Tom had a $4M industrial refi he liked. Good sponsor. Clean financials. No red flags. So he sent it to fifteen lenders.
More lenders, better odds. That was the logic.
Three weeks later he had four term sheets, two polite declines, and nine lenders who never wrote back.
He also had a problem he didn’t know about yet. Two of the lenders who passed knew each other. One mentioned the deal was “making the rounds.”
That comment moved Tom’s deal from opportunity to leftover, before anyone even ran the numbers.
Not a bad deal. A bad number.
The instinct to go wide feels safe. More shots, more chances at a yes.
But the number of lenders contacted isn’t what drives outcome quality. Sending to the right lenders is what matters.
A lender actively doing that asset class, that size, that geography, right now, is a real shot. A lender who fits none of that but got CC’d anyway isn’t a tenth chance. It’s noise. The Broker solution page covers what actually determines fit before a deal ever goes out.
There’s no universal number. Any source that gives you one is guessing.
But most brokers who’ve been burned on both ends land somewhere between three and six lenders, all genuinely active on that box. MBA’s Commercial/Multifamily Research put total CRE lending at roughly $706 billion in 2025, with more deal flow moving through the market than ever, and more of it competing for the same limited underwriting attention on the lender side. Multiplying noise just adds to that queue.
Fewer than three risks missing the best terms. More than six risks the deal reading as shopped, whether or not it was.
Three well-matched lenders will usually close faster than fifteen scattershot ones.
Because the real matches aren’t competing against real alternatives. They’re competing against noise.
The actual skill isn’t restraint. It’s knowing fit before you hit send.
See how the matching works with a live demo.
