Refinancing Working Capital Loans

The process of commercial mortgage refinancing has become more relevant to small businesses which are trying to deal with reduced sales and cash flow. In some situations business owners are being forced to refinance existing loans by current lenders, and in other cases they are attempting to secure additional cash. Difficulties for refinancing are now occurring frequently with short term commercial funding and long term commercial real estate loans.

Some commercial finance situations lend themselves better to refinancing than others. There are two scenarios that are particularly difficult to refinance, one involving SBA loans and the other business opportunity financing. The need to replace existing business lines of credit with new financing arrangements is now emerging as equally difficult.

Revising commercial mortgage loans in which there is business property serving as collateral is a more traditional form of refinancing. Some borrowers are finding that they need to refinance simply to replace their existing commercial mortgage because many banks have decided to stop making commercial loans. Small business owners are being forced to explore refinancing options in order to get capital from their business equity to support their business financing needs in a slow economy. As borrowers are discovering, commercial refinancing is not as straightforward as it might have been in the past for either of these cases. In particular, there are two problem areas that will often be hard to overcome.

Business valuation is one factor acting as an obstacle to smooth refinancing. Declining sales levels lead to reduced commercial property values because commercial appraisals often derive business value from the income approach. The lack of recent profits for many businesses is another key problem impacting business loan refinancing. Many merchants are showing losses on recent tax returns and financial statements because of financial fluctuations. Recent losses are likely to be a significant difficulty when attempting to refinance commercial loans and commercial mortgages because lenders want current cash flow to cover debt payments.

Whatever the specific financing situation for a small business, commercial borrowers should be better prepared if they approach the process with a realization that there might not be the usual obvious solutions to refinancing business loans. It is likely that most businesses will need to evaluate and consider both new commercial lending sources and new business financing programs before the end of their current efforts to refinance business debt.