I’ve been in commercial lending for 34 years and I’ve seen just about everything.

I see that you are gathering information on possibilities available for your potential Church Builders.
Lending is all over the place and may not be the same as it is today by the time they search to find their land and get all of their plans and costs together. The advantages of being a charitable non-profit are that they are currently able to usually purchase materials at a discount/ no sales tax, and if they choose wisely in certain areas additional funding types may be available.

Here are some guidelines for Church loans. Church service loans that are building a church service building are not the same as a church buying land for a retreat. With SBA loans we use projections to calculate income that can pay the debt. Debt being the Monthly mortgage payments and all expenses.

With Churches you must establish the actual cash that is coming in for the past 3 years usually, and then identify from where that cash has come. We will additionally ask for personal guarantees.

How much cash and where it comes from will be important.
Non-profits often get donations of land at the market value, some even above market value and those that donated it receive credits and or deductions from the gift donation to the charitable non-profit.

Well organized Churches. hire expert tax professionals that can guide them on how to use their Charitable non-profit status to receive free land, materials and free labor.

Sometimes church owners will not use their church status because they can’t prove income and from where it came so they’ll build facilities for profit where they rent out and lease to others including churches and then they go SBA and can use projected income to qualify for their project.

Because this is specialized, there are no set firm one size fits all approach.
Keep your loan to value low so that you have a better chance at financing.
The DSCR should be 1.4 and the LTV 65% and under and then nearly everything is financeable. Sure your group might fit into a 100% LTC / loan to cost, but the LTV should be under 70% and 65% is better. I will be posting additional creative ways for financing, We do provide pre-construction consultations.

We see fraud all the time and report it and have an anti -fraud policy.
Sadly church groups and charitable nonprofits historically have a high occurrence of financial deceit for gain, fraud. You must always be looking for fraud regardless of who your borrowers are, even clergy.