I'm Chris Sava. I own Hub Financing, LLC, a commercial mortgage brokerage in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I place ground-up construction, bridge, fix-and-flip, DSCR rental, multifamily, condo conversion, land, and special-situation debt for real estate developers and investors. Mostly New England. Nationwide when the deal calls for it.

I'm not a lender. I don't fund loans off a balance sheet, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I do is sit between you and roughly every credible capital source in the private and bank space, and make them compete for your deal.

Seven years in private lending. And here's the part that actually matters to you: in that time I've read and compared hundreds of loan programs. Not marketing pages. The real guidelines. Leverage caps, minimum sponsor experience, draw mechanics, interest reserve treatment, exit fees, extension tests, recourse carve-outs, the conditions buried on page four of the term sheet that decide whether a deal closes on time or at all.

Almost nobody accumulates that view. A developer sees the handful of programs they've personally borrowed under. A loan officer sees one. I've spent seven years reading the whole shelf, side by side, and watching which programs performed the way they were advertised.

I use that against the lenders now, on your behalf.

What's Actually Going On Inside a Direct Lender

Developers go direct because it feels cheaper and faster. One phone call, no middleman, no extra points. I understand the logic. But when you've read enough of these programs against each other, the structural problems stop looking like bad luck and start looking like design.

A direct lender has exactly one product. Their product. Their leverage caps, their credit box, their geography, their asset class preferences, their sponsor experience requirements. When your deal doesn't fit, you don't get told "you need a different lender." You get told "here's what we can do," and what they can do is a worse version of your deal. Lower LTC. Bigger interest reserve. A guaranty you didn't want to sign. You take it because you think that's the market. It isn't the market. It's one lender's appetite on one particular Tuesday.

The person quoting you is paid on volume, not on fit. A loan officer at a direct shop has a number to hit. Their job is to get your deal into their pipeline and keep it there. Not to tell you that the fund down the street is doing 85% of cost on the same project at 200 basis points less. They're not villains for this. They're employees with quotas. But their interests and yours are only pointed in the same direction by accident.

Credit boxes move, and nobody calls you to say so. Private lenders are levered. They borrow to lend, whether through warehouse lines, note-on-note facilities, or a securitization pipeline. When their cost of capital moves, when their leverage provider tightens, when a couple of loans in their book go sideways, the box tightens overnight. Deals that were slam dunks in the spring get repriced or shelved in the fall. If you're a direct borrower with one relationship, you find out about this at the worst possible moment: two weeks from your acquisition deadline, on a call that starts with "so, we need to revisit a few things."

Retrades happen because they can. Once you're forty days in, out of pocket for third-party reports, and staring down a closing date, the leverage flips entirely. You have no alternative and everyone knows it. The appraisal comes in soft, the "revised" proceeds come down, the rate ticks up, and you close anyway because you have no choice. A retrade against a direct borrower with no backup is nearly free. A retrade against a borrower whose broker has two other term sheets on the desk costs the lender the whole deal.

Turnover destroys institutional memory. Loan officers, processors, and underwriters at private shops churn constantly. The person who knew your last three deals is gone, and you're re-explaining your track record to someone who's reading your file for the first time and pattern-matching it against a policy manual.

Why Brokers Are the Best-Informed People in This Industry

Not the best marketed. The best informed. There's a difference, and it comes down to volume of information.

A direct lender sees their own deals. A developer sees their own deals. A good broker sees hundreds of term sheets a year across dozens of capital sources, and sees the ones that funded next to the ones that fell apart. That's the dataset. Nobody else in the transaction has it.

It means I know things you can't find out from a rate sheet or a website:

• Which lenders quote aggressively and then retrade, and which ones honor the term sheet they issued
• Who is actually funding this month versus who is out of dry powder and still taking applications
• Which credit committees kill deals over sponsor experience, and which ones care far more about the GC and the budget
• Who can actually close in eighteen days, and who says eighteen and means forty-five
• How a marginal deal needs to be packaged, story and all, to survive the specific underwriter who's going to read it
• What the last five comparable deals actually priced at, not what the market "should" be

That's not a rate-shopping service. That's market intelligence, and it's perishable. It's worth what it's worth precisely because it can't be Googled.

Yes, It Costs More. Pay It Anyway.

I'll be direct, because pretending otherwise insults your intelligence: on some deals, going through a broker costs more in total points than going direct. That is a real number and you should weigh it.

Here's what you're buying with it.

Competition. The single most expensive mistake a developer makes is negotiating against one lender. When three lenders know they're bidding against each other, pricing, leverage, and structure all move in your direction, and they move by more than the fee. A quarter point of leverage on a construction loan is worth multiples of a broker fee on the same deal.

Enforcement. This is the part developers underestimate. A broker who brings a lender ten deals a year has leverage that no individual borrower will ever have. When a lender wants to retrade my client, they're not weighing one deal against one borrower. They're weighing one deal against their relationship with the person who feeds them a chunk of their pipeline. That asymmetry keeps lenders honest in a way that no term sheet language can. It is, bluntly, the most valuable thing I sell.

Speed, where it counts. Not the first call. The forty days after it. Knowing what a specific underwriter needs before they ask, packaging the file so it doesn't bounce, and knowing when a deal is quietly dying so we can pivot to the backup lender with three weeks of runway instead of three days.

Optionality. Direct means one shot. If it fails, you start over and you've burned your timeline. I don't run one process; I run a parallel one and keep a live alternative until you're funded.

A cheap loan that doesn't close is the most expensive financing in real estate.

How I Work

I'm the whole firm. You deal with me, from the first call through the closing table, and nobody hands your file to a junior processor. I read your budget before I shop it, and if it has a problem, I'll tell you rather than let an underwriter tell you three weeks later. If your deal doesn't work, I'll say that too. That's a faster answer than most direct lenders will ever give you.

Hub Financing is compensated by the lender at closing. There's no application fee to talk to me and no charge for a real opinion on whether your deal is financeable.

If you're a developer or investor with a project in the next ninety days, send me the deal. Worst case, you get a free read from someone who has compared hundreds of loan programs and knows which ones your deal actually fits.

Chris Sava Hub Financing, LLC
25L Inn Street, Newburyport, MA 01950
chris@hubfinancing.com | 978-417-9325 | hubfinancing.com