Financing a single-family rental
What loan do I use to buy a single-family rental property?
A single-family rental is the deal every DSCR and hard-money-to-rental program was designed around, which is exactly why this roster is the longest and least differentiated on the site — it is the box everything else on this page deviates from.
- DSCR rental loan A single-family rental is the reference case DSCR underwriting was built around: one appraisal, one lease or one market-rent estimate, one coverage ratio.
- Fix-and-flip financing A flip loan prices and sizes itself around a fast resale, not a lease — it is the wrong tool the moment the plan is to hold and rent.
Lenders in the directory
No lender here publishes a rule for this
This is an underwriting judgment, not a published threshold. None of the 37 lenders in the directory states a policy on it, so there is no honest way to build a shortlist — and a list computed only from which products a lender writes would tell you nothing you could act on.
What matters here is how the file is presented rather than which lender receives it. The sections below cover that. When you are ready to approach lenders, the directory shows what each one does publish, with the date it was verified.
Why this is the reference case
Single-family rental underwriting is comparatively simple because every input has one obvious source. The appraisal is a standard Form 1004 with a market-rent addendum (Form 1007) if the unit is vacant or between tenants. The rent roll is one line. The property tax and insurance figures come off one parcel. Nothing in the file requires the lender to reconcile competing income streams or unusual comparables, which is why this is the property type almost every lender in the directory is willing to write.
What actually varies between lenders here
Because the property itself introduces so little complexity, the differences between lenders on a single-family deal come almost entirely from borrower- and deal-level facts that live on other pages in this directory: credit score, DSCR ratio, loan size, and leverage. This page exists to isolate the property variable and hold it constant — see the credit cluster and the leverage cluster for the filters that actually separate one lender from another on a standard rental.
Where the roster below is padded, and why that is fine here
Nearly every lender in the directory that writes any rental product at all clears the products filter on this page — that is not a curation failure, it is the honest answer for the single most commonly financed property type on the site. The "clears" and "unpublished" split below is driven entirely by whether a lender has a stored verification date, not by anything property-specific.
What to check before assuming this is your page
If the property is two to four units, a condo, a manufactured home, or anything else with its own entry in this cluster, read that page instead — the roster will look identical, but the underwriting mechanics and open questions are not, and treating a duplex or a condo as a plain single-family file is where surprises come from later in underwriting.
What to have ready
- Purchase contract or current mortgage statement
- Lease or a comparable rent estimate for the unit
- Most recent insurance quote and property tax bill
Questions
Is a single-family rental easier to finance than a duplex?
Do I need a lease in place to qualify?
Why does the lender list look so long here?
Terms used on this page
- Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR) — DSCR is a property’s gross monthly rent divided by its total monthly mortgage payment. A DSCR of 1.00 means the rent exactly covers the payment; 1.25 means rent exceeds the payment by 25%.
- Form 1007 (Single-Family Comparable Rent Schedule) — Form 1007 is a one-page appraisal addendum, ordered alongside the standard appraisal on a one-unit property, in which the appraiser identifies comparable rentals and reconciles them to a single opinion of the property’s market rent.
- Form 1004 (Uniform Residential Appraisal Report) — Form 1004, the Uniform Residential Appraisal Report, is the standard appraisal form for one-unit residential properties. It documents the property, the neighborhood, and comparable sales, and reconciles them into a single opinion of value.