Taking Pride in Being the Best
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
When Josh Woodward, president and CEO of Lima One Capital, thinks back on his early days at the company, he remembers how different the real estate investment lending industry was in the early 2010s. “At that time, we were still operating in the shadow of the financial crisis,” Woodward recalled. “Almost no one really understood what business-purpose lending really was. We used to spend half of our meetings explaining how our business worked.”
As “employee number six,” as he described it, Woodward joined Lima One in 2013, three years after its original founders, two U.S. Marines who named the company after their unit’s call sign, started the company. Despite external challenges during its early years, Lima One kept growing.
“We kept at it,” Woodward said. “Over time, we have added products, geographies, and capabilities so that today we are sourcing and underwriting high-quality loans that enable us to grow our business and expand our product suite to serve our investors.”
The company views itself not just as the “premier lender for real estate investors nationwide,” but also as a partner to those investors. “We provide proven experience, broad lending options, and innovative technology to help real estate investors build, enhance, and stabilize communities,” Woodward continued, noting the lender’s ability to offer “durable, flexible capital to the best borrowers and sponsors in the space” was greatly enhanced by a 2021 acquisition by MFA Financial, Inc., a real estate investment trust (REIT).
“This gave us a lot of control and ability to work with our borrowers more than many others in this space,” Woodward explained. “We are dedicated to being very aligned with our clients and achieving successful outcomes while also benefiting from low cost of funds because of our REIT status.” He continued, “We essentially just focus on originating as many good loans as we can find. It is a tremendous partnership.”
Bringing Experience to Bear on the Underwriting Process
Part of creating a dynamic portfolio of loan products involves an intimate understanding of how every element of the borrowing experience works, and that is one of the reasons Greg Larsen, Lima One’s senior director of underwriting, is so glad he spent several years in the special assets division at a former employer in the midst of the housing crisis of the mid-2000s.
“I spent more than seven years working out problem real estate transactions with homebuilders and other borrowers, in mediations, and even going to court,” Larsen recalled. “There are so many things that can go wrong [in a loan] that most people do not even think about. If you want to be an amazing underwriter, I recommend going into a special assets group first.”
That special-assets experience gives Larsen a unique perspective on loan products today, and he puts that perspective to use in a variety of ways in his position at Lima One. Currently, he said, he is evaluating existing lending guidelines in order to remove “bloat” — verbiage added to lending guidelines over time to address unusual circumstances and provide guidance for the future — that can sometimes expand to the point it inhibits the intended purpose of a loan product.
“Case-by-case information is really important, but bloat can also reduce the size of your lending box and prevent ‘common sense lending,’ which is a problem when it comes to working with real estate investors,” Larsen explained. His division recently reduced their basic lending guidelines document by roughly 30 pages.
“This gives more power to the underwriter to make more informed decisions about the buy box and have discussions with the borrower,” Larsen said. “We retain the information about the big things that are important to us and to our borrowers, but we empower our underwriters to work with customers to come up with solutions together instead of just functioning as gatekeepers.” The streamlining project is ongoing; Larsen said the next new release will “potentially expand into other product types and serve larger sponsors that historically haven’t been part of our focus.”
Woodward said this type of creative thinking is part and parcel of Lima One’s overarching vision for lending. “We have, by intention, set up our business to be flexible,” he explained. “That is a benefit to having great people and vertical integration. We are a company that is entrepreneurial in nature even though we are bigger than we were a decade ago. Lima One is designed to survive and thrive in any environment.”
Bringing Courtesy & Common Sense to the Borrower Experience
In addition to dynamism and innovation, Lima One prioritizes its borrowers’ and clients’ experiences throughout the loan process, whether that means creating an efficient, transparent application and evaluation process or carefully tracking both direct and indirect customer reporting on their experiences in order to refine products and protocols.
“The borrower experience and our client-facing technology are areas of ongoing heavy investment for us,” said Darrel Williams, chief information officer at Lima One Capital. “We are striving to leverage technology in order to create faster closings and transparency that are a big part of our client experience.”
Williams explained Lima One believes consistency throughout the borrowing process is essential to the client experience. “We want everyone who goes to Lima One for a loan to know exactly what to expect, where to find things, and how to easily see what tasks are currently open and what is coming next,” he explained. “We are dedicated to building a process that is highly optimized for trust and speed within our Lima One client portal.” Williams said bringing this goal to fruition is a significant factor in the company’s decision to view itself as a partner for customers.
“Lima One is always working to anticipate borrower needs so we can provide better insights and deliver that transparent and efficient experience every time,” Williams said. This means his teams do not just send out customer surveys or conduct follow-up calls; they also monitor online feedback, evaluate service calls, and scrape feedback in innovative ways to identify trends and overall customer sentiment.
“We want to put all of this information together and allow that to highlight pain points and things we need to address,” Williams said. “It really comes down to being an active listener and then making decisions from there.”
