Banks in general do not like to lend to gas stations and convenience stores. I will repeat. Banks in general do not like to lend to gas stations and convenience stores.
You could go into great detail as to the reasons for this, but suffice it to say, ANY bank would rather lend money for an apartment building, office building, self storage facility and a host of other types of commercial asset classes. The chances of default are less and it is much easier to sell off some of these properties in case of foreclosure. Gas stations and convenience stores with fuel depreciate much faster than other types of properties.
So how do you find out WHO is lending? You could go from bankGas stations for sale in Florida to bank to bank until you might find one or you could go through a mortgage broker that hopefully knows who has an appetite for lending to gas stations.
There are a couple of things you can do if you’re searching for a bank. If you are considering SBA financing, you can call the district SBA office for your State and make a Freedom Of Information Act Request (FOIA) and simply ask any parameter you like. You can ask which lenders have done SBA loans for gas stations and convenience stores in the past week, the past month, the past year, whatever your time frame is. You can ask the loan parameters also, meaning, you can find out which loans were done for 7 years, 10 years or 20-25 years. The reason for this is so you can ascertain which ones were real estate loans, which ones were business only loans or which ones were either working capital or inventory loans. If a loan is for 20-25 years, it WILL be real estate backed. If you find that a loan is for 10 years, that is most likely a business only loan where the loan and amortization is ten years maximum. If you see a loan that is for seven years, the borrower probably borrowed money for working capital or inventory.
You can also find out if it is a 7(a) loan (most common) or a 504 (normally larger loans). You can find out the loan amount which might indicate to you which banks do larger real estate backed loans. Some banks lend to gas stations a LOT, but they are small loans, less than $150,000, which are frequently to do a small construction build-out, add equipment (like an ATM machine, walk in cooler, POS system, etc) but they frequently are not interested at all in doing larger loans. Some banks specialize in doing these “Express” loans for smaller amounts.