25 to 30% down payment. There may be some other options out there if you are able to do FHA, if you're able to do a VA loan. There may be certain, you know,
00:03:11 - 00:04:06
little stipulations there that will allow you to get a lower down payment, but I would suggest that you plan on something that's 25 to 30% down. Now, one thing that's really nice about the SBA that is not necessarily true about a conventional mortgage is with the SBA, you can get extra operating capital for the business, whereas that conventional mortgage is going to just be for the property. Now, you when you're buying just a house and you're going to convert it, the price there is probably going to
00:03:38 - 00:04:29
be a little bit lower than buying an existing facility using an SBA loan. So, it can kind of even out. Just know that as you're going into this and getting a conventional mortgage for a house, you're probably going to need some other type of funding to allow you to get the operating capital that you need. Unless you have those funds available to you, that could be some kind of a small business loan, could be an SBA loan that is specific to the operating capital. There's a lot of different options that
00:04:04 - 00:04:57
are out there. You just have to kind of know where to look for those. So, type in funding sources down below if you are interested in understanding exactly how that works for you and how I could help you out and and figuring out how you're going to get the funding for your specific situation. Now, the third one that I want to talk to you about for funding your assisted living business is hard money or private funds. Typically, when you're looking working in this world, it's going to be very much
00:04:30 - 00:05:33
contingent on the value of the real estate and and what's in there. Some lenders can do up to 100% loan to value, so they will loan you the full amount. Others have a a smaller um they're a little more conservative. They want something that's, you know, 80 70% 70 to 80% of loan to value, which means your down payment in that scenario would be 20 to 30%. The chances of you finding somebody that's like 100% loan to value and they don't need any type of a down payment is pretty slim, but it can
00:05:01 - 00:05:56
happen. Hard money is is something that it it can scare people. Just like the name of it, hard money. It feels scary. When in reality, it's a great way for you to get into the business, get it operating. Typically, hard money loans are 12 to 24 months in length and then they balloon and then you pay it off. You would refinance at that point. So, if you are struggling trying to find an SBA lender, trying to find somebody that does a conventional mortgage that's going to work for you and work with you,
00:05:29 - 00:06:16
you may need to go the hard money route for 12 to 24 months. Show the business is doing good. Go back to an SBA lender and say, "Hey, I've now been running the business for a little bit. I need to refinance this into your SBA loan. Uh, what's the process for that?" And it's a very different conversation because now you own the business. You've been doing it for a period of time. you have proof and documents showing how it's been working and it can really allow you to
00:05:52 - 00:06:33
catapult yourself forward and and make some really good progress as you're trying to launch your assisted living business. So, those are going to be your three big ways of getting funding. There's other opportunities out there. We'll talk a few about a couple of those here at the end of the video, so make sure you stick around so you can learn a little bit about those, specifically grants. I want to talk to you about that. So, if you're interested in grants, make sure you stick around for
00:06:13 - 00:07:07
the end of the video. Now, let's talk a little bit about finding a lender. So, finding a lender can be overwhelming. It can be hard. There are so many banks out there, so many people out there that that are just like, "Yeah, here's money." Or you like, you don't even know cuz you just see a bank and you assume, "Oh, they they just do personal banking." When in reality, there's a lot of banks out there that do different types of lending and different types of loan products or credit, just other
00:06:39 - 00:07:33
funding mechanisms that they have that may fit what you need. So going out there and and starting to talk and build relationships with lenders is going to allow you to be far more successful than if you were just trying to make assumptions that they're not going to be able to help you out. Now, finding a lender, something that I really think you should be doing is working with a lending broker. And we had a conversation a few weeks ago with a Regina. We're going to link her video up above so you can go and look at that.
00:07:06 - 00:08:02
Regina helped me secure some short-term funding that I needed for my business in Colorado. We had a grant. It was a million dollars. But the way that that grant worked is you had to pay your contractors for the work. It was a renovation grant that allowed us to make a bunch of improvements to the home. Well, we had to pay those contractors and then we had to get their receipt and then we had to submit it to the state for reimbursement. And I don't know about you, but I didn't just have $300,000 sitting around ready to go to
00:07:34 - 00:08:29
pay all my contractors. So, I worked with Regina. She helped me secure 300 $350,000. We got it in about a 3-week period of time. We got access to that to those funds. We paid all of our contractors. We got the receipts. We submitted them to the state for our reimbursement. We got that back. We paid off those those short-term loans. So, Regina was instrumental in helping me do that. But she does more than just those types of loans. She's great. And finding somebody like Regina is going to help you out a
00:08:02 - 00:08:50
ton. So, if you haven't already, make sure you go watch that video and reach out to Regina when you are needing some help there in in in getting funding. Um, that's how we got our funding actually in the first place. We worked with a guy, I think his name was Dan, who was at the Bank of Denver. He doesn't do this anymore, but he was instrumental in helping us get the funds that we needed for our assisted living businesses upfront. It's all about finding that lending broker, somebody that can help
00:08:26 - 00:09:22
you out, that understands, and can really help you navigate the the lending space. Super important. is going to be super helpful, a key person for you to be talking to. Next thing is to just do an internet search. If you don't know how to find these people, doing a simple internet search for something like SBA lenders near me in my state, you know, something along those lines, you're going to find some kind of a registry. If there's not one that is like official, somebody has built one that's
00:08:54 - 00:09:45
going to give you that information. And then you now have a list of 50 banks that do SBA loans. and then you can start reaching out to them. This is where having a really solid business foundation is so important. And we're going to link down below a link for the assisted living launchpad bundle, which helps you really build that foundation because it is absolutely critical for you to have that foundation when you start talking to these lenders. You have to have a business plan. You need to
00:09:20 - 00:10:04
