Show Notes
In this episode I sit down with Will Harvey to talk about how to build a private lending fund. He was last on the show in 2020, right before COVID, having just quit his mortgage job to go into multifamily full time. Will’s funds have written about 50 loans without a single foreclosure, and he got there by way of house flipping, a boutique motel, a wedding venue, and a stack of LP positions in apartment deals.
We get into why he pivoted from owning apartments to lending against them, how the private lending model works from both sides of the table, why he runs a fund instead of placing loans one at a time, how he’s underwriting borrowers with Claude Code, and what he’s doing to raise capital now that friends and family are close to tapped out.
Key Takeaways
Will pivoted from owning real estate to financing it
He spent three years originating residential mortgages before buying rentals in Northern Virginia.
He burned the boats on the W-2 job to go into apartments full time, then COVID scattered the group he’d been investing with.
He got involved in a few deals as a baby GP and worked out that he preferred the passive side.
Year-one bonus depreciation from the LP deals offset the high-tax income from flipping, which he could do because he was a full-time real estate investor.
Private lending found him by accident
He launched his first fund in 2023 to invest in other people’s syndications, mainly multifamily.
The fund still holds a position in a build-to-rent deal and a position in a mobile home park.
The deal was a million-dollar new build in Ashburn, Virginia, with the borrower putting down 75 percent.
Harvey Capital lends almost entirely on residential, mostly one to four unit properties, plus a couple of mobile home parks.
Asset-based lending asks a different question than your bank does
A conventional lender puts the weight on the borrower’s W-2s, tax returns, and bank statements, and the answer comes back black and white.
Private lending weighs the borrower and the asset together.
His house flipping background lets him look at a deal and know inside two minutes whether it works.
One recent loan went against an entitled infill lot the borrower owned free and clear so he could pull equity for another project.
Speed is what private lenders sell, and it beats price
Will got shopped harder writing loans at 3 percent than he does writing them at 12 percent.
As a loan officer he felt like a commodity, because a borrower could call anyone and find a slightly better rate.
In May his team closed a loan for a repeat borrower in under 24 hours, from a Tuesday phone call to a Wednesday closing.
Google Ads drives most of his deal flow now, because people searching for a hard money loan in his market have already decided what they want.
AI is doing the work a lending team used to do
Will runs Claude Code with a set of skills built for specific parts of the business.
The skill looks at the property and the comps the way Will would, then hands him a PDF briefing to decide from.
He pulls eight CSV reports out of Google Ads every week and lets Claude tell him which campaigns to cut and which to fund.
He built a list of self-directed IRA owners by having Claude Code read county records and scrub the custodian language off the titles, and the mailers he sent have one prospect discussing $500,000 or more.
With one operations lead, he thinks the two of them could handle ten times their current volume.
Connect with Will!
Harvey Capital: https://harvey-capital.com
Email: will@harvey-capital.com
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