Nobody is talking about the lease

Everyone is talking about the SBA decoupling rule like it changes deal size. It does. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the lease between OpCo and PropCo. Stack a 7(a) on the business and a 504 on the real estate, and you've got two loan agreements, two collateral packages, and an intercompany lease you control on both sides. That lease is about to get scrutinized harder than it ever has. Rent has to be arm's length. Term has to outlast both notes — 25 years for the 504. Assignment language has to survive a default on either side without cross-defaulting the other. If the lease was drafted a decade ago when both entities were wholly owned, none of that pressure-testing happened. Now it's a closing condition. The deals that close clean in Q3 are the ones where someone read the lease before the lender did.