Hard Money Lenders 2026: The Largest 59, Ranked by Loans Made

How this list was built, and why it is not a list of ads

Search for hard money lenders and you get map pins, directories and lender pages. None of them says how many loans a lender made. The federal record does. Under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, every lender above a size threshold reports each mortgage it originates, with the amount, rate, term, state and its own legal entity identifier (LEI), and the FFIEC publishes the file loan by loan. We counted the 2025 file by lender (our arithmetic; the script and its full output are in the data folder).

HMDA has no “hard money” field, so we used the same loan group as our hard money loan rates page and our private money lender page: originated (action taken 1), conventional, first-lien, closed-end, not reverse, 1-4 units, investment property, made primarily for a business or commercial purpose, no debt-to-income ratio reported, and a term of 36 months or less. That gives the same 68,319 loans and 658 lenders as those pages. The filters barely change who is on top: dropping the debt-to-income condition adds 1,694 loans (70,013 in all), so 97.6% of these short-term investor loans were made without an income ratio (our arithmetic), and a broader cut (any occupancy, any income ratio, term of 36 months or less) gives 73,793 loans with the same 10 largest lenders by count.

Three things on this page differ from those two pages, and the reasons are in the record:

• Dollar totals leave out three loans. Two loans from Everwise Credit Union were reported at $500,005,000 and $800,005,000 on properties valued at $6,905,000 and $24,805,000, and one from Mackillie Inc at $510,005,000 on a property valued at $1,855,000. Those $1.81 billion look like keying errors, so the dollar figures here use $32,146,980,000 instead of the $33,956,995,000 on our rates page. Loan counts are unchanged.
• BancFirst is a bank. Four banks that file with the CFPB have no “bank” in their filed name (BancFirst, BOKF NA, Pacific Premier and Washington Federal). Counted as banks, the non-bank group is 73 lenders with 57,127 loans (83.6%), not the 77 lenders and 83.9% on the private money page.
• One large filer is flagged, not ranked. EMPORIUM TPO LLC reported 2,290 loans in this group, every one with a 30-month term and a 7.25% median rate. In 2024 the same lender reported 1,869 investment loans with a 360-month term, so the 2025 loans look like 30-year rental loans entered in years instead of months. It stays in the totals, as on our other pages, but not in the ranking.

The 25 largest hard money lenders by loans made in 2025

Short-term investor loans by lender, 2025 (names and cities as filed with HMDA; shares of 68,319 loans; dollars exclude the three loans above)

“States” counts the states (and DC or Puerto Rico) where the lender made at least one such loan; the median rate is the note rate only, before points, which HMDA does not report for these loans. Rates lender by lender, with the middle half and the 2024 medians, are on our hard money loan rates page; this page is about who lends, how much and where.

Four things in the ranking matter more than the order:

1. One lender is the market's center of gravity. Kiavi's 19,477 loans are more than the next five lenders combined (our arithmetic: 4,835 + 3,691 + 2,409 + 2,105 + 1,984 = 15,024). It grew 14.2% from 17,051 in 2024. Its filing lists San Francisco, and it lent in 46 states.
2. RCN Capital files twice. Its two LEIs reported 2,105 and 693 loans, 2,798 in all (our arithmetic), which would place it fourth, ahead of Easy Street Capital. Counting LEIs, as HMDA does, slightly overstates the number of companies.
3. Big loans and small loans are different businesses. Genesis Capital's median loan was $935,000 and Center Street's $765,000, with 52.2% and 70.8% of their loans in California; Kiavi, Lima One and LendingOne sit between $235,000 and $285,000 across 39 to 46 states. If your project is a $200,000 house in Ohio, the California large-loan lenders are not your comparison set.
4. Only one bank makes the top 24. Community Bank of Mississippi made 370 loans, 77% of them in Mississippi. Banks lend short-term to investors mostly in their own region, as the next table shows.

