If you've done a few rehabs on hard money, you already know where the loan tends to stall. It isn't the closing. It's the draws.
You finish a phase of work, you need to get reimbursed so you can pay your crew and keep moving, and suddenly the loan goes quiet. The lender has to send a third-party inspector to the property. You wait for them to schedule it. You wait for them to drive out. You wait for the write-up to come back to the lender's desk. Meanwhile your contractor wants to get paid and your own cash is tied up in work you've already completed.
That waiting period isn't on your construction timeline, but it costs you anyway. A week here, a week there, and a project you scoped for four months quietly becomes five.
We built our draw process to take that delay out entirely. Here's exactly how it works.
Step 1: You request the draw in your portal
When you've completed a phase of work, you start the draw right from your borrower portal — the line items you're drawing on, the dollar amount, and your documentation. No email chains, no PDFs going back and forth, no calling to ask where things stand. It's all in one place, and you can do it from your phone on the jobsite.
Step 2: You do a guided virtual inspection — from your phone
This is the part that's different. Instead of us dispatching an inspector to your property, you complete a guided virtual inspection yourself, using a platform called Sitewire. It walks you through capturing photos, video, and receipts of the completed work, right there on site. Your contractor's progress gets verified remotely.
No third-party inspector to schedule. No site visit to wait on. What used to take a week of coordination takes you a few minutes on your phone.
Step 3: We review and approve
Once your inspection and documentation are in, we review the draw against your project's budget and scope. Our operations lead packages it up, and the final approval comes from Will — every draw gets a real set of eyes, not an automated rubber stamp. If something's missing or off, you hear back quickly with exactly what we need, not a vague "it's under review."
Step 4: Funds are on the way — same or next business day
Once your draw is approved, your funds are on the way to your account the same or next business day. That's the whole point. Your reimbursement comes back fast enough that you're not floating completed work for weeks, and your crew stays paid and on the job.
The details worth knowing up front
We'd rather you know exactly how this works before you close than discover it mid-project:
- We finance 100% of the renovation through these draws. The rehab budget is built into your loan — you're not funding the work out of pocket and hoping to recover it later.
- Minimum draw is $5,000, and you can take up to five draws over the life of the loan. Plan your draw schedule around real construction milestones, not tiny incremental requests.
- Your photos need to show the work and the property — we ask for at least one shot that makes the address clear (a street sign, house number, or mailbox in frame). It protects everyone that the work we're funding is on the right property.
- Any single contractor payment over $10,000 needs a lien-release waiver before we disburse. That's not us being difficult — an unreleased mechanic's lien is one of the fastest ways a clean title gets clouded, and that's your problem at resale or refinance as much as it's ours. The waiver protects your exit.
- There's a $100 draw inspection fee on each approved draw, deducted from that disbursement. It covers the virtual inspection. You're only charged on draws that actually fund — if a draw is denied or you withdraw it, there's no fee.
- We cap cumulative draws at 50% of your reno budget until 50% of the work is verified complete. It keeps the money flowing in step with the actual progress on the ground, which is what protects the project — and your equity in it — if something goes sideways with a contractor midstream.
Why we run it this way
A draw process should do one job: get money you've already earned back to you fast, without becoming a project in itself. Most of the friction in hard money lending is legacy friction — it exists because nobody bothered to rebuild it. The third-party inspector model is a good example. It made sense before everyone carried a high-resolution camera and GPS in their pocket. It doesn't make much sense now.
So we don't use it. Verifying real work on a real property is something you can do yourself, in minutes, with better documentation than a hurried site visit would produce anyway. We get a permanent, time-stamped record of every phase, and you get your money back without waiting on someone else's calendar.
That's the trade we're always trying to make: keep the controls that actually protect the deal, cut the steps that only protect a lender's old habits.