About

Mission

Private lenders, capital partners, brokers, and serious investors should not have to reconstruct the week from rating-agency PDFs, warehouse gossip, and lender rate sheets that do not say when they were updated. The Payoff Letter reads that tape and files it twice a week.

The beat is fix-and-flip and bridge, DSCR rental, small-balance commercial, and asset-based real estate lending. National, not a single metro. The standard is simple: every reported fact links to its source, and a number without a source does not run.

Cadence

Tuesday is The Brief: news, capital markets and securitizations, rate ranges, people moves, and one chart. Thursday is Funded: paid deal spotlights. The site holds the archive, a page for each spotlight, and the rates record.

Ownership

The Payoff Letter is owned by a private lending operator. That operator also owns First Equity, a private lending business. Editorial is independent of First Equity's lending. First Equity does not assign coverage. A loan from any lender, including First Equity, is not a condition of a story or a spotlight. Sponsored content is always labeled.

The operator stays in the background. This page is the disclosure. There is no founder column and no portrait.

Editorial and sponsored content

Reported items in The Brief are not paid by the subjects. Funded spotlights, sponsorships, and directory listings are advertising. The lender pays, supplies the figures, and approves them before publication. We label that material Sponsored on the site and in the newsletter, name the paying lender, and keep it visually distinct from reported news.

That is the standard in the Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and native advertising: a material connection has to be clear before a reader decides to trust the item. See the FTC Endorsement Guides (opens in a new tab). Example spotlights on this site are fictional placeholders and are marked Example. They are not loans and not lenders.

We will correct a reported error. Email hello@payoffletter.com with the passage and the source.

Not financial advice

Nothing here is an offer to lend, a commitment to buy a loan, or financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Rate pages are market information from named, dated sources. They are not a quote for any borrower. Lending decisions belong to the reader and their counsel.

How this is paid for

Launch revenue is labeled Funded spotlights, sponsorships, and a lender directory. A paid rates and data tier may follow. The newsletter is free at launch. Prices are on the advertise page and marked as launch pricing.