I built the resource I wished had existed

This tool exists because I couldn't find anything like it when I needed it. Three times, across the full spectrum of California home project financing — a renovation financed with personal loans and a cash-out refi, a $2M ground-up build, and an owner-builder custom build in a rural county. Same broken research process every time, different products every time.

The first time was a San Francisco renovation — financed through stacked Lightstream personal loans with a planned cash-out refi exit. I engineered a financing stack around a projected post-renovation appraisal because no lender would touch the project conventionally.

The second was a $2M San Francisco ground-up build. That project produced a hand-built lender database that remains more comprehensive and honest than anything publicly available. That spreadsheet is the seed of the directory you see here.

The third is a $2M+ custom build in unincorporated Napa County — currently in progress. Owner-builder financing, pre-construction costs as down payment equity, rural lender restrictions. All of it in real time.

Every existing resource about home project financing is either written by someone selling a loan, generated by a content farm with no firsthand knowledge, or an outdated broker site that ends in “call us.” Whether you're looking at a HELOC, a cash-out refi, an FHA 203(k), a personal loan stack, or a full construction-to-perm, this is written by someone who actually bought loans — multiple times, across multiple product categories — and learned what nobody tells you. The lender directory contains qualitative notes from real conversations. The strategies come from actually executing them.