Underwriters and agency reviewers return the same five studies over and over. None of the five is hard to avoid — in advance.
The first failure pattern is incompleteness against the program: a USDA study silent on enumerated Appendix A factors, an SBA study without global coverage analysis. Reviewers work from the rulebook; a study that does not is returned with a list. The second is the unanchored assumption: a capture rate, expense ratio, or growth figure that appears without derivation or benchmark — one such number infects the credibility of every other.
The third is the missing ramp: pro formas that open at stabilization, as if members, occupants, or customers arrive with the certificate of occupancy. The fourth is advocacy tone — promotional language, risks minimized or omitted, a document that reads like the sponsor’s pitch with a consultant’s cover. Reviewers are professionally allergic to it, and rightly: a study that cannot name the project’s risks has not analyzed them. The fifth is stale or generic data: demographics from the wrong radius, industry ratios from the wrong size class, a template visibly recycled across asset types.
A returned study costs its fee again in time: the correspondence cycle, the revision, the re-review — commonly months on agency files — while rate locks expire and sellers grow restless. The economics are lopsided enough that study selection is risk management: the screening questions are whether the consultant builds to the specific program’s factor list, benchmarks every material assumption, models the ramp, and can show recent studies accepted by the same reviewer population.
Wert-Berater’s production discipline — factor-compliance matrices on USDA work, benchmark-annotated ratio tables, ramp-resolved pro formas, and plain statement of every risk — exists because the firm’s studies are read by people whose job is to find the gap.
President, Wert-Berater, Inc. — independent feasibility study consultants since 1998. More than 4,000 feasibility studies completed across all 50 states and internationally, evaluating $40.2 billion in project value for SBA, USDA, EB-5, conventional, and institutional financing decisions. Fiduciary duty runs to the lender and agency in every engagement.
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