Quaker State Commerical Finance Leonard J. Keating Scam commerical lending operation Conshohocken, Pennsylvania

This is a very simple warning.  Do not give up front money to Quaker State Commerical Finance.  They collect money up front for loans that they know in advance that they are unable to do.  In my example the loan request was for $8.5M construction loan.  We submitted the basic guidelines of our deal to which they issued a "term sheet" outlining an $8.5M loan.  To proceed we had to send them $7500 which we did.  About a week later they informed us that the maximum loan available under the program described in the term sheet was $4.5M.  We asked for our $7500 back and it was not returned.  Simply put they will pre-approve any scenario that you send to them simply to collect the $7500.  It turns out that once they sent us the program guidelines we could easily see that the loan amount would only go to $4.5M - however they did not send us these guidelines until AFTER the $7500 was paid.  I have since moved on and successfully completed a lot of commercial financing. 

The lesson that I learned a few years ago is the best lesson I can pass along when it comes to commercial financing - DO NOT PAY ANY ADVANCE FEES TO A BROKER.  Advance fees paid to a direct lender are a necessary part of the process but you should never be paying an advance to a broker.  And to follow up even further - if you are paying advance fees to a lender do some extra due diligence to make sure that they are in fact a legitimate direct lender.  The world of commercial finance is filled with scam artists.