SBA 7(a) Dialysis Center Feasibility Study

A thin 7(a) dialysis record

SBA's 7(a) files hold just 28 dialysis center loans approved in FY2017 through FY2026, worth $31.9 million. That makes the record thin, and it changes what the page can say. Both outcome rates are withheld: the cancellation cohort and the charge-off cohort are both below 30 loans, and by a presentation rule of Loan Analytics' own, no rate is printed for so small a group. A reader should not take the absence of a rate to mean that no dialysis loan was cancelled or lost. What the record does show is loan size and who lends. The median dialysis loan is $291,750, but half of the loans fall between $150,000 and $2.0 million, a spread wide enough to hold an equipment or working capital loan at one end and a building or full clinic at the other. No borrower was a franchisee; the share is 0.00%.

Where the loans sit

The SBA files carry no lender table for this class, so this page cannot name who holds these loans. California has 11 of the loans and Texas 5, while Florida, Hawaii, Michigan and New York have 2 each, and Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Virginia have 1 each. Annual volume never rose far: 5 loans in FY2017 and 5 in FY2018, 3 worth $7.8 million in FY2023, 1 in FY2024 worth $675,000 and 3 worth $465,000 in FY2026. With so few loans in any year, a borrower should expect to explain the dialysis business to the lender in detail and should lean on the study in front of it.

What a dialysis feasibility study has to carry

With no outcome rates to lean on, the study does most of the work. Demand has to be shown from the patient side: the number of people needing dialysis within a realistic drive, the nephrologists who refer them, and the stations and shifts at competing units and how full they run. Revenue depends on the payer mix, which the study should document by payer and then test with a weaker mix than planned. Cost covers the water treatment system, stations, plumbing and the licensing or certificate of need some states require. Coverage should be tested through the census ramp a new unit needs, with the floating rate raised. The appraisal will treat a dialysis building as special-purpose medical space, often leased to an operator, so the study should state the lease terms and the building's value to another medical tenant. SBA attaches no coding caveat to this class in these files, so the figures above describe dialysis center loans as SBA reports them.