After waking up on 1/1/21, with a 2020 hang over, we looked around and began to implement our 2021 plan. Annually, CFSI has an offsite strategic planning meeting in October where we bring our senior leadership and line managers together for a couple of days of meetings and eating to clear our heads and plan for the year ahead. We had anticipated that 2021 was going to be the best year ever for CFSI, ultimately it was, but it was challenging for our clients and team with the lingering effects of Covid on the psyche, client lending practices, housing inventories, and the new political environment.

As a new president was being sworn in, the market was afraid of what might happen, and lock downs continued. People were growing restless across the United States. The housing sector continued to soar in many states and an exodus of people and businesses from CA and NY to TX and FL to more “cost effective” and “free” states where taxes and business climate seemed better. The supply chain bottleneck because of geopolitical, employment, and covid issues caused a backup of ships, supplies, lumbar, and goods. To top it off, truck drivers, dock workers, and unions slow the pace of unloading the hundreds of ships off our coast. All of these factors drove prices up across the board.

Back in Business

In our business, though, construction projects started again! Many cities had reopened building departments after the holidays, started to reissue permits, while banks started to go back to lending and away from PPP lending/forgiveness. We saw our project feasibility group volume quickly pick up. From that point it is 120-180 days before projects are funded and break ground where our fund control services and inspection services start and by mid-year we were back to pre-pracademic levels of volume with our clients and adding many new clients each month who needed our expert construction advise to assist with their lending platform.

Mitigate Risk in the New Year

Q4 is scheduled for record breaking month over month services and our 2022 planning session has us growing organically by 20% and adding new products and services for our client base.

With the infrastructure bill passed by the house, major construction will continue in our cities and states across the county. We are still short 5 million homes in the United States, and it will continue to grow in the coming years. CFSI and our clients are positioned to take advantage of the building trends. Private lending for residential and multifamily projects, both renovation and ground up, have/will be pivotal for us to fill the void of housing and the capital markets loves this asset class and B2R will help in many ways beyond homeownership. What we do supports lender risk, gives them confidence about a project, which Wall Street likes. Lenders will continue to lend money to the space and in short it makes the entire process flow smoothly and keeps the shovels in the ground and doing our part to keep the American Dream alive.