Dental Office Feasibility Study in the Fresno, CA Metro Area

A dental office book that outweighs its national share

Position 5 of 39 is where dental offices land in the Fresno, CA Metro Area's own class order, and the location quotient of 1.77x says dental offices take a larger part of the local loan book than the national share would predict. Nationally, the area is placed 41 of 562 on the metro and micro list for dental loans. Across FY2017 to FY2026, 37 approvals sum to $36.6 million, and the median loan of $525,000 is 1.04x the nationwide figure, so the story here is count and share more than unusual ticket size.

Ticket sizes and the 7(a) and 504 split

The middle half of loans runs from $270,000 to $1.5 million, a spread that fits both a practice acquisition and a new build-out. Of the 37 loans, 26 are 7(a) and 11 are 504, which shows the real estate program in regular use for dental practices. The franchise share is 0.00%: no loan in this area is tied to a franchised dental brand. Years can be shown for only two periods, FY2017 with 5 loans and $1.2 million and FY2019 with 6 loans and $10.4 million, so the page cannot tell a reader how steady the flow has been.

Lenders holding the loans

SBA's records list two holders with 11 loans each. Cen Cal Business Finance Group holds 11 loans totaling $7.2 million, and Live Oak Banking Company holds 11 loans totaling $21.2 million. Both figures describe who holds or held the loans today, not how they began, and a borrower should not read them as a statement of what either institution would underwrite. The two dollar totals differ widely even though the counts match.

Reading the missing rates

For Fresno, no cancellation or charge-off rate is shown. Too few loans were disbursed in FY2017 to FY2021 for Loan Analytics to publish them, and it withholds a rate in that case. The absence says nothing about whether outcomes were good or bad. Fresno's boundary comes from the 2023 federal area list, and a loan with an unmatched project county is counted in no metro at all.

Questions a Fresno dental study must answer

The work for a dental office here should measure patient volume against the number of existing practices within a reasonable drive, the payer mix between private insurance and public coverage, and how many treatment rooms the floor plan can fit. It should model hygiene and associate staffing, the equipment and imaging package, and a lease-up path for a new practice against the faster ramp of a practice purchase. Lenders will test coverage of the debt payment on collections that have been haircut, and the appraiser must decide how the price divides between an existing patient base and the improvements. The study should state those two apart, not blend them.