Potomac Business Services is a proven leader in providing commercial and commercial real estate services and credit expertise to credit unions. We support our partners across the entire spectrum of commercial lending tasks by supporting your staff with decades of direct lending and servicing experience within both the credit union and banking industries. Our “credit first” approach assures that our partners will receive fair and accurate credit and program evaluation services that put safety and soundness ahead of production.
New Commercial Membership Development
Credit unions possess a number of attractive advantages over traditional bank lenders but sometimes are challenged in finding reliable relationship development channels through which they can communicate their commercial lending programs. PBS can help alleviate this challenge by assessing its partner’s market position, internal resources, and product offerings and recommend a program that will allow it to stand out from the crowd. PBS can help establish specific products, provide lending policies, establish risk rating methodologies and help implement operating procedures that reflect best practices.
Loan Origination
Since we specialize in finding new commercial members for our partners, PBS is able to use its considerable industry contacts to help drive new membership to them. Our business development efforts have been effective in locating new borrowing relationships for our credit union members. PBS has sourced almost $375 million in new borrowing relationships through its contacts since 2007.
Underwriting and Credit Evaluation
Our staff has over 100 years of underwriting and credit administration experience under the regulatory supervision of NCUA, the OCC, OTS, FDIC and numerous state banking and credit union agencies. In addition to specializing in underwriting office, multi-family, mixed-use, hospitality, construction and development and bridge financing, our staff is skilled in USDA, SBA 504 and New Markets Tax Credit finance. We take a “credit first” approach in order to assure that our partners receive accurate and transparent credit evaluation products that prioritizes safety of capital above short term gain.
Participations
Commercial real estate loans are typically illiquid and credit risk is often held exclusively by the originating lender. However, PBS provides comprehensive purchase and sale administration as well as matching of buyers and sellers at no cost to its members. By leveraging its stable of dedicated partners PBS is able to provide unparalleled asset liquidity and risk concentration management tools unavailable to all but a few unaffiliated lenders. We provide the buyer and seller with documentation, execution and funds transfer administration for all participation transactions as well as participation management and servicing.
Our participation capability also allows our members nearly unlimited capacity to scale its internal loan capacity to meet the needs of its borrower by accessing our member network. For this reason your member business loan [MBL] borrowers should never outgrow even the smaller credit unions.
Loan Documentation and Closing
Once a partner has rendered its credit decision PBS can issue standardized loan commitment letters on its behalf and engage our seasoned legal team to begin the loan documentation process. PBS uses a library of customizable legal documents that aligns with our servicing policy in order to ease compliance with standard servicing and operating procedures. This standardization also eases compliance with NCUA regulations and promotes operational consistency. PBS typically handles all aspects of loan closing including engagement of legal counsel, document review, closing administration, funding administration and loan boarding.
Loan Servicing
PBS typically services the loans that it closes on behalf of its membership subject to a standard servicing schedule. Servicing costs can be arranged as monthly payment scrapes or quarterly billings. This service includes all billing, updated document tracking and requests, file administration, document warehousing, document security, site visits, construction draw administration, project tracking, periodic site visits, workouts and asset disposition. In other words, we can handle the servicing process throughout the entire loan lifecycle.
Credit Review
PBS performs annual credit reviews as part of its standard loan servicing process and the cost is covered in the standard servicing fee. In addition, PBS uses a screened third party credit review agency to perform semi-annual independent credit sampling as well as an annual management and practices evaluation. Your reports are addressed to you and are held in strict confidence.
File and Document Administration
We warehouse all original documentation for our members but all documents are digitized for easy member access. PBS uses a secured and encrypted document management and delivery service to assure safe and secure handling of your member’s personal and proprietary documents.
Types of loans
PBS provides mortgage lending products primarily within the middle market segment of the commercial real estate market with loans from $2 million to $20 million. We specialize in the financing of:
- multi-unit residential properties
- triple net lease properties
- national credit anchored retail properties
- non-anchored multi-tenant strip retail centers
- mixed use properties
- owner occupied office/retail/light industrial properties
- GSA government leases
- Real estate secured working capital lines and loans
- brokered owner/occupant
- warehouse/flex properties
- construction, tenant improvement, and renovation
- hotels