The gap we were built to fill.
Canada's banks tightened. Borrowers did not stop needing money. Between 2019 and 2021 the reported value of private mortgages in Ontario alone climbed from roughly $13 billion to more than $22 billion, and by 2023 private lending accounted for something in the order of one dollar in ten of the national mortgage market. That growth was not speculation. It was households refinancing, consolidating, bridging a sale, or buying in a town no institutional lender had an appetite for.
Lendmax began on the brokerage side of that market. Two decades of arranging mortgages made one thing obvious: the constraint was rarely the borrower and almost always the lender's box — its geography, its credit floor, its unwillingness to look at a file that did not fit a template. So we built the lender we kept wishing we could send files to, and then built the investment corporation that funds it.
Since 2020 the corporation has lent through a pandemic, a rate shock and a housing market that changed character twice. The book was built for exactly that: short duration, conservative loan-to-value, defined exits, and markets deep enough that a property can actually be sold if it has to be.