Dental Office Feasibility Study in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA Metro Area

A dental market that leads the country

No metropolitan or micro area in the country shows more SBA dental office loans than Los Angeles-Long Beach, which ranks 1 of 562 for the class. SBA approved 654 of them from FY2017 to FY2026, totalling $579.0 million gross. Within the area dental offices rank 3 of 39; the location quotient of 1.52x says the class is more heavily represented here than in the national book. Los Angeles County supplies 454 of the loans and Orange County 200.

Loan size is the second thing this cell shows. The median is $613,000, 1.21x what dental offices borrow nationally at the median, and the middle half spans $250,000 to $1.2 million. Dental practices are equipment and build-out intensive, and a practice purchase can carry goodwill, so the spread is wide. The study has to separate a start-up suite from an acquisition, because the debt service coverage test is different for each.

Programs and holders

Counting by program, 520 loans were 7(a) and 134 were 504, so property-backed lending is a real share of the dental book. No dental loan here carries a franchise flag (0.00%). Bank holders: Live Oak Banking Company (61 loans, $92.3 million); U.S. Bank, National Association (48 loans, $45.5 million); Wells Fargo Bank National Association (36 loans, $38.4 million); Readycap Lending, LLC (18 loans, $8.7 million); JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association ($3.9 million across 19 loans).

Development companies on the 504 side: Business Finance Capital (32 loans, $32.5 million); CDC Small Business Finance Corp. (31 loans, $28.0 million); California Statewide Certified Development Corporation (31 loans, $25.6 million); The Mortgage Capital Development Corporation (16 loans, $17.5 million); Southland Economic Development Corporation (6 loans, $5.5 million). SBA lists the holder of each loan, current or former, so these Los Angeles rows show who has been active and nothing about who will approve a given request.

Cancellations, charge-offs and the study

Walk-away risk shows up first: 14.5% cancelled at the floor, 15.9% at the ceiling that tallies undisbursed loans as cancelled. For Los Angeles dental offices Loan Analytics withholds the loss rate entirely; we neither guess it nor read the gap as zero. For a lender the practical reading is that cancellations are common enough that a signed lease and a clean appraisal should come before commitment.

A study for a dental office here should test patient demand per chair against competing practices in the specific county, the cost of a Southern California build-out, the payer mix, and how well cash flow covers debt service at the $613,000 median. For dentists, a Los Angeles or Orange County address counts only when the delineation of July 2023 contains that county by name, and any loan that fails this lookup is absent from the 654, which therefore understates the area slightly.