Renovo Financial Review 2026: 6,767 Loans, 9.75% Bridge Median

Who Renovo Financial is

Renovo Financial is a private real estate lender headquartered at 222 West Adams Street in Chicago. Its site says it “was born in 2011” when co-founders Kevin Werner and Daniel Rosen met in Chicago, that it had early backing from the private equity firm Granite Creek Capital Partners, and that it now has “boots on the ground in more than 30 major markets.” Its management page lists Kevin Werner as CEO and co-founder; that answers the question people search, and it is the company’s own statement. The lender also claims 9,000+ unique clients, “$10+ Billion” in originations, 14 years in business and a 4.5 Google rating. We did not audit the rating.

The legal names matter, because three different ones appear:

• RF Renovo Management Company, LLC is the name on the federal HMDA file. The GLEIF record shows a Delaware company created January 9, 2015, with its headquarters at 222 West Adams Street, Suite 3150, Chicago, and its legal address with a registered agent in Dover. The parent is listed as a non-public exception.
• RF Mortgage Services Corporation is the name in the footer of every page of the site.
• RFLF 4, LLC holds a Minnesota originator licence, according to the lender’s licensing page.

The licensing page reads: “RF Mortgage Services Corporation (NMLS #2135934) and RF Renovo Management Company, LLC (NMLS # 2476464) along with their respective officers and employees perform acts for which a license is required.” It adds an Arizona mortgage banker licence (BK-1025412) and a California Department of Real Estate licence (02147408) for the first company, an Oregon lending and servicer licence under 2476464 for the second, and a Minnesota originator licence (MN-MO-2594707) for RFLF 4. These are the lender’s own claims as printed on October 21, 2026. NMLS Consumer Access, which we cannot republish, is the place to confirm them, and your loan officer’s own NMLS number is a separate check.

Eight years of federal loan counts

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) Data Browser gives counts by year for the filer’s LEI. The 2025 file is entirely business-purpose; earlier years are the filer’s whole HMDA file.

Loans grew 16.8 times from 2018 to 2025 and dollars 25.3 times (our arithmetic). The 2025 count is 53.8% above 2024, and dollars rose 46.9%. The withdrawn share of applications taken, 21.1% in 2025, was 23.9% in 2024 and 24.2% in 2023.

The 2025 ranking

Among the 441,949 business-purpose originations in our nationwide 2025 extract (investment property or two-to-four-unit buildings, actions taken 1 and 3), Renovo ranks ninth of 1,756 lenders by number of loans, with 1.53% of the total. Rank is by loans, not dollars: JPMorgan Chase, fifth by loans, made 8,193 of them for $20.1 billion.

The list mixes mortgage banks, a bank and bridge lenders, so the median rates are not comparable down the column. For short-term loans on one-to-four-unit investment property, the filter used on our hard money lenders ranking, Renovo is third by count, with 3,691 loans. See also our best fix-and-flip lender 2026 page and the reviews of Kiavi, RCN Capital, Easy Street Capital and Champions Funding.

Two loans under one name

The median of 9.5% that appears across all 6,767 loans is a blend. Split by contract term, the file shows a bridge lender and a rental lender.

All 3,912 short-term loans are interest-only with a balloon; 3,732 have a term of exactly 12 months, and 3,465 are home purchases. That is the profile of a fix-and-flip or bridge loan, so the answer to “is Renovo a hard money lender?” is: more than half of its loans, and 62.2% of its dollars, look like one, and the rest look like a rental lender (our arithmetic). The 30-year loans are mostly refinances: 2,173 cash-out and 372 other refinances against 286 purchases.

Four narrower cuts, each from the same file:

• One-to-four-unit bridge loans: 3,691 loans, $1.50 billion, a 9.75% median (9.5% to 10.25%), a $285,000 median loan and a 67.85% median combined loan-to-value ratio. The national figure for the same filter is 9.99% on 68,319 loans with a $265,000 median loan.
• One-to-four-unit rental loans: 2,278 loans, $574 million, a 7.05% median, a $205,000 median loan and a 73.52% median combined loan-to-value ratio.
• Five-plus-unit loans: 798 loans for $1.11 billion with a $855,000 median loan. The 221 short-term ones had an 11.0% median and a $1.1 million median loan; the 553 long-term ones had a 7.25% median.
• Loan-to-value is filled in: the field is reported on all 6,767 loans, unlike some lenders whose file leaves it blank. It is a combined ratio as the lender filed it, not an appraisal we checked.

What the bridge loans cost, by size and state

The spread is narrow: among the size groups the medians run from 9.75% to 10.5%, and loans under $150,000 cost 0.25 points more than the middle. On the median one-to-four-unit bridge loan, $285,000 at 9.75% interest-only, 12 months of interest is $27,787.50, or $2,315.62 a month; each quarter point is $712.50 a year and one point of fee would be $2,850 (our arithmetic). HMDA does not show the fee. The 30-year book is similar in structure: loans under $150,000 had a 7.2% median against 7.0% for $150,000 to $299,999. On the median one-to-four-unit rental loan, $205,000 at 7.05% over 30 years, principal and interest is $1,370.76 a month (our arithmetic).

The 40 states reached by the book are led by Texas (901 loans), Ohio (776), New Jersey (692), Florida (624) and Pennsylvania (592), together 53.0%. The mix differs by product: New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Massachusetts lead the bridge loans, while Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania lead the 30-year loans (445, 440 and 391).

Applications, denials and withdrawals

HMDA covers applications that reached a decision or were withdrawn. It does not cover enquiries, quotes that were never turned into an application, or files closed for incompleteness that a lender did not report. For Renovo in 2025 the file holds 8,595 records.

