The NPLA serves as a full-time advocate for private lenders.

Private lenders play a vital role in the health and growth of our national housing market and the broader economy. By making B2B (business-to-business) loans to real estate investors on deals that do not fit the standards of “conventional” lenders due to time frame or perceived risk, they play a crucial role in revitalizing local communities, preventing and ameliorating neighborhood blight, and creating new opportunities for homeownership. Despite their vital place in the financial ecosystem, private money lenders have historically held a near-invisible place in the lending industry.

Leonard Rosen, CEO of the Pitbull National Hard Money Lending Conference, has plans to change that.

“Private lenders are a valuable part of the economic infrastructure of the United States, but they are largely misunderstood and even mistrusted,” he explained.

Rosen’s new organization, the National Private Lenders Association (NPLA), will fill what he described as “a void in our marketplace” by providing private lenders with “a strong, full-time voice in Washington D.C. and on a state level.” He added, “It is the NPLA’s job, our function as an association, to educate, inform and lobby for the growth of our industry and provide valuable information to legislators.”

An Organization Unlike Any Other
Rosen is passionate about the need for “full-time advocacy for the protection of our industry.” He described legislators as generally “confused” about private lending, which leads to well-intentioned but adverse policy decisions that hurt private lenders’ ability to deploy capital safely and productively in the real estate sector.

“99.9 percent of our industry is making business-to-business loans. Lawmakers must understand how we work and, further, that we are not usurious in our efforts to deploy capital,” he said. “NPLA’s educational goals focus here.”

The Foundation of the Financial Food Chain Under Fire
Rosen noted private lenders are often self-directed investors using money in their individual retirement accounts (IRAs) to fund deals, making it imperative that those individuals’ interests be protected from a legislative angle just as any other lenders’ interests would be.

“There is a whole food chain that begins with the deployment of capital from an investor,” he said. “These investors deploy billions upon billions of dollars into the marketplace every year, whether it be for the investor rehab market, the small-balance capital market, or midsize and large commercial projects. Support for all of these comes from private investment because traditional banks simply do not have the appetite for it.”

Rosen, like the majority of the private lending population, worries electoral shifts looming in 2020 could bring in a new crop of legislators uneducated on how the private lending community functions and erroneously equating the industry with the check-cashing and payday-loan sectors.

“People have good intentions when they want to regulate the private lending community. They want to protect the consumer. However, those good intentions adversely affect our industry when the legislator is uneducated about how private lending really works [in the real estate sector],” Rosen said.

“NPLA’s strong, national voice, full-time representation in Washington, D.C., and its role as a clearinghouse for legislation that comes up on state levels will provide that education, create positive partnerships between lawmakers and private lenders, and, ultimately, fill that void,” he said. 

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NPLA’s first meeting will be October 27, 2019, in Scottsdale, Arizona. To learn more about the NPLA private lending think tank—which will assemble leaders in the industry, including hedge funds, hard-money lenders, private lenders and investors in a series of panels dealing with legislative issues, education and ethics—visit NPLAOnline.com. You’ll find details on the association’s agenda and how to be involved.