Coming off of a record year in volume, Triumph Capital looks to serve the private lending community across the country on both a small and large scale
These days, everyone’s zeroing in on their differentiators. In the private lending space, however, those differentiators aren’t necessarily the same as they used to be.
“Ten years ago, as long as you had the funding capabilities, customer service didn’t really matter because there were really no options out there. Today with the influx of a lot of Wall Street capital, being a private lender with customer service, with technology, with a platform that makes it easy for borrowers to come to us and do a loan—that’s what it takes to be able to compete and survive. Overall, it’s been good for the business and it just makes everyone better,” said Oliver Austria, co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph Capital Partners.
Triumph Capital is a nationwide private lender that operates through retail, wholesale, and correspondent channels on residential, multifamily, and mixed-use properties. They are focused on providing capital to the real estate investor, whether they’re a professional landlord or someone doing a quick fix and flip.
Over the past year, Austria said that the team at Triumph Capital has come together like a well-oiled machine, closing out the year with record volume of $300 million. They also launched some key products and initiatives such as their ground-up construction, resi-term, and multifamily mixed-use financing, and rolled it out through their broker and correspondent channels. More than that, though, Austria said they’ve been able to work toward a common goal.
“We’re able to really deliver upon our promise of being able to provide the capital in a quick and efficient matter to the sponsors and do it in a way where we’re creating a lot of collaborative partnerships across the industry, across the country,” Austria said.
There’s been a lot of demand for their new products, particularly their demand for ground-up construction financing for residential and multifamily projects, given the housing inventory shortages experienced in many parts of the country. Although the fix and flip market is still active, Austria says that it’s tapered off somewhat, not being one of their strongest growth areas.
Triumph plans to continue rolling out whatever products they need to create in order to help real estate investors “be able to win”. Austria said that one of those products is a term product for retail, office, industrial, hospitality, and specialty use. They also plan to launch a fund allowing them to originate loans that wouldn’t otherwise fit into their existing parameters.
This year, Triumph Capital is planning a builders’ summit in San Diego, calling developers and builders across the country to come and learn more about how to get better pricing on materials and how to more efficiently go through entitlement and permitting. It’s a “very fragmented industry,” Austria said, and the summit will essentially create a mastermind community of people in this space.
In addition to making private lenders step up their game in terms of service, the influx of Wall Street capital has also made the private lending space a little more attractive for both inexperienced investors and inexperienced lenders. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Austria said, but it’s put the onus on good lenders to set the bar a little higher.
“When the money to purchase properties becomes easier, that’s when some of the ‘amateurs’ start to get into the business and start to get into competing for properties, but what I’ve found is that any lender that’s doing their diligence . . . they’ll counterbalance [inexperience] with heavier equity required in a project,” Austria said. “So you’ll have some of the novices get into the game but there’s a higher threshold for them to enter the game.”
That higher threshold might involve putting more money down on a project or undergoing a more stringent vetting process.
The team at Triumph also aims to continue working within the private lending community to put together a coalition of like-minded companies in order to launch legislative action across the country to help safeguard the industry against legislation that might be detrimental their business.
“What we do has worked primarily because it’s business to business, it’s working with business owners across the country. When we start getting legislation and regulation that’s not necessary to be a talking point for some of these politicians, it starts to become detrimental to what it is that we’re doing,” Austria said.
