We sat down with Brandon Walters, president of INCA Capital, at the 2026 Crittenden Report Finance Conference to get an inside look into how deals are still getting done in the current landscape. He shares his thoughts on where to find lending opportunities, deal structuring, where he sees gaps in the capital stack and more.
Full transcript below (lightly edited for clarity):
Where are you finding opportunities to lend that others are avoiding?
So right now we’re getting an opportunity to return to our roots. So our CEO started the fifth largest home builder in the United States, a company called Meritage Homes. He was a co-founder and co-CEO. And so right now we’re seeing a lot of opportunity in real estate construction of residential homes, horizontal development of lots or just raw land that maybe has some level of entitlements but isn’t ready to go vertical just yet or do any improvements on it just yet.
What types of deals or borrowers are coming to you right now?
So we’re seeing a lot of people that are with banks or with other lenders that are coming to us. We had a borrower that just called us last week who used to use us for financing. He found a source that had some cheaper money and was using them for a little bit, but then they funded the loan, they sold the note, they sold the note again and it ended up being real difficult for him to get financing. So he called me last Friday, said, “Hey, Brandon, I need some money from you. I’m having a tough time, I need to extend the loan. It’s halfway through and I need some help finishing the project.”
So it was a relationship that we had a long time ago. He came back and said, “Hey, it just isn’t working with these different sources and I need to kind of regroup with you.” So we’re always in the niches wherever the opportunities are. We feel like the banks kind of came into our space a little bit and started doing some of the financing that maybe we were more accustomed to doing. And now they’re kind of backing out of that space and maybe not extending existing loans and giving us an opportunity to step in and finance those properties that we finance. I’ve been doing this for 22 years now and that’s kind of where our space has been, where that construction horizontal development on the residential side.
How are you structuring deals to get them across the finish line?
So we’re finding we need to be very creative right now. I’m a CPA by background, so I’ve been doing this for 22 years. I started my career with the largest accounting firm in the world, Deloitte. And so I like that creative structuring, financial side of it. And we’re finding today with a lot of, just a lot of the unknowns in the market, people that maybe started a project and costs escalated on them and they don’t have enough money set aside, or they maybe have some additional collateral that has some equity and they just need something a little bit more creative to help them get the project finished. That’s kind of where we’re seeing a lot of opportunity.
So that creativity and then second, the speed. So we had a loan where a group came to us. They had debt with a major bank. And the bank said, “No more financing, we’re not going to provide you any more lines of credit,” which means the bank relationship’s over, which means that the real estate financing is over. And they did that suddenly for them right before quarter end. And so they came to us and said, “Hey, I need money and I need it in 10 days. Our money’s sitting in the bank, it’s all our own money. It’s primarily our CEO’s personal capital. We don’t use any bank lines. We don’t use any outside money. So we can move very quickly.” And so that speed gave us the opportunity to kind of step in and say, hey, we can help you out here. It was a great property. It was just the bank had decided they were going to wash their hands of that relationship and just got rid of everything that they had. So we closed that one in 10 days and were able to help him out.
What’s your favorite part of working in this business?
For me, I love real estate. I’ve always enjoyed real estate. My father is an executive with one of the largest home builders in Arizona, and so I’d always grown up around that and just enjoyed being a part of that. But what I really enjoy is the different asset types. So one day I’ll be looking at maybe a residential subdivision in Arizona, and then the next day in Sacramento and other subdivisions, and then townhomes in L.A., and then industrial land in Colorado, and then residential land in Colorado Springs, Denver, all over the place. So that variety is what’s a lot of fun for me.
And then trying to put something together that works for everybody, that works for us, but that also works for the borrower, that’s maybe just a little different than they’re going to get with a bank or with another financing source. Because again, it’s our capital, so we make the rules as to what we want it to look like so we don’t have to check boxes and make it fit within a certain mold, we can kind of do what we need to do and what they need to have done to make it fit for them.
Where are the biggest gaps in the capital stack today?
So from our perspective, we’re only on the debt side and we’re only on the senior debt side. But it seems that there’s a lot of mezzanine capital out there, but there’s not a lot of equity. So we’re seeing gaps today on the equity side. Obviously, there’s a lot of opportunity in an office, but it’s just tough to get comfortable with that asset class. That’s just hard today. Even as those values keep falling and falling and falling, it’s still difficult to find equity for those kinds of transactions.
And then, you know, multifamily, I think values there are kind of just settling in, maybe dropping a little bit. Guys that need to refinance or buy again, I think they’re having a little bit of a tough time. So from what we’re seeing, we have plenty of deal flow coming to us and guys that will come to us first looking for debt before they have the equity and then kind of have to step away because they just can’t find the equity.
We just had one that we were excited about. We put the term sheet out. We were ready to go. And they backed away and said, “I’m sorry, we weren’t able to get the equity together.” And so they’re back to the drawing board on that. So whether the prior equity stepped away and maybe they’ll find it next week or it might take longer, I don’t know. But that to me seems to be kind of, it seems there’s a lot of capital in the market, there’s a lot of debt in the market, but maybe not as much equity, at least from my vantage point.
