Portfolio loan or separate DSCR loans for your rentals?

What a portfolio loan is

A portfolio loan, also called a blanket loan, is a single mortgage secured by several rental properties. You close once and make one payment instead of financing each rental separately. Bundling saves real money on fees, often thousands of dollars per property, and it saves you from running five separate closings.

Terms follow the same DSCR framework: up to about 75% of value, a 30-year fixed, no tax returns, and credit minimums starting around 640 to 660.

How lenders underwrite it

Each property is still underwritten on its own numbers: its own rent, taxes, insurance, and HOA. The coverage ratio is calculated property by property, never blended across the portfolio. Each unit counts at its lease rent, or at market rent if it is vacant; lenders reject rents the owner hopes to get and averaged numbers.

That means one weak property can drag the loan down. Sometimes the right move is to leave it out of the portfolio loan and finance it separately, or not at all.

When separate loans win

Portfolio programs usually start around five properties. With fewer than that, separate DSCR loans often price better. Separate loans also make sense when you plan to sell one property soon, or when one property's numbers would weaken the rest.

When a portfolio loan wins

Five or more rentals with clean, verified numbers. You save fees, close once, and manage one loan. There is no cap on portfolio size: larger portfolios get packaged into multiple portfolio loans, each sized to price well, so one oversized loan doesn't drag down the terms on the whole book.

Plan on about 45 days. A complete, clean property schedule up front is the biggest factor in hitting that.

Check the values first

Before a portfolio goes to a lender, we compare what you think each property is worth against county records and recent sales. An appraisal that comes back low on two or three properties can blow up a portfolio loan, and it is much cheaper to find that out before the appraisals are ordered.