Blanket & Portfolio Loan
FinancingThese are the two financing tools investors reach for once conventional, agency-backed lending runs out of room.
Portfolio loan — a loan the lender keeps in its own portfolio instead of selling it to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Because the lender carries the risk, it writes its own rules: it can lend past the conventional financed-property cap, on non-warrantable condos, to an LLC, to a foreign national, or on a property a conforming lender would reject. The trade-off is usually a higher rate, a shorter term, or a balloon.
Blanket loan — a single mortgage that covers multiple properties at once. Instead of ten separate loans on ten rentals, one blanket loan secures all of them. A well-structured blanket loan includes a partial release clause, so you can sell one property and release just that property’s lien without paying off the entire loan.
Both are how serious portfolio builders scale: conventional financing for the first handful of properties (best rates), then portfolio and blanket loans for the rest. Terms vary widely by lender — compare rate, term, balloon, release clause, and prepayment penalty before you commit.
For the full picture, see HELOCs & portfolio loans and how they compare to agency loans.