Ponderosa Systems
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Industries · Hard money & private lenders

AI for hard money lenders.

Pre-qualify broker deal submissions in minutes, not days. Draft term sheets your principals approve in one click. Keep borrowers and brokers updated through the fastest cycles in lending — built into Liquid Logics, Mortgage Automator, or whatever your shop already runs on.

Book a 20-minute intro call → See pricing

Speed is the product. Then it's the bottleneck.

Three patterns we see in nearly every hard money shop. The faster the cycle, the more these compound.

24-48 hr

broker term sheet expectation

Brokers compare your speed against the lender across the street. Miss the window, and a deal you would have funded goes elsewhere — even if your terms are better.

Inconsistent

deal evaluation across underwriters

Two underwriters, same deal, two different answers. As volume scales, eligibility logic that lives in people's heads stops scaling with it. Brokers notice.

7-21 day

cycles demand constant communication

Closings, draws, balloon dates, extension requests — all on a fast clock. Your team spends hours on the same status questions while the next deal waits.

Three agents we ship to hard money lenders.

Pre-qualification is where almost every engagement starts — it's the agent we ship first because it pays back fastest. Term sheets and broker comms come next.

Agent 01 · We start here

Deal Pre-Qualification Agent

A broker submits a deal — through your form, an email, or a text. The agent extracts the deal package (loan amount, address, ARV, purchase price, exit strategy, sponsor experience), runs it against your eligibility matrix, and produces an answer in minutes instead of hours.

  • Reads any deal submission format and normalizes it into your data model
  • Runs your full eligibility matrix per program — fix-and-flip, DSCR, ground-up, bridge
  • Routes qualified deals to an underwriter with a one-page summary
  • Generates a clear "soft no" with eligibility gap explanation for deals you can't fund
  • Logs everything to your CRM with full submission record
What it moves
Time to broker response
From hours to minutes for the qualified-or-not answer. The metric to watch: median time from broker submission to first lender response, and the share of deals that get a same-day verdict.
Agent 02 · Speed-to-terms

Term Sheet First-Draft Agent

Once a deal is approved in concept, the agent drafts the term sheet from your standard template. It pulls the deal data, customizes terms by program and sponsor, and stages a finished draft for your principal or underwriter to review and send.

  • Pulls structure from your standard term sheet template
  • Customizes terms by deal type, sponsor experience, and LTV
  • Surfaces every term for human review before send — never auto-sends
  • Cuts a 2-4 hour task to under 30 minutes of review
What it moves
Term sheet turnaround time
Same-day term sheets become the norm rather than the exception. The metric to watch: median time from deal approval to term sheet sent, and broker NPS on responsiveness.
Agent 03 · In-process

Broker & Borrower Status Agent

Watches every active deal across your pipeline. Drafts proactive status updates ("Closing is on for Tuesday, here's what to expect"), answers routine borrower and broker questions about payments, draws, balloon dates, and extension processes. Escalates anything genuinely new to a human.

  • Proactive updates at every status change in the pipeline
  • Routine questions answered from your loan terms and policies
  • Multi-deal broker views: "Show me all my active submissions"
  • Escalation to the right human when the question is genuinely new
What it moves
Hours saved per LO/processor per week
Most shops report 6-12 hours a week of LO and processor time recovered. The metric to watch: inbound borrower/broker call volume per active loan.

The 30-day path, applied to hard money.

Same structured engagement we run with every client. Tuned for fast-cycle lending — your eligibility matrix, your term sheet template, your broker relationships.

1

Day 0–5 · Map your eligibility matrix and deal flow

We sit with you and your underwriting team. Map the full eligibility matrix per program, the term sheet template, the broker submission paths, and where deals currently get stuck. We confirm scope and lock the metric we'll grade success against at 90 days.

2

Day 6–18 · Build the pre-qualification agent inside your stack

We build inside your LOS, CRM, and inbound channels. Eligibility logic is encoded explicitly so two deals with the same data get the same answer. State licensing footprint baked in. Every customer-facing output surfaced for human review at design time.

3

Day 19–25 · Test against real broker deals

Real deal packages from your last 90 days run through the agent. We compare its verdicts to what your underwriters actually decided. Tune until alignment is high. Train your team in a 60-minute session, recorded for new hires, with runbooks they can use without us.

4

Day 26–30 · Ship and watch

The agent goes live on real broker submissions. We watch the first week with your team. Monthly tuning starts on retainer; warranty starts otherwise.

Built inside the tools hard money shops actually use.

If yours isn't on the list, ask. We've integrated with most things that have an API, and we'll work with Google Sheets and DocuSign too if that's what you run on.

Liquid Logics The Mortgage Office Mortgage Automator Salesforce (custom) HubSpot Pipedrive DocuSign Adobe Sign Google Workspace Microsoft 365 Slack Twilio Calendly Make.com Zapier

Questions private lenders ask.

The most common questions from owners and operators before they book the call.

How is this different from what you build for mortgage lenders?

Different agents, different metrics, different stack. Hard money cycles are 7-21 days versus 30-45 for mortgage, deal flow is broker-driven and asset-based instead of consumer and income-based, and the regulatory weight is light. The agents we ship reflect that — pre-qualification is broker-deal triage rather than borrower screening, term sheet drafting is mission-critical, and there's no refi opportunity agent because hard money loans mature too fast.

Does the agent handle different deal types — fix-and-flip, DSCR, ground-up, bridge?

Yes. Each deal type has its own eligibility matrix and term-sheet template. We map your standards for each program at intake — LTV caps, ARV thresholds, sponsor experience requirements, location restrictions — and the agent applies the right rules to the right deal type automatically. New programs get added the same way.

How does it integrate with Liquid Logics, The Mortgage Office, or Mortgage Automator?

We build inside your existing LOS using its API where one exists, or via Make.com or Zapier as a glue layer when it doesn't. Liquid Logics, Mortgage Automator, and The Mortgage Office all have integration paths we've worked with. If your shop runs on a Salesforce custom build or Google Sheets and DocuSign, we work with that too.

What about state-by-state licensing differences?

We bake state-specific rules into the eligibility matrix. The agent declines to issue terms in states where you're not licensed and flags borderline jurisdictions for human review. Hard money licensing varies enormously by state and asset type, so we configure to your exact lending footprint, not a generic rule set.

How fast can the agent draft a term sheet?

From a complete deal package, a draft term sheet can be ready in under 5 minutes — pulled from your template, populated with deal-specific terms, and staged for a principal or underwriter to review and send. The 24-48 hour broker expectation becomes the same-day standard.

What about deal data privacy — brokers don't want their deals shared with anyone they didn't authorize?

Deal data stays in your tenant — your LOS, your CRM, your storage. Where AI providers like OpenAI or Anthropic are involved, we use the enterprise tiers that exclude your data from training and provide data-processing agreements. We don't aggregate or move deal information off your systems.

What size hard money shop is this for?

Sweet spot is private lenders funding 3-50 loans a month. Smaller than that and one agent may be enough rather than three; larger than that and you probably already have an internal automation team and we'd be partnering rather than fully delivering.

What does it cost?

From $4,995 setup plus a monthly retainer starting at $695. Most hard money engagements land in the $5,995 setup plus $1,495/month range for two agents — typically the pre-qualification agent and the term sheet drafter, since they pay back fastest. Pricing scales with deal volume and the number of programs you offer. No hourly billing.

Ready to ship your pre-qualification agent in 30 days?

The 20-minute intro call is free. We'll come to it with thoughts on your eligibility matrix, your broker submission flow, and which agent — pre-qual, term sheets, or comms — is the right place for your shop to start. No deck, no obligation.

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