The rest of the list: 34 lenders with 100 to 313 loans

Lenders ranked 25 to 58 by 2025 short-term investor loans (type from the FFIEC agency code)

Of the 59 lenders with 100 or more loans, 35 are non-banks, 23 are banks and one is a credit union, and together they made 60,453 loans, 88.5% of the total. The lower half of the list is where local lending shows up: 22 of the 34 lenders above are banks and one is a credit union, most of them in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi, and most keep the majority of their loans in one state. Among non-banks, Eastside Funding in Washington (416 loans) and Strategic Funding in Virginia (114) lent in one state only, at medians of 12% and 13.5%. CCG Fund 1 and BARH Dunmore reported no note rate on their loans.

Ranked by dollars: the large-loan lenders move up

Top 10 short-term investor lenders by 2025 dollars lent (three implausible loans excluded)

“Rank by loans” is the rank in the first table, without EMPORIUM TPO (which reported $897,610,000 and would sit between CV3 and Temple View). Kiavi's share falls from 28.5% of loans to 21.0% of dollars because its loans are small; Genesis Capital, 13th by loans, is fourth by dollars. On the borrower side this is the practical point: lenders that specialize in loans near $1 million in California and other high-price markets do a different job from the volume lenders that finance $200,000 houses in the Midwest and South.

Who leads in each of the 10 largest states

The three largest short-term investor lenders in each of the 10 states with the most 2025 loans

These 10 states had 58.2% of the national loans. Three patterns:

• Texas and Missouri are the least concentrated. Texas had 110 reporting lenders and its top three made 37.4% of the loans; in Missouri, banks and credit unions made most of them, led by First State Bank of St Charles (140). If you invest in those states, a local bank is a real alternative, and our rates page shows bank medians run well below non-bank ones.
• New York and Ohio are the most concentrated. In New York, Loan Funder alone made 39.3% of the loans; in Ohio, Kiavi made 47.1%. In New York, the second slot goes to EMPORIUM TPO, whose loans look like 30-year loans, so the real short-term second is lower down.
• California is almost all non-bank (99.8%) and big-ticket. Its median loan was $735,000, where Conventus, Center Street, Genesis and Anchor compete; the largest bank or credit union lender in California made 2 loans. Our Florida hard money page goes county by county for Florida.

Who grew, who shrank and who left

Year-over-year change for selected lenders (short-term investor loans, same group both years)

The national total grew from 59,288 loans in 2024 to 68,319 in 2025. Two of the new names are new to HMDA altogether: Rain City Capital and CV3 Financial Services were not on the 2024 filer list, so their 1,454 and 1,409 loans are the first year anyone can count. Merchants Mortgage & Trust is different: it did file for 2024, but its 1,284 short-term investor loans that year carried a debt-to-income ratio, which puts them outside this group; read the 0 as a reporting change, not a new lender.

Merchants matters for another reason. On August 26, 2026, Velocity Commercial Capital, a subsidiary of Velocity Financial, signed an agreement to buy Toorak Capital's operating platform, which its press release describes as “including Merchants Mortgage & Trust Corporation (“Merchants”), which is Toorak's direct origination business in the United States” (Form 8-K, exhibit 99.1, filed August 27, 2026). Velocity's own lender reported 433 short-term loans in 2025; with Merchants' 1,889, the combined group would be 2,322 (our arithmetic), fifth on the list if RCN's two filings are counted separately. Velocity says it expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. Our Velocity and Toorak page covers the terms.

A falling count is not by itself a sign of trouble: lenders move between short-term and 30-year rental loans, and Lima One, for example, also made 1,070 loans with terms of 30 years or more in 2025. A lender that disappears from the filer list, as Sundae Funding and Secured Investment Corp did, is worth a question before you sign.

Names you may know that are not on the list

Some lenders that rank in search results are missing from the record, or appear with almost no short-term loans. We searched every name in the 2025 HMDA filer list.

