Resources

The SBA guaranteed a record $44.8 billion in fiscal 2025 and its lending manual never requires a feasibility study for any of it. Lenders ordered thousands anyway. The one permissive clause in the regulation, the five circumstances in which SBA says it will ask, the June 2025 underwriting reset, and how much loan volume runs through the fact patterns where a study is expected.

A $9,000 feasibility study is 180 basis points of a $500,000 loan and 26 basis points of a $3.5 million one. The published fee bands for SBA studies in 2026, the appraisal, valuation and environmental reports they sit beside, what the SOP says about paying for them, and the arithmetic that puts the fee where a credit committee looks at it.

The industry closed 280 stores last year and opened 768 that sell fuel, most of them owned by operators with fewer than ten locations. How the SBA finances a gas station: the environmental file that decides the loan before the credit memo, the special-purpose equity, the franchise rule that returned in June 2025 for branded fuel, and where 7(a) and 504 divide the project.

In 2025 a top-ten chain went bankrupt, the largest automotive services company sold its whole U.S. wash division, and the benchmark operator agreed to go private. On the SBA loan tape, car washes charged off at 5.25 percent against 7.45 percent for all industries. How the SBA finances a tunnel, where 7(a) and 504 split the project, what it costs to build in 2026, and how a credit memo reads a membership base.

Senior housing is at 90 percent occupancy with almost nothing under construction, and the SBA and USDA will finance the next wave on one condition: a state license. How the license decides eligibility under 7(a), 504, Community Facilities and B&I, where each program's loan ceiling stops against $185,000 to $270,000 per unit in hard cost, and what the study has to prove.

USDA's B&I approval rate fell from 89 percent to 53 percent in two years, and SBA's Inspector General keeps naming the same three failures: eligibility, repayment ability, equity injection. The twelve deficiencies that get feasibility studies sent back, why the templates on page one of Google make them worse, and the outline built to the regulations that survives review.

One agency, five programs, five different answers to whether a feasibility study is required. B&I sets a $1 million bright line, Community Facilities splits the report into tiers, REAP has suspended its grants, FIELDS requires a study from every applicant, and Section 538 asks for a market certification instead. The full matrix, plus the 37 factors behind the five components.

Half the top search results say the SBA will finance an apartment building. The regulation says no in one sentence. What the passive real estate rule bars, what the 51 percent exception actually covers, and where rural multifamily money still comes from: USDA Section 538.

The campground industry's fastest-growing revenue line in 2025 was the long-term stay, and it is the one that can make a park ineligible for an SBA loan. The 50 percent transient test as written, the USDA B&I version of the same rule, what the 2026 data say about revenue mix, and what the feasibility study has to prove.

The interconnection queues that supposedly prove America's power crisis are mostly speculative paperwork. Grid operators now expect roughly one gigawatt in five to energize. Deflate the numbers anyway and Texas still has to build a second Texas.

The 75+ population reached 25.7 million in 2024, up 17.6% in four years, but growth is uneven and a state ranking alone underwrites nothing. Every state ranked by size, growth, and concentration, then adjusted for supply per 1,000 residents, the 85+ curve to 2040, income qualification, and the regulatory and labor constraints that decide where projects actually pencil.

American brewers closed 481 sites last year and opened 300. The beer story has been covered thoroughly. The buildings have not. Auction data shows the equipment clears at four figures against buildouts financed in six, and the improvements left behind are worth nothing to anyone.

Forty-six percent of American children under six live in a licensed child care desert. The standard prescription is better capital access. The loan data disagrees: the sector borrowed $1.1 billion in a single year, and lenders priced it like a restaurant, not a dental practice.

American veterinary practices grew revenue again last year while treating fewer animals, the fourth consecutive year of that pattern. The profession calls it pricing power. It is arithmetic with a deadline, and the SBA default rate everyone quotes describes a market that no longer exists.

America closed 280 convenience stores last year and opened 768 new fuel-selling locations. Inside sales set a record. The industry is not shrinking, it is being sorted, and the threat to the single-store operator is not the electric car. It is a commercial kitchen hood.

America delivered more apartments in 2024 than in any year since 1986, then stopped building. The vacancy that followed is being read as a supply failure. Half of it is a demand failure: net migration fell from 2.7 million to a projected 321,000 after the concrete was already poured.

American hotels posted their first non-recessionary RevPAR decline on record in 2025. The aggregate hides a split: luxury rose, economy fell. And $51.4 billion of federally guaranteed hotel credit sits almost entirely on the losing side, in flags like Super 8 and Days Inn.

Senior housing occupancy has risen for twenty straight quarters into the thinnest construction pipeline since 2012. The demographic wave is real and enormous. It is also arriving with less money than the sector's pricing assumes: average rent is now $69,600 a year, and most of the cohort cannot pay it.

American self-storage is 77 percent full and cutting street rents at the same time. Both numbers are true. The gap between what a sitting tenant pays and what a new one is quoted, $22.55 against $11.60 at the largest operator, is the entire underwriting question.

Express car washes have spent a year as the poster child for overbuilding. The federal loan tape disagrees. Charge-offs run at 5.25 percent against 7.45 percent across all industries, and new openings had already fallen roughly forty percent before the first bankruptcy made headlines.

The SBA publishes every loan it guarantees but never ranks who repays them. We computed charge-off rates for 416 NAICS codes from the agency's own loan-level files: a 24x spread between the safest industry and the riskiest, and a finding that inverts the usual story about which businesses are dangerous. Free, sortable, refreshed annually. Cohort and method published in full.

The article you have already read There is a standard piece on this subject. You have seen it. It runs a table down the page with a column called "Franchise usually wins?" and fills it with Yes, Sometimes, Often no. Hotels: franchise. QSR: franchise. Car wash: independent. Self-storage: independent. Then it says something sensible about revenue not being profit, lists a dozen red flags, and stops. Nothing in that table is wrong, exactly. It is just not an answer. It is a summ

Between 2023 and 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture put $517 million into 76 fertilizer production facilities across 34 states and Puerto Rico. The projected result was 11.8 million additional tons of annual fertilizer production and more than 1,300 jobs [1]. On July 1, 2026, Secretary Brooke Rollins stood up and said the previous administration had managed "only building 6% of their stated goal" [2]. The fuller version, relayed through trade press from her remarks: of

There is a persistent misreading of the American small-business market. The common story says the constraint is capital: that good projects go unbuilt because financing is scarce, that entrepreneurs with sound ideas cannot get to a closing table. That story is now largely wrong. As of mid-2026, federal capital for owner-operated and rural businesses is more available, and more generous, than at any point in a generation. The Small Business Administration is originating loans