Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union successfully launched and grew its construction lending program through a partnership with Land Gorilla. Discover how an easy-to-use platform, expert support, and comprehensive resources helped TVFCU streamline the lending process, improve member satisfaction, and achieve impressive results.

Andy Woodman,
Director of Mortgage Lending, TVFCU

Video Transcript:

Primary market for TVFCU is going to be central Tennessee and then going into northwest Georgia. It’s about a 17 county footprint. And as we’ve just started out with our CP program we’re limiting it to just our footprint at this point, despite the fact we can lend wherever really. And with very minimal pomp and circumstance and just basically by word of mouth and through call-in requests, it’s been an outstanding program for us so far.

Have we ever had construction lending program or department? The answer is no. We have had requests for the product to offer it to our membership, and really needed to find the best way to roll that out without necessarily investing in staff and the experience that it would take to do that. We had a few people on staff that had done these loan types before with some experience, but the vast majority of those who would actually be doing the day to day handling of loans really had none.

And so what we wanted was somebody that could give us the infrastructure to launch the program, the parameters, the documents, the necessary check-the-box type things that we would need to put it in place. Once we had a few going, to be able to hold our hand and walk us through the process of getting the actual home built, making sure the builder was happy, the draws were funded and inspections were done on time. So we needed help across the board. We had reached out to Land Gorilla and you all provided basically the resources and everything we needed to be able to stand this up and get it to market fairly quickly.

The benefits and result of using Land Gorilla, as far as the builder and project review goes, just the resources that Land Gorilla has that we simply don’t have access to for an organization of our size. Having Land Gorilla as that partner to go ahead and make sure they’re helping vet the builder for our borrower because ultimately that’s really who we’re looking out for here. Again, things that Land Gorilla is able to find that we probably wouldn’t think to investigate upon has been great. It takes a careful eye to look over a project like that, between the plans, specs, making sure the budgets align with what the builder saying they’re going to kind of put in place. And again, as I mentioned earlier, our team really didn’t have much experience with that. What I found, were about ten months in, their learning curve has been so steep and the things that they’ve been able to take to and now understand and just become more fluent with it, I think it’s directly attributable to working with Land Gorilla and having access to the platform.

The best feature we found with Land Gorilla has to be the Dashboard and the OneSite platform. I mean, hands down, from a management perspective, being able to just pop in at any point in time and see where we are, how many projects we have going for my team that handles the loans, their ability to go in and see every detail they need to about the loan, and we’ve had really nothing but positives come from both, again, borrowers and builders in regards to OneSite and our ability to go ahead and get their draws on time, handle their inspections, it’s been a real blessing.

Between the platform itself and the ease of use and the team there working with my team and getting them fluent in the terminology and the documents and the program itself. We wouldn’t be where we are today. I would never have expected it to take off like it had had it not been for Land Gorilla, so I cannot endorse them enough.

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