Commercial mortgage financing efforts are rarely problem-free for small business owners, and now economic uncertainties have resulted in new and significant financial challenges. On the bright side, there are practical and effective commercial finance solutions for most of these problems. The bad news is that successful business finance programs (which avoid the key problems) have become more complex and are usually difficult to find.

There is often a useful value for both problem-finding and problem-solving with working capital funding and commercial mortgage loans. With the recent banking chaos, the importance of finding the commercial lending problems has assumed a new level of importance because there is in fact a new set of business finance difficulties to be confronted by small businesses. Unfortunately these problems are typically not obvious to the average commercial borrower.

For many new commercial borrowers, their previous investment finance experience has been limited to their home. An ongoing major difficulty to overcome in this situation is that there are approximately 25 key differences between residential mortgages and commercial mortgage loans. In a common example, even experienced commercial borrowers are often confused that they cannot obtain small business loans for the same cost, terms and interest rate as their home mortgage.

One of the biggest new commercial financing problems has been that many lenders have simply stopped making business loans. While this is a serious problem, an even bigger problem currently emerging is that many commercial lenders are not informing their business owner clients on a timely basis of their inability to provide commercial loans. There are many disappointing reports about commercial borrowers being told at the last minute that their commercial loan would not be approved after waiting several weeks to complete the commercial financing or refinancing process.

The growing shortage of lenders that will provide short-term working capital is a critical new business financing problem. While the number of lenders providing commercial real estate loans (which require the property as collateral) is shrinking, working capital financing (which does not require separate collateral) has become even harder to find consistently. This particular problem is currently impacting virtually all businesses because even thriving businesses usually need periodic help with short term business financing.

For either old or new business loan problems, the solutions will of course vary based on circumstances. Commercial borrowers should be encouraged to know that they have more commercial financing choices than they probably realize. With the help of a commercial loan expert, finding and solving business finance obstacles should be easier than tackling the challenge alone. On a precautionary note, when seeking commercial finance solutions, small business owners should probably avoid the bank or banker that caused their working capital and business financing problems in the first place.