Lending in REDA

This is where the lending line begins. If you're new to lending in REDA, one idea explains almost everything you'll see on the screen: a loan in REDA is a deal. There's no separate "loan" object to hunt for — a loan lives on the same Opportunities tab as every other deal, and it becomes a loan by being of the Lending type. This article walks that model end to end: the loan's lifecycle, where loans come from, the pieces that make up a loan, and — just as importantly — the honest boundaries of what REDA does and doesn't calculate for you. No prior REDA experience is assumed; every term is defined as we reach it. The four how-to and reference articles beneath this one do the step-by-step work.

The loan is a deal

REDA's Opportunities tab is a single "deal" hub. The same record type of object serves as a lease, an acquisition worksheet, a property-sale settlement, and — when its type is set to Lending — a loan. So when you're looking at a loan, you're looking at a deal that happens to be a loan: it carries the parties, the collateral property, the loan terms, and every balance figure on one record page.

Everything about servicing a loan hangs off that one record. Two kinds of child records do the day-to-day work:

• Loan Payment rows — one per instalment or funding receipt, recording principal and interest as they move (see Recording Loan Payments).
• Loan Disbursement and Loan Payoff tickets — the controlled records that draw funds out or use a loan's escrow to retire another loan (see Disbursements & Payoffs).

That's the whole shape of it: one loan deal, its payments, and its money-movement tickets. The rest of this article and its siblings simply detail each piece.

The loan lifecycle at a glance

A loan advances through a fixed set of Stages shown as the Path across the top of the record. For the Lending type there are six, in this order:

Prospecting → Pending → Funded → Closed Won → Payoff Pending → Closed Lost

You move a loan along this Path by hand as the real-world loan progresses. A word on the order that surprises people: a loan is marked Closed Won as soon as it funds and the deal is done — "won" here means the loan was successfully placed, not that it's been repaid. From there it can move on to Payoff Pending while the principal is worked down toward settlement or refinance. So Closed Won comes before Payoff Pending, not after.

What matters for the numbers is when a loan starts to count: a loan begins feeding your property and portfolio debt totals from Funded onward. At the Lending type, the internal "active", "won" and "closed" states all switch on together at Funded and stay on through Closed Won and Payoff Pending — so a loan kept on the books at Closed Won still counts as active and still appears in your property's debt figures. Only Closed Lost takes a loan out of play (a loan that never funded or was abandoned).

One constraint to note now: the money-movement tickets — disbursements and payoffs — can only be created against a loan that has reached Closed Won. The full rule lives in Disbursements & Payoffs.

Where loans come from

Loans reach the Opportunities tab in two ways.

You can also just create a loan deal directly from the Opportunities tab — see Creating a Loan.

Anatomy of a loan

A loan record gathers four kinds of information. This is the overview; the detail lives in the how-to articles.

The balance figures are calculated by REDA from the loan's payments and tickets — nobody types them, and they read 0.00 on a brand-new loan until money is recorded. Every one of them is explained, with its formula in plain words, in Escrow & Principal Balances.

The honest scope — what REDA does and does not do

This is the single most important thing to understand before you set expectations for a lending team.

So what are the Amortize, Frequency, Interest Rate and Interest Accrual Type fields for? They document the agreed terms — they record what the parties agreed, so the loan record is a complete picture of the deal. They do not drive any calculation. Each instalment — the principal portion and the interest portion — is entered by hand as a Loan Payment row, using the split you compute. A loan's "schedule", in REDA, is simply the set of Payment Due payment rows you create (see The Loan Repayment Schedule).

Parent and child loans

A loan can sit beneath a parent loan — useful when a single facility is split across several properties or slices. There is one level only: a child loan cannot itself have children. Child loans use the Loan Type value Allocation, and REDA enforces that the Allocation type is reserved for child loans. The parent's amount is a ceiling for what you can allot to its children, and each child's borrower must match the parent's borrower. The full mechanics and worked math are in Loan Terms & Allocation.

Loan types

The Loan Type field records what kind of loan this is. One line each:

Worked example: Meridian's Harbour Tower loan

We'll follow one loan across this whole section. Meridian Capital — Meridian's internal purchasing entity — holds a loan of 500,000.00 secured on Harbour Tower, borrowed from the external lender Harbour Capital Partners. At the concept level, here's how that file comes to life:

1. Meridian's Harbour Tower acquisition auto-creates a placeholder loan at Prospecting, with Meridian Capital (the acquisition's buying account) set as borrower and the acquisition already linked.
2. The team fills it in — the lender or deal account, Loan Amount 500,000.00, a Loan Type, the Loan Start Date, and the agreed terms.
3. They advance it to Funded once the money is received. The balance figures stay 0.00 until payments and tickets are recorded — that's expected, not a missing field.

The same 500,000.00 loan is carried through Creating a Loan, The Loan Repayment Schedule, and Escrow & Principal Balances.

A Lending deal record — the Meridian Capital / Harbour Tower loan of 500,000.00. The header carries the Stage (shown here at Prospecting) and the Loan Details section holds the terms.

The placeholder loan REDA creates when an acquisition closes and spawns a property — named TBD [ Lending ], opened at Stage Prospecting with the Lending record type. Its Loan Details are still empty: it is a stub waiting for terms, marking that the new property may carry debt.

Where to go for each task

Where to go next

1. Onboarding Borrowers & Lenders — capture and convert a lending inquiry into a loan.
2. Creating a Loan — build the deal and enter its principal.
3. Loan Terms & Allocation — the terms block and parent/child facilities.
4. The Loan Repayment Schedule — recording instalments by hand.
5. Escrow & Principal Balances — every computed figure, explained in words.
6. Property & Acquisition Loan Rollups — how loans roll up onto a property.

Frequently asked questions