Who Lends on Memphis House Purchases

Since July 2024, 14,728 single-family houses inside Memphis changed hands in a stated-price sale, and 5,947 of them closed with a purchase loan. The 15 busiest lenders wrote 42% of those loans, and 4 of the 15 are investor lenders: Ninety8 Capital, Avalon Capital, Kiavi Funding, CrestCore Financial. Between them the 4 wrote 644 loans, 26% of everything the top 15 closed.

The 15 busiest lenders

Pinnacle Bank leads the table with 376 loans, and the top of the list is banks and mortgage companies as you would expect. The investor lenders are further down in volume but they are not small: Ninety8 Capital alone closed 214 purchase loans in the window, and 96% of them were for more than the house sold for.

How we tell an investor lender from a bank

We do not read the lender's name or its marketing. We compare each purchase loan against the price on the deed it was recorded with. A loan more than 2% above the purchase price is funding something besides the purchase, almost always the renovation, and a lender whose loans do that at least half the time is lending to investors as a business. On that rule the 15 split cleanly: the 4 investor lenders sit between 88% and 96% of loans above price, and every bank on the list sits at 35% or below, with most in single digits.

One caution rides with that rule. A loan above price is not always a rehab loan. Government-backed mortgages can roll a funding fee into the balance, which is why one lender on the bank side sits well above its peers and still lends like a bank. The rule was set with a gap on both sides so no lender sits in the grey zone between the two types, and the chart refuses to build if one ever does.

60% of Memphis house sales recorded no purchase loan

8,781 of the 14,728 sales, 60%, recorded no purchase loan on the parcel within a month of the deed. That is not the same as 60% cash. Some of those buyers financed later or borrowed against another property, and about 8% of the deeds of trust in the county file for this window have not yet been matched to a parcel, so a few points of that 60% are loans we could not pair with their sale. Read it as an upper bound on cash buying. It is still the same population the who is buying Memphis homes page splits into companies and individuals, and the cash share is a large part of why company buyers show up the way they do there.

What to do with the list

We manage rentals; we do not arrange financing and we do not recommend lenders. What the table is good for is a reality check. If you are buying from out of state and the lender you have been quoted does not appear anywhere on a list of who actually closes Memphis purchases, that is worth a question, and the same goes for a renovation loan from a lender whose Memphis loans never exceed the purchase price. Our out of state investor page covers the rest of the diligence we would run before a purchase, and the method behind this chart is on how we source our numbers.

How we count

Purchase = a warranty deed inside Memphis on a single-family parcel with a stated price of $20,000 or more, from the county register. Purchase loan = the largest deed of trust recorded on the same parcel from a week before to 30 days after the deed. Lender = the beneficiary named on the deed of trust, with a trustee's name stripped. Figures are as of 2026-09-01, cover July 2024 to date, and refresh weekly on Memphis rental data.

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