Tiny House on Wheels (THOW)
Like many rapidly growing industries the tiny house movement is experiencing its own challenges with financial institutions slowing adapting their lending programs to better suit the tiny house buyer. Below are some of the common options for financing your tiny home.
Tampa Bay THOW Mortgage
Tampa Bay Tiny Homes is proud to work with with Freedom Bank who offers a 10 year mortgage. This program requires 20% down and currently only available to residents of the Tampa Bay Area. Contact us now to find out more about this program.
Synergetic-Funding
Synergistic Funding – This local business works with eleven different lending institutions to assure they can provide the best options to clients seeking to purchase a tiny home. With many lending institutions seeing the demand and potential of tiny homes and tiny homes on wheels Synergistic Funding is excited to offer these programs to Florida residents.Home Equity Loan
Perhaps the easiest way to finance a tiny home is a Home Equity Line of Credit or “HELOC”. Most lenders will loan you a percentage of the equity in your home. Home equity loans are the easiest to qualify for and generally have the best terms. For those reasons, if you are already a homeowner this would be the best choice.
Unsecured bank loan
Talk to your local bank and see if you qualify for an unsecured loan. Local credit unions tend to have higher success rates over the mega banks. LightStream is a division of Suntrust that offers Tiny Home, RV and Personal loans. A new lender we have talked to and can recommend is SoFi. Eligible borrowers can get unsecured loans for 2-7 years with fixed and variable rates between 5-14%. An application to this lender will not ding your credit since they perform a “soft” pull.
Secured bank loan
Do you own anything else free and clear that would count as collateral for the amount borrowed? Things like your car, a boat, motorcycle, RV, bikes, other? Again, talk to your local bank.
RV Loan
Some Tiny House builders have become RVIA certified as a means to sell more units utilizing RV loans. You can read more about this here. While we meet all the standards required by RVIA we are not currently RVIA Certified.
Friends/Family
You might know someone with cash that would be willing to loan you the money on a 3 to 5 year note with an interest rate that will make it worth their while, yet, not put huge undue burden on you, maybe like 8-10%. I am no loan expert, but here is some quick math. Let’s say you want to buy a Tiny House for $35k. Hopefully you can put up $5k of your own cash. No matter where you get a loan, the lender is going to want you to have some skin in the game. That leaves a balance of $30k. At 9% over three years, your total interest would be around $4300. That is a decent return on investment for the lender, and is a bit high for you, but it’s not ridiculous. Want to see ridiculous? Just look at how much interest you would pay for a 30 year mortgage on a note only worth $100k at 6% ($115,838.19 in total interest, in case you are curious)