We’re happy to announce that we’ve officially added additional asset types to the StackSource platform. For the last two years, we’ve arranged financing across the five core asset types in commercial real estate: Multifamily, Office, Industrial, Retail, and Hospitality. But the reality is that there are several other prominent asset types in the market we’ve been missing, along with new niche asset types arising in the market where we have already begun providing capital solutions.

Entirely new categories

First thing you’ll notice on StackSource when you go to create a new project is that more asset types are present on the first screen. In addition to the five that have been present, we’ve added Land, Self Storage, Religious facilities, and Hospitals.

Land can be financed in several ways. A bridge loan on land could be used for the purpose of covering pre-development costs. StackSource can also arrange capital for “horizontal development”, which would be a developer taking raw land and adding basic infrastructure to support vertical development.

Self Storage has become a major asset class in commercial real estate in its own right over the last decade or two. At launch here, we have over 100 lenders across the country interested in self storage loans of various sizes, locations, and deal scenarios.

Religious facilities are ubiquitous in the US, but function pretty differently than your typical “commercial” real estate. The church, mosque, synagogue, etc could be a tenant in the property or own it themselves. Either way, there’s a specialized set of lenders that provide financing for these types of properties.

Hospitals can also be considered owner-occupied (own their own building) or can operate as a tenant under a landlord. Either way, operating history is key to underwriting one as real estate collateral, whether the hospital is for-profit or non-profit.

New sub-categories

In addition to the entirely new categories above, we’ve also broken out sub-types to a few of the asset classes we have already provided support for at StackSource.

Multifamily

We’ve broken out Multifamily into several different sub-classes. Apartments is the most common, but we also now more specifically match lenders and tailor underwriting guidelines to the seven other categories shown above.

The newest to the market in this space has been Co-living, which has sprung onto the scene over the last few years to address the growing affordability challenge in America’s cities, while taking advantage of a shifting millennial-led mindset of the sharing economy. We dive deeper into Co-living here.

Medical Office

Rather than try to shoe-horn this into retail (because clients walk in) or office, we’ve now given Medical Office the credit it deserves as a separate niche asset class. We’ve already seen instances where lenders in our network are interested in Medical Office when they are not necessarily excited about traditional Office uses, so this will be a helpful distinction for borrowers and lenders alike.

Industrial

We’ve broken out Industrial a couple of ways. Manufacturing facilities have a much deeper underwriting in the the operating business, as they are typically more tailored and the value derived around heavy machinery. Light industrial and warehouses are typically much more apt to be re-used by other tenants in the case of vacancy.

Cannabis production/distribution is a whole other animal. This is largely due to the fact that Cannabis is still an illegal substance at the federal level, meaning that even if states have legalized cannabis use for medical or even recreational purposes, banks that rely on FDIC insurance typically can’t touch them.

So there we have it. If the property type you want to finance still isn’t covered by StackSource, you can still select “Other” and provide information about the asset and its financial outlook, but we now directly cover a lot more scenarios to match lenders more precisely, and tailor the underwriting presentation to fit.

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