know your underwriting. You need to know exactly where you're at or else they're just going to say no. So, you can do an internet search. you can find all that information and then once you have that list of lenders now you can start reaching out to them. You're sending them your business plan. You're making some really good progress and it's going to allow you to actually get some traction with people and people are going to be excited about helping you out. That's another way that you can do
00:09:42 - 00:10:33
this. That's actually how I got funding for one of my businesses in the past. So, really good strategy. Third way is to just do some cold outreach to people about your goals. just getting out there, getting on social media, getting out and and just letting people know that you're doing what you are are doing. Get in real estate groups, just communicate it out. Communicate your vision, what you're doing to make progress on it. And when you do those things and people see it and and you
00:10:07 - 00:10:55
have that foundation, again, we're going to go back to that foundation cuz you need that. If you have that in place, it makes those conversations go so much more smoothly. You're going to have so much more traction as you're trying to move things along with them. So, talk about it. get out and and go and do some networking and reach out to people and let them know what you are trying to do and people will get excited about and they want to start working with you. So that's another way just open your mouth,
00:10:31 - 00:11:18
get it out there and let people know what you're working towards and see you never know what's going to happen and and it might not be the person you're talking to but it could be their friend or somebody else in their network. Always always always open your mouth and let people know what you're doing. Now let's talk a little bit about how you're going to qualify for lending. So, when it comes to qualifications, you need to have that business plan together. You have to build the foundation. Make sure
00:10:55 - 00:11:46
you go and grab the launchpad. We'll have a link down below for that. Uh, but it is absolutely crucial. And if you haven't listened to that talk with Regina that I was just talking about, go listen to it because she talks about the importance of having that foundational piece there, your business plan. You need to have your underwriting. You need to know number one, is it profitable for you to be doing this? Like, does it make sense for you from a financial standpoint? If it does, then you need to
00:11:20 - 00:12:10
have that in place so that you can start working with lenders because they're going to want to see that underwriting. They want to see that 24, maybe even a 36-month perform to see where it's going. So, absolutely crucial for you to get to that point. You need to gather a bunch of other documents, your bank statements, tax returns, all of those types of things. It is so beneficial for you to just have that in a Google Drive folder somewhere so that it's readily accessible to the person that you're
00:11:45 - 00:12:32
going to be giving it to. And if you're talking with 50 different lenders, 10 of them are going to want to see a lot of that information. It's going to save you a ton of time if you just create a folder that's going to help you make some progress there. The next one is gathering documents from the seller. So, if you're buying something from somebody, you need to get their information. You need to get their P&Ls, their balance sheets, their tax returns. You need to grab all of that information
00:12:09 - 00:12:54
because a lender is going to want and need to see that information. So, rent rolls and there there's just a whole slew of of documents that you have to get from a seller. They're also going to be looking at your personal creditworthiness. And I know for a lot of you that's something that is a concern that you you don't know how credit's going to work. It's where building partnerships with people can really benefit you. If you go and find somebody that has good credit and bring
00:12:32 - 00:13:21
them into your partnership, that can benefit you. But they will look at your personal credit. If you can put all of those things together though in a nice package and you're really quick at getting it out to people, they're going to be a lot more excited about working with you. It's going to give you a lot more success as you're trying to secure the funding that that you need. Now, let's talk a little bit about grants here as well. Grants, I'm going to be totally upfront with you. They are
00:12:56 - 00:13:55
probably not going to be the answer for you to get the funding you need to start. It's really hard for you if you're a for-profit business. you're a brand new entity, like you just barely set it up, you know, three months ago. Um, you have no track record of what you're doing and you're trying to buy a house and renovate it and get all of the equipment that you need in there. Chances of you getting a grant that's going to do all of that, I would say very, very slim. Now, if you are opening
00:13:26 - 00:14:11
things up and and you're a nonprofit, you've been operating for a little bit, you own the property already, you just need it for some renovations, now you're starting to open up different doors. It doesn't mean that something's going to automatically be there. Grants are hard to find. They they can be very difficult. If you need help with that, go check out the Launchpad product. Again, we'll have that link down below cuz in there is the grant funding foundation's course. It's a part of the
00:13:49 - 00:14:44
Launchpad bundle. Can really help you understand what it takes to get grants and and what you should be looking for there. Grants are hard. They they take a lot of work and I know there's so many of you out there that want grants. I don't think you should be relying on them. They're a great supplemental way to help you get started. That doesn't mean that they're not out there, that you can't use them. It's just something that you need to be aware of going into it. It is not going to be the absolute
00:14:16 - 00:15:07
answer for you as you get into this. I just want to be honest with you. We have covered a ton in this video. So much stuff here. If you found this to be helpful at all, make sure you like the video, subscribe, and ring the bell as well so you get notified every time we put out awesome content like this to help you out on your journey to launching your assisted living business. I'd love to help you out as well. Make sure you go over to assistedlivinginvesting.net and grab our free underwriting calculator. Uh we'll
00:14:42 - 00:15:25
have a link for that. Uh it's just a big blue box in the top right corner. Go grab that. And down below, we're going to have links as well for the launchpad. And if you need a step-by-step process to try to help you figure out how to do this, including the funding piece, which is phase three of my five phase approach, we have the accelerator course down below as well. So, make sure you go and grab that in your link. Does residential assisted living sound interesting to you, but you don't know
00:15:03 - 00:15:48
how to get started? At assisted living investing, I help beginners like you launch their assisted living business in the next 12 months. I love helping and coaching people. Would love to do that for you. And remember, it doesn't take a lot, just a little bit. Just keep going step by step by step. And I promise you, if you do and you're consistent and persistent, you're going to be successful. Thanks for watching and have a great day. [Music]
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