For years, an investor closing ten deals a year paid the same origination fee percentage as someone closing one. That flat-fee structure is starting to give way to something else: financing priced around the borrower’s track record and volume, not just the deal in front of them.
“Investors doing multiple transactions in a shorter period of time deserve a cheaper cost of financing, and they typically weren’t getting that on a deal by deal basis,” said Adam Eldibany, founder homebldr, who has watched the pattern play out across active investors. “Lenders and brokers weren’t going to offer a discount without some guarantee of volume.”
The shift shows up across the lending side of the market in different forms. Several hard-money and fix-and-flip lenders now offer tiered rate programs, where borrowers who’ve closed ten or more deals qualify for materially better pricing than first-time investors get on an identical property. Others tier by leverage rather than rate: a borrower with zero to two completed projects might be capped around 75-80% of purchase price, while someone with five or more deals behind them can reach up to 93% of project cost on the same terms otherwise. Some lenders reward repeat business with speed instead of price, cutting closing timelines from weeks down to days for borrowers they’ve funded before. And a few have moved past pricing mechanics entirely into relationship-based underwriting, where a borrower returning to the same lender gets a real edge in approval odds and terms that a one-off applicant wouldn’t see.
The Subscription Version of the Same Idea
homebldr, a real estate investment financing platform built on a broker model, has taken a different structural approach to the same problem: instead of tiering rate or leverage by deal count, it sells a flat annual subscription that trades a lower cost of financing for a commitment to route deals through the platform for a year.
“When an investor signs up for a financing subscription, they’re asking us for a real discount on their cost of financing over the year,” Eldibany said. “In exchange, we’re asking for a real commitment that they’ll work with homebldr on their deals for that year.”
That’s a different mechanism than a tiered rate card or relationship-based underwriting, but it’s solving the same mismatch: repeat investors subsidizing the cost structure built for one-off borrowers.
Where the Model Runs Into Friction
Subscription pricing brings its own adoption problem that tiered or relationship-based models don’t: the cost shows up as one lump payment instead of being absorbed deal by deal. Eldibany said that was the biggest obstacle to homebldr’s version, even among investors who understood the math worked out cheaper over a year. His fix was routing the subscription fee through a buy-now-pay-later provider so it could be paid in installments instead, a small operational patch on top of the pricing model, not a separate trend in its own right.
Investors who do a single deal, or who are working with homebldr for the first time, can still finance it on a standard deal-by-deal basis; homebldr says it works with a network of more than 80 capital partners to fund deals nationwide, though the financing subscription is built specifically for investors doing multiple transactions a year.
The Broader Shift
None of this means per-deal pricing is disappearing. Most investors, especially first-timers, will still be priced deal by deal for a while yet. But the direction is consistent across tiered rate cards, relationship underwriting, and subscription models alike: the industry is slowly unwinding the assumption that a repeat investor and a first-time buyer should cost a lender, or a broker, the same thing to serve. Which version wins out (a rate tier, a relationship discount, or a subscription) looks less important than the fact that all three are now live answers to the same question.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