What the 2025 HMDA filer list shows for well-known investor lenders

A missing name is not a red flag by itself. HMDA covers a non-bank lender only if, “In each of the two preceding calendar years,” it “originated at least 25 closed-end mortgage loans” that are not excluded, and it had a home or branch office in a metropolitan area (12 CFR 1003.2(g)(2)). Some loans never count: Regulation C excludes a loan secured by “unimproved land” (12 CFR 1003.3(c)(2)), “Temporary financing” (12 CFR 1003.3(c)(3)), and business-purpose loans unless they are a home purchase, home improvement or refinance loan (12 CFR 1003.3(c)(10)). The official interpretation describes temporary financing as a loan “designed to be replaced by separate permanent financing extended by any financial institution to the same borrower at a later time”, so a bridge loan planned from day one to be refinanced, or a ground-up construction loan for a house to be sold, may never reach HMDA. A flip loan does: the same interpretation's example is a loan “with a nine-month term to enable an investor to purchase a home, renovate it, and re-sell it before the term expires.” Loans on 5 or more units are reported to HMDA but are outside this 1-4 unit list. What happened to Fund That Flip is in our page on its shutdown.

Complaints on file with the CFPB

The CFPB's public complaint database is built for consumer products, and most hard money loans go to LLCs, so counts are small and say little about a lender's quality. They are still a public record you can read before you sign.

CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, all years, read October 8, 2026

Read a complaint, not the count: the database shows the issue and the company's response, and a complaint is the borrower's account, not a finding. For a business-purpose loan, licensing and state law matter more; our private money lender page covers which states require a license for these loans and what NMLS Consumer Access can show, keeping in mind that it “shows only licenses that are in a "reportable" status” (NMLS).

What you can do with this

1. Shortlist by your state and loan size, not by brand. Start with the state table above and the CSV: the CSV has every lender with 100 or more loans, its states and its median loan. A lender that made 1,000 loans in California at a $765,000 median is not the obvious choice for a $180,000 house in Pennsylvania.
2. Ask each lender for its HMDA name. The lender you meet may be a brand; the HMDA filer is the legal entity that closes the loan (Kiavi's is Kiavi Funding, Inc.; Toorak's direct lender is Merchants Mortgage & Trust). If a company claims hundreds of loans a year and has no HMDA filing, ask why; the exclusions above are legitimate reasons, but get the answer.
3. Compare at least one volume lender and one local lender. In Texas, Missouri and Georgia, banks and smaller lenders made a meaningful share of the loans. Get the rate, points, extension fee and default rate in writing from each; HMDA shows only the note rate.
4. Check the rate against the record. The median note rate on these loans was 9.99% in 2025; lender medians and state medians are on our rates page, and our hard money loan calculator turns points and term into a yearly cost.
5. Plan the exit before you borrow. In 2025, 68.6% of these loans had a 12-month term and 91.9% a balloon payment. If you will keep the property, the refinance is a 30-year DSCR-type loan; our DSCR loan rates page has that record, and the best fix-and-flip lenders compares the large lenders from filings and rating-agency data.

Kiavi pays us a referral fee when a loan closes through its button in the box below; RCN Capital and Easy Street Capital pay us nothing. All three are in this record as short-term lenders: Kiavi Funding made 19,477 loans in 46 states, RCN Capital 2,798 across two filings in 43 and 36 states, and Easy Street Capital 2,409 in 45 states, mostly on 6-month terms. Being large in HMDA is not the same as being right for your deal; compare the terms.

FAQ

Loan-level data: FFIEC/CFPB HMDA Data Browser, nationwide originated conventional loans for 2024 and 2025 (request URLs in the data file), filtered to the same short-term investor group as our hard money rates and private money lender pages; lender names, agency codes and cities from the FFIEC public institutions API and the FFIEC 2024 and 2025 filer lists, read October 8, 2026. Our scripts hmda_lenders.py and hmda_lender_totals.py and their full output are in the data folder. Coverage rules from 12 CFR 1003.2 and 1003.3 and the Supplement I official interpretations (eCFR). Velocity Financial, Inc. Form 8-K and exhibit 99.1, accession 0001193125-26-369585, filed August 27, 2026. CFPB Consumer Complaint Database API, read October 8, 2026. NMLS, Information about NMLS Consumer Access. All counts, shares, sums, medians and changes are our arithmetic. This is analysis of public records, not investment, legal, lending or tax advice, and not a loan offer.