Hard Money Loan Requirements 2026: What 7 Lenders Publish

Why “requirements” means “this lender's requirements”

A hard money loan is a short-term, interest-only loan from a private lender on an investment property, approved mostly on the deal (the property and its value after repairs) and less on your income. (If you are new to the product, start with what a hard money loan is and what 68,319 borrowers got in 2025.) It is business-purpose credit, so no agency publishes a standard: each lender sets its own credit floor, experience rule, leverage and fees, and its own investors or securitization buyers hold it to them.

The useful answer is therefore a table of what each lender prints, with the page and the date. Every figure below is the lender's own claim, read on November 12, 2026; where a page does not print a number we write “not stated”, which does not mean there is no limit. Rates and fees move without notice and depend on the borrower and the property. For how often the application fails, see our analysis of 2025 federal loan data: lenders decided 57,059 short-term investor purchase applications and 14.9% were denied.

Credit score and experience

Source: each lender's fix and flip page and FAQ, read November 12, 2026; the URL of every row is in the CSV.

Three details sit behind that table. First, what counts as a flip differs. RCN Capital counts completed flips in the last 3 years and sorts borrowers into four groups; Lima One counts one exit of an investment property in 36 months and says the exit can be “a previous flip, or the sale or refinance of an investment property the investor was on title for.” New Silver groups investors on its page as just getting started, 2 to 3 projects completed, 4 to 10 and 10 or more, while saying no experience is required. Second, the credit score is a floor, not a price: Lima One's page says flippers with more experience get higher leverage, lower rates and lower origination fees. Third, Anchor Loans prints a score range, not a score: 660 to 720 depending on your experience tier, so ask which tier you fall in.

Leverage: purchase, rehab and after-repair value

Source: each lender's fix and flip page and FAQ, read November 12, 2026. Lima One's two pages differ (75% LTV on its fix-and-flip page, 85% LTV on its hard-money page); we show both. Anchor Loans prints no leverage figures for fix and flip on the pages read.

RCN Capital is the only lender among the seven that prints the whole matrix, so it shows how much leverage depends on you. (The same page also lists rate packages with their own tiers, for example “Up to 80% of Purchase Price” for a new investor with up to 2 flips in the last 3 years; the figures below use the experience matrix.) For light rehab on a purchase:

Source: RCN Capital loan-programs page, November 12, 2026; every tier also finances “100% of Rehab Costs”. RCN labels each row light, moderate or heavy rehab without defining the terms on the page we read. The top tier's 100% of purchase carries the footnote “5+ in-state experience, a total of 10+ experience and a qualifying score of 720+ FICO”.

Entity, appraisal, reserves, down payment and states

• Entity. CoreVest says properties must be held in a special purpose entity, “typically a Limited Liability Company (LLC)”, on specific programs; Groundfloor lists “business entity docs” among its documents. The others do not state a rule on the pages we read.
• Appraisal and who sets the value. Easy Street says it “determines loan-to-value (LTV) based on an in-house valuation of the property” and closes with no appraisal; New Silver says an appraisal “with interior access is required.” Because the after-repair-value cap is applied to the lender's value, not your estimate, the same house can carry different caps at different lenders.
• Reserves and liquidity. None of the seven prints a reserve or liquidity minimum for a fix and flip loan. CoreVest's FAQ says it requires reserves on its rental portfolio loans, not on flips; Groundfloor asks for “proof of funds (just one mo. bank statement)”.
• Down payment. Easy Street: borrowers “should expect to contribute a minimum down payment of approximately 10% toward the purchase.” Groundfloor: “Down payments as low as 0% in qualifying situations.” Lima One says it requires the investor to “cover a portion of the property's purchase price at closing.”
• Property and size. Easy Street funds single-family and 2 to 8 units; Lima One 1 to 4 units and warrantable condominiums with a minimum as-is value or purchase price of $100,000; New Silver 1 to 4 units, condos and townhomes, not rural property.
• States. Anchor Loans does not lend in Vermont or South Dakota; Lima One not in Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota or Vermont; Easy Street not in Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota or select metro areas including Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit; Groundfloor lends in 35 states for most products.

