Financing a warrantable condo
Does condo warrantability matter for a DSCR or hard money loan?
Warrantability determines whether a condo project qualifies for an agency loan — and no lender in this directory makes agency loans, so the label matters less here than the HOA questions a DSCR or hard-money underwriter will actually ask instead.
- DSCR rental loan A condo unit qualifies under the same DSCR framework as a single-family rental once the loan itself is a non-agency product, which every lender in this directory writes.
- Assuming warrantable status is the deciding factor Warrantability is a Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac certification standard, and none of the lenders in this directory are agency lenders — treating a warrantable label as the underwriting answer here skips the questions these lenders actually ask.
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.
What "warrantable" actually certifies
A warrantable condo project meets Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s checklist: owner-occupancy above a set threshold, no single entity owning too large a share of units, adequate HOA reserves, no pending litigation, and a rental-cap policy that does not exceed agency limits. The certification exists to protect agencies buying the loan on the secondary market — it has nothing to do with hard money or DSCR underwriting, which never touches that secondary market.
What a DSCR or hard-money lender checks instead
Since none of these lenders sell into agency pools, the file review looks different: whether the HOA allows non-owner-occupant rentals at all, whether there is a minimum lease-term restriction that conflicts with the investment strategy, whether the HOA is current on its dues and has adequate insurance, and whether comparable condo sales exist in the building or complex to support the appraisal. None of this is published as a lender-level criterion in this directory — it is evaluated project by project.
The rental-restriction question matters more than warrantability
The single most common reason a condo deal falls apart in this space is not agency warrantability — it is discovering, after the purchase contract is signed, that the HOA bylaws cap the number of units that can be non-owner-occupied and that cap is already full. That is a document review problem to solve before financing, not a lender criterion any of these loans will surface for you.
What to have ready
- HOA bylaws, specifically the rental-restriction section
- HOA budget and reserve study
- Master insurance policy declarations page
Questions
Do I need to prove the condo is warrantable to get a DSCR loan?
What condo issue actually kills these deals?
Is a condo treated the same as a single-family rental otherwise?
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%.
- Non-QM Loan — A non-QM loan is a mortgage that does not meet the Qualified Mortgage standard, usually because it verifies income by some route other than tax returns. It is a documentation category, not a credit-quality one.
- 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.