Cannabis property loans.

Cannabis real estate financing works differently from every other category on this site, and the reason is straightforward. Cannabis is illegal under federal law. Federally regulated banks and credit unions generally will not take on that exposure, and SBA financing is not available at all. Those are facts about how the lending market is structured, and any honest conversation about financing a cannabis property starts there.

What remains is a real market, just a smaller one. Private capital and a limited group of specialty lenders have built programs around licensed cannabis real estate. They understand the regulatory environment, they know how to underwrite it, and they write these loans routinely. The work is finding them, because a conventional lender search produces nothing.

The license sits at the center

In most property types, the real estate leads and the business follows. Here the license is often the most consequential element in the file.

Lenders will want to know the license type, the issuing state and municipality, its current standing, and any conditions attached. In an acquisition, the question of whether and how a license transfers becomes central. That varies significantly from state to state, and it is a legal question for your counsel and the licensing authority, not something we can answer for you. What we can say is that lenders will require it settled and documented, so getting clarity early prevents the deal from stalling later.

What the building is worth without the use

The second thing lenders concentrate on is the real estate itself, evaluated as if the cannabis operation were not there.

That is their downside position, and it drives a lot of the decision. A cultivation facility built inside a conventional industrial shell, where the power, HVAC, and water improvements are substantial but the underlying building remains a warehouse, tends to support better terms than a heavily specialized structure with limited alternative use. The same logic applies to dispensary space in standard retail. The more the property looks like ordinary commercial real estate underneath the build-out, the more comfortable a lender gets.

Build-out costs in this category are genuinely large. Environmental controls, security systems, electrical capacity, and water handling add up quickly, and lenders separate the generic infrastructure from the use-specific investment when they assess value.

How we work these files

We do not promise placement on every cannabis deal, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does. The lender set is narrow enough that some scenarios do not find a home.

What we do is look at the property, the license, and the operation, tell you candidly whether we think it is placeable, and take it to the lenders who are actually active in this space if it is. No credit pull, no cost to start.