Single-tenant office loans.

One lease, one occupier, one rent check. Of everything filed under the office label, this is the version a lender can actually measure, because for a defined number of years the income is a document rather than an assumption about a market. Office lending has tightened across the board, and single-tenant is where that tightening is easiest to argue with.

The measurement is simple to state and hard to get right. Rent is contractual for as long as the lease runs. After that, it is a leasing assumption. Every underwriting decision on a single-tenant office building comes down to how much of the loan sits inside the contractual period and how much sits in the assumption.

That is why two buildings with the same rent, the same square footage, and the same submarket can produce very different quotes. The one with a long tail on its lease is a term deal. The one with a short tail is a rollover deal, and rollover deals get sized around what happens if the tenant does not renew.

The real cost of losing the tenant

Owners tend to think about vacancy as lost rent. Lenders think about it as lost rent plus everything it takes to replace the tenant.

Backfilling office space means a tenant improvement allowance, a leasing commission, free rent to get the deal signed, and however many months the space sits empty before any of that starts. On a single-tenant building there is no other income covering the carry while that plays out. A lender underwriting your file is estimating that whole sequence, and the estimate drives how much debt the building supports.

This is also why the build-out matters. Space that was configured tightly around one occupier, with specialized rooms, unusual floor plans, or improvements no one else wants, reads as a longer and more expensive re-lease. Open, dividable, conventional space reads as a shorter one.

What strengthens the file

Renewal probability cannot be proven, but it can be evidenced. A tenant that recently spent its own capital on the space, expanded into more of it, put its headquarters there, or has occupied the building for a long stretch is telling a lender something. So is a rent that sits at or below what the space would command from a replacement tenant, because a below-market rent gives the occupier a reason to stay.

The reverse is also true, and worth knowing before you go to market. Contract rent well above market, a short remaining term, and a tenant in a shrinking footprint is a combination lenders read quickly.

How we place these

Send us the lease, the tenant, and the expiration. Those three items determine most of the lender list before we look at anything else. From there we shop it across banks, credit unions, life companies, CMBS, and private capital, and tell you honestly which of those are actually writing on a building like yours right now. No credit pull, no cost to start.