Free SBA Lender Search Tool

Many of us select SBA lenders based on word-of-mouth referral. A friend who closed a deal liked their banker, the introduction gets made, and that's the lender. Word-of-mouth isn't a bad starting point, but it picks for the lender's relationship skills, not for fit with your specific deal. The good news is there's a tremendous amount of free public data out there on SBA lender performance. The FOIA dataset shows every 7(a) loan, by lender, by year, by industry, by size, by outcome. The bad news is it's a giant flat file which isn't user friendly. So we filtered through it and built a directory for this community. Sortable by PLP designation, deal-size sweet spot, days-to-fund, charge-off rate, top industries, and geography. No login, no paywall. Tool: searcheros.ai/business-lenders Companion writeup: searcheros.ai/blog/how-to-choose-sba-lender The framework for which columns matter and how to weight them came from a few conversations with @Ron Wexler‌. Credit to him for the screening logic. A few things that surprised me once the data was actually filterable: - Industry experience varies wildly bank to bank. Some lenders have 200+ closed loans in a given sector; others have two. The FOIA data shows it cleanly. Going to a lender with real reps in your industry usually means faster underwriting and fewer "we've never seen that" surprises. - The acquisition-lender field is smaller than the headline 7(a) numbers suggest. Filter to lenders who actually write trailing-3-year loans of $1M+ classified as Change of Ownership, and ~450 banks collapses to maybe a dozen at scale. Live Oak alone sits near 800 of those loans. A lot of "SBA lenders" mostly do working-capital loans; far fewer are acquisition specialists. The blog walks through how to use the columns on a real deal and how to sequence them. Probably most useful if you're picking a lender in the next 90 days. If you've worked with an SBA lender on an acquisition and the directory is missing a column that would have changed your decision, I'd love to know what it is. That's the kind of feedback that makes v2 worth shipping.