Visio Lending is not in the tables: the page we read (its home page, November 12, 2026) offers DSCR rental loans and prints no fix and flip terms. Our DSCR loan requirements cover it.

What “100% financing” means in these published terms

Only one of the seven lenders prints 100% of the purchase price: RCN Capital's top tier (10 or more flips, 720 score, loan of $800,000 or less). It sits under a 75% after-repair-value cap, and that is the number that decides your cash:

Financing is 100% of cost only if purchase plus rehab is at or below the lender's after-repair-value cap. At a 75% cap you need an after-repair value of at least cost divided by 0.75 (our arithmetic): for $250,000 of cost, $333,333.

Here is the same deal at each lender's published caps. Purchase $200,000, rehab $50,000, total cost $250,000, after-repair value $325,000 (so cost is 76.9% of after-repair value). Light rehab; borrower with the experience each row names.

Our arithmetic on the caps printed by each lender on November 12, 2026. Assumptions: the lender's value equals $325,000; RCN's light-rehab row applies; Lima One's 75% is read against after-repair value (its page says “LTV”); New Silver's 90% is applied to total cost (its page also lists “Construction Financing up to 100%”, which read as 90% of purchase plus 100% of rehab would give a $230,000 loan and $20,000 of cash).

Three things follow. The after-repair-value cap cuts “100%” down: RCN's 10-flip borrower is quoted 100% of purchase and 100% of rehab ($250,000) but is capped at $243,750 because cost is above 75% of value. No lender among the seven lets this deal reach 100%. Experience moves the cash: at RCN alone, the same house takes $30,000 of cash from a borrower with no flips and $6,250 from one with 10 or more, a $23,750 difference. Fees are on top: Easy Street prints a $1,995 document fee and “zero to two points” (a point is 1% of the loan), which on a $230,000 loan is $1,995 to $6,595 more (our arithmetic); New Silver prints an origination fee of 1% to 1.75%. Cash to close is a number to ask each lender for, not to assume to be zero.

Lenders' posted fundings also sit below their maximums. Easy Street shows a Mesquite, Texas loan of $230,400 at 90.00% LTC, with $45,000 of construction funding and $185,400 funded at closing, next to a stated maximum of 93%.

What a reader can do with this

• Run your deal against the cap before you apply. Divide purchase plus rehab by your estimated after-repair value. If it is above 75%, most of the caps above (RCN, Lima One, Easy Street, New Silver, Groundfloor at 70%) will put cash into the deal whatever the headline says. Our fix and flip calculator and hard money loan rates analysis put the cost of that cash in numbers.
• Match the experience rule to where you are. Lenders that print a flip count (RCN Capital, Lima One) or an experienced-investor rule (Anchor Loans) price your first deal differently from lenders that state none (New Silver, CoreVest, Groundfloor). Ask each one how it counts a flip.
• Ask in writing for the numbers the pages leave out: minimum score for your program, which value the cap uses and who sets it, how light, moderate and heavy rehab are defined, reserves, and every fee that comes out of the closing. The lender-by-lender record, including complaints and ownership, is in our best fix and flip lender comparison, and each lender has its own page: Lima One, RCN Capital, CoreVest, New Silver, Easy Street and Anchor Loans.
• Check what happens if the flip runs long. Extension fees, default interest and points are in the filings of public lenders; see hard money extension, points and default interest.

Kiavi publishes its own requirements on kiavi.com; the box below links to it.

FAQ

Lender terms read on each lender's own website on November 12, 2026 (Lima One Capital, RCN Capital, CoreVest, New Silver, Easy Street Capital, Groundfloor Lending, Anchor Loans, Visio Lending); the URL of every row is in the CSV. The 2025 denial share is from our analysis of the 2025 HMDA loan-level file in fix and flip loans 2026. Worked examples are our arithmetic on published caps, not a loan offer. This is analysis of public documents, not investment, legal or tax advice.