It all started with experiencing the difficulties in housing finance first-hand
Builders Patch was founded by Kanan Ajmera who spent nearly two decades in affordable housing finance. Frustrated with the unnecessarily complex and lengthy processes that made it painful for both lenders and developers to finance a housing project, she decided to create a modern system that would do away with the manual repetitive tasks involved in due diligence collection, and provide transparency on how deals get funded & clarity on what steps are to be taken to close successfully.
She was joined in her mission by Uma Pandit, who brought her years of product development experience to create an intuitive, easy-to-adopt platform that anyone can use with even the most minimal tech understanding. Together, they created a powerful solution that can be deployed in days to build capacity and scale at an enterprise level.
Challenges in housing finance
High demand, low supply, slow supply
America has a housing crisis. We need to build, renovate, and climate-proof over 7.3 million affordable rental units in the next decade to address the acute shortage in the US housing market.
Supply is lagging behind demand, but even projects that are under construction often take years to complete due to delays in the funding process.
The first step to accelerate the process of affordable housing development is to speed up the flow of funding. With our streamlined workflows, a project that took 3 to 6 months to get underwriting approval, now can be funded in just 30 days, drastically shrinking the financing timeline.
Complex processes, multiple players, disjointed systems
Multiple sources of funding need to be pooled together to finance a new development project. The process of applying for funding on the borrower's side, underwriting and disbursing funding on the lender's side is a lengthy, cumbersome process. For an industry this large and important, workflows can often be labour-intensive and dependent on legacy tools that haven't upgraded in years. We are changing this.
We are bringing all stakeholders of a deal onto a single platform, streamlining the way they work and empowering strategic decision-making with data-driven analysis. Our mission is to reduce the time, cost and effort required to finance the development and preservation of affordable homes across the country.
Capacity building and resource optimization
We believe that smaller staff sizes and limited resources shouldn’t be a hindrance of growth. Our platform helps small teams build the capacity they need and to disburse capital in their communities.
By removing the need to do hours of manual data entry through a digital interface that a new recruit can quickly adapt to, we are removing several hurdles to scaling. It doesn’t matter whether your team consists of 5 or 50 people, our technology infrastructure will help you process loan applications & disburse funds at scale.
Speeding up & scaling the disbursement of climate resiliency & weatherization funds
Simply building new housing is not enough. We need to ensure new and existing units are energy-efficient and collectively contribute to decarbonization and weatherization efforts. The funds are there, now we just need climate financing to be agile.
We are helping lenders disburse large amounts of capital to borrowers, who will apply these funds for energy retrofits, renovation, and decarbonization efforts. Together, we can tackle housing affordability and the climate crisis.
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