Active listening is not restricted to clients, either, said Woodward. “We really take pride in constantly creating an environment where our employees can be at their best, which can mean very different things to different people,” he explained. “We spend a lot of time working on creating sound feedback loops, empowering our teams, and working to bring the best operating environment for them to reality.”
Larsen recalled making the decision a year ago to join Lima One, saying, “The people were all just some of the nicest people I had ever worked with. It makes it easy to work long hours to accomplish goals for ourselves or our clients because we are all working together and pushing harder thanks to our company culture.”
Deliberately Set Up for Agility & Flexibility
As 2025 draws to a close, the only thing that appears certain about the lending industry is that it is not going anywhere. When it comes to making predictions about rising or falling interest rates, the relative health of the housing market, and the stability or volatility of the economy, economists and analysts are currently all over the map. While experts at World Bank and the United Nations recently predicted deceleration in the U.S. economy during the remainder of 2025, Goldman Sachs and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected accelerated economic growth for the rest of the year. Deciphering conflicting analyses like these can be challenging not just for real estate investors actively acquiring assets in the live market, but also for those operating behind the scenes, including lenders like Lima One.
This exact scenario is why, observed Woodward, Lima One has been built to withstand not just economic turbulence, but unpredictability as well. “We intentionally set up our business to be agile, nimble, and flexible,” Woodward said. “I may not know for sure if rates will go up or down, or whether people will buy more homes or fewer, or if the economy is going to be good or bad, but I do know we have built a business that can survive and thrive in any combination of those conditions.”
Woodward called Lima One’s dynamic nature one of the company’s “core tenets,” crediting the “entrepreneurial nature” of Lima One’s leadership and its employees for its ability to pivot effectively when necessary.
“We are a bigger company now, but we still act like a small startup from over a decade ago, and that has allowed us to adapt and thrive in any environment,” Woodward said. “That is why we are one of the few lenders who have been in this space as long as we have, and why we will always be able to meet our customers’ needs.” He continued, “Some things will never change: Customers will never want to close loans more slowly, seek out a more difficult experience, or have less access to funds. To help make sure they do not experience those things, we will never change in our dedication to being nimble in our business operations. We offer premier lending products, and that is a constant.”
Sidebar 1
By the Numbers
15 // Lima One has been in business for 15 years. The company was founded in 2010.
46 // Number of states served by Lima One at time of publication.
30,000 // Lima One has closed more than 30,000 loans since its opening in 2010.
$11 Billions // Lima One has provided more than $11 billion in fundings to real estate investors.
60,000 // Lima One moved into a new 60,000-square-foot headquarters in Greenville, South Carolina, in July 2025. The company also has a hub office in Irvine, California.
2 // Lima One has two main offices, with headquarters in Greenville, SC, and a hub office in Irvine, California.
Sidebar 2
Meeting Market Challenges by Aligning Lending & Investment Strategies
As a national lender for real estate investors, Lima One is dedicated to providing innovative and dynamic solutions to keep investors active in every market and throughout every economic cycle. To that end, the company offers an array of investment property loans designed with the changing needs of investors in mind.
“We are dedicated to listening to and learning from the experiences of our borrowers,” said Darrel Williams, Lima One’s chief information officer. “In this business, it is far too easy to assume we know what we should be building for our clients instead of letting their experiences be the roadmap to the solutions we are building. We listen and engage, then build.”
Lima One currently offers three primary types of loans. They are:
FixNFlip Loans
The Lima One FixNFlip loan program is designed to offer “maximum leverage with minimal money down,” according to the company website. These loans may be tailored to any fix-and-flip project, from a quick carpet-and-paint project to a heavy, materially challenging rehab. For investors who qualify, the lender may offer up to 92.5% LTC/75% LTV, and access to up to 100% of the rehab budget with 4-day draws. Lima One’s three primary FixNFlip loan categories are:
» FixNFlip
» Fix2Rent®
» Bridge Plus
New Construction Loans
Lima One’s New Construction loan program is designed to help investors “finance ground-up construction projects and scale at their own pace,” the company said. According to the website, these loans are designed to close fast with maximum exposure and repeatable processes in order to “make it easy to leverage your equity and plan your next build. Lima One’s three primary new construction-loan categories are:
» New Construction
» Build2Rent®
» Bridge Loan
Rental Loans
No matter the market, there is always demand for rental loans, but not all lenders are flexible enough to work with investors as the market shifts. According to the company website, Lima One “offers smart, flexible [rental loan] programs that can be tailored to your investment plans and exit strategies” whether an investor “sticks to the same approach or pivots to fit a changing market. Lima One’s three primary rental-loan categories are:
» Portfolio loan
» Single-family rental
» Short-term rental
Learn more about Lima One’s lending programs at LimaOne.com.