The 0.25% denial share is not an approval rate. It is 17 denials over 6,784 originated-plus-denied files. It says that almost no application got a formal denial; it does not say that 99.75% of people who asked were approved, because anyone turned away before filling an application, or who dropped out after hearing terms, is not in the file. A withdrawal can mean the borrower found a better offer, the deal fell through, or the lender said no informally. HMDA cannot separate them. Denial reasons are on file for the 17: unverifiable information 7, credit history 5, insufficient cash 3 and collateral 2; the median denied loan was $445,000.

Who buys the loans

HMDA records whether a loan was sold within the calendar year. For Renovo, 6,677 of 6,767 loans carry purchaser type 9, which the FFIEC data dictionary defines as “Other type of purchaser”, and 90 carry type 0, “Not applicable”. The dictionary’s other buyer types are Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, Farmer Mac, a private securitizer, a commercial bank or savings institution, a credit union, mortgage or finance company, a life insurance company and an affiliate. So almost every loan was sold in the year, and not to any of those named kinds, which fits a lender that funds loans through a facility and passes them to an investor or fund. The file cannot say who the buyer is.

Our search of the SEC’s full-text system found no filing under the names “RF Renovo Management” or “Renovo Financial” that relates to this lender. One trace of the group: an RFLF 4, LLC, the name on the Minnesota licence above, is listed as the originator of 1 loan for $1,867,800 (0.75%) in a February 7, 2025 Form ABS-15G exhibit for a Saluda Grade residential transition loan trust of $250,000,000. One loan is not a pattern, and we cannot confirm from the filing that this entity is the Renovo group.

What the lender says it offers

These terms are from renovofinancial.com, read October 21, 2026. They are marketing, not a quote, and the site’s own FAQ answers “What’s pricing like?” with “Quick Answer: It varies.”

The HMDA terms match the bridge page: a 12-month term is the median, with 127 loans at 18 months and 46 at 24. They also show what the site does not: the 30-year loans are priced about 3 points below the 12-month ones (7.05% against 9.99%). Construction and homebuilder facilities of $3 million to $30 million are largely absent from a mortgage disclosure file, so HMDA is a view of the smaller loans.

CDFI status and complaints

The site lists a “C3 Fund – CDFI” in its menu. The Treasury’s CDFI Fund list of certified institutions as of September 17, 2026 (1,281 institutions) includes C3 Impact Fund, LLC, type Venture Capital, at 222 West Adams, #3150, Chicago, with the website renovofinancial.com. C3’s own site calls it “a certified community development financial institution” focused on 1-to-4-unit properties in low- and moderate-income communities, and claims $80M+ in originations and a $200k average loan. It is a separate legal entity from RF Renovo Management Company, LLC, and nothing in HMDA tells us which of the 6,767 loans, if any, went through it. Do not read the CDFI listing as a statement about the whole book.

On October 21, 2026 we searched the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database with company set to “RF Renovo Management Company, LLC”, “RF Mortgage Services Corporation” and “C3 Impact Fund, LLC”, and with the free text “Renovo”. Every search returned 0, while the same API returned 15 for Champions Funding, LLC. “None on file” applies only to those exact strings, and zero complaints is not evidence of a clean record. We did not rely on forum posts or review sites, which we could not verify.

What the data cannot tell you

• Today’s rate. HMDA is 2025 loans. The lender publishes no rate sheet.
• Cost. Total loan costs, points and fees, discount points and origination charges are blank on all 6,767 loans, and so is the prepayment term. Default interest, extension and draw fees are in the loan documents; see our guide to extension, default interest and points.
• Approval odds. Withdrawals and unrecorded enquiries sit outside the denial share.
• Performance and servicing. HMDA ends at origination. The site says it services in-house; we have no delinquency data.
• Who owns it. The GLEIF record lists the parent as a non-public exception and the site names only early backing from Granite Creek Capital Partners.

What a reader can do with this

• Ask which book your loan is in. A 12-month interest-only bridge loan at around 9.75% to 10% and a 30-year rental loan at around 7% are different products. On the $285,000 median bridge loan, each point of fee is $2,850 (our arithmetic).
• Get the whole cost in writing. Rate, points, extension fee, draw fee, default rate and any prepayment term, before you pay for an appraisal. HMDA shows none of them.
• Check licences yourself. Look up NMLS 2476464 (and 2135934) on NMLS Consumer Access, plus your loan officer, and check the state where the property is.
• Price at least one other lender the same day. Compare against the hard money loan rates 2026 table, bridge loan rates, the DSCR lenders ranking for the 30-year side and multifamily loan rates for five-plus units.
• Do not take 0.25% as comfort. If a deal is tight, ask the lender what share of its applications it declines informally.

FAQ

Sources, read October 21, 2026: FFIEC HMDA Data Browser loan-level file and aggregations for LEI 254900O2K17TNH5CL873 (2018 to 2025) and our saved nationwide 2025 extract, tabulated by us with the filter business or commercial purpose = 1 and action taken = 1 for originations; the FFIEC loan-level data fields dictionary; the GLEIF LEI record for RF Renovo Management Company, LLC; the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database search API; the CDFI Fund list of certified CDFIs as of September 17, 2026; SEC EDGAR full-text search and Form ABS-15G exhibit 99.1 of Saluda Grade Mortgage Funding LLC filed February 7, 2025 (accession 0001999371-25-001352); renovofinancial.com home, our story, management team, licensing, FAQ, locations and loan program pages, and c3.fund. This is analysis of public records, not investment, legal, lending or tax advice. We have no commercial relationship with Renovo Financial; Kiavi is a paid link.