Financing A High-rise Condo With Bank Statements: Complete Guide — The Quick Read: A high-rise condo purchase and a bank statement mortgage are two separate approvals happening at once. The building has to clear a project review — reserves, litigation, owner-occupancy ratio — and you have to clear an income review based on deposits instead of traditional personal-income documentation. Both gates have to open. A strong borrower file does not fix a troubled building, and a healthy building does not substitute for deposit documentation that won’t hold up.
What Bank Statement Financing Actually Solves
A bank statement loan lets a self-employed borrower qualify using deposits into a bank account. This is different from qualifying off traditional personal-income documentation. It matters because most business owners write off enough expenses that their traditional personal-income documentation understates what they actually take home.
The programs available through select lenders in Lendmire’s wholesale network run on 12 or 24 consecutive months of personal or business bank statements. Longer lookbacks tend to smooth out a seasonal business. Shorter ones sometimes carry tighter conditions in exchange for less paperwork. On business accounts, the lender applies an expense ratio. This ratio strips out the portion of every deposit that covers payroll, rent, and overhead rather than personal income. It typically runs 20% for a service business with no employees, and up near 50% for a business with six or more employees or any product-based operation. It can also be replaced by an accountant-provided figure or a profit-and-loss method capped at 80%. Transfers from your own business into your personal account count in full toward eligible deposits.
None of that has anything to do with the building. That’s the part most borrowers don’t expect.
Key Terms Defined
Non-warrantable condo — a condo project that fails one or more of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s project eligibility tests, meaning conventional lenders can’t finance units inside it regardless of the buyer’s own credit or income.
HOA questionnaire (condo-cert) — a form the building’s association completes disclosing budget, reserves, insurance, delinquency rates, and litigation status, which the lender uses to decide whether the project itself qualifies.
Master insurance policy — the building-level policy covering structure, roof, and common areas; separate from the individual unit owner’s own coverage.
HO-6 policy — a “walls-in” insurance policy an individual condo owner carries on their own unit, required by virtually every lender regardless of what the master policy covers.
Expense ratio (bank statement underwriting) — the percentage of business deposits presumed to cover overhead rather than personal income, subtracted before qualifying income is calculated.
How Underwriting Treats the Building, Step by Step
A high-rise gets treated as a fundamentally different animal from a small condo building. That’s because the project review carries more weight the taller and denser the building gets. Most lending definitions put a high-rise at 7 stories or more, though some jurisdictions use a 10-story line. Every unit inside comes with elevator service and shared structural systems, and these get scrutinized separately from a walk-up building.
The association fills out a project questionnaire. On the agency side, this is Fannie Mae’s Form 1076. It collects the data lenders use to judge whether the owner-occupancy ratio, single-entity ownership concentration, litigation exposure, and reserve funding all clear the bar. Non-QM and DSCR lenders use an equivalent HOA package, often called a condo-cert. It asks similar questions, even though the loan itself never touches an agency file number.
If the building fails that review — too many units owned by one entity, active litigation, an underfunded reserve account, or an owner-occupancy ratio that’s drifted too low — it becomes non-warrantable. That label describes the building, not the borrower. A luxury tower, a beachfront property, or a 60%-sold new development can all carry it, and it says nothing about your creditworthiness or the unit’s value.
Insurance gets checked at two levels. The master policy covers the structure and common areas; an HO-6 policy covers the interior of your specific unit. Trying to close without an HO-6 policy is almost always a dealbreaker — lenders require it, and so does the condo association. Master policies come in three flavors — bare walls, single entity, or all-in — and a bare-walls policy leaves interior finishes entirely on the owner’s HO-6 coverage. That distinction confuses a lot of buyers who assume “walls-in” language means everything is covered.
How Underwriting Treats You, Step by Step
Once the building clears review, the deal moves on to income. The lender decides whether to review personal statements, business statements, or a blend of both. That choice reshapes the entire calculation. Deposit screening comes next. Transfers from another business need documentation proving the source is business-related. Transfers from a personal account get excluded from eligible deposits entirely — counting those would double-count income already captured elsewhere.
After the expense ratio is applied to business deposits, the resulting income figure runs against credit, reserves, and debt-to-income the same way any mortgage file gets reviewed. Across the wholesale network Lendmire places files with, credit floors on this program sit around 660, with debt-to-income allowed up to 50% on most files. Reserve requirements scale with loan size — typically 3 months of payments on smaller loans, stepping up to 6 and then 9 months as the loan amount climbs, plus additional months per other financed property to a cap, subject to underwriting and lender guidelines.
Sizing and Leverage — Where the Numbers Actually Land
Sizing runs on two overlapping ladders through select lenders in the network — a portfolio bank-statement program carrying files to $6,000,000, and a bank-statement portfolio program that carries twelve-month-statement files all the way to $30,000,000 on its own scale: roughly 65% loan-to-value to the $5,000,000 mark, 60% to $10,000,000, and 55% up through $30,000,000, with interest-only capped at 60% or the band’s own ceiling, whichever is lower.
Leverage on a high-rise condo bought as a primary residence steps down as the loan gets bigger. On most files in the $300,000 to $1,000,000 range, purchase leverage runs up to 90% with credit around 680 or better. That ceiling drops through the size bands — 85% around the $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 range, 80% near $2,000,000 to $3,000,000, and down further from there. Above $4,000,000, every file goes through case-by-case review before it’s even submitted — never a flat “up to” figure at that size.
Second homes and investment properties usually run about five points lower than the primary-residence ceiling, at every size band on most files. A high-rise condo bought purely as a rental falls into that investment-property bracket. It’s also worth remembering that a non-warrantable building caps out even lower on its own: up to 80% LTV on non-warrantable condos generally. Condotels go lower still — 75% on a purchase and roughly 70% on a cash-out for standard rental collateral. That ceiling drops closer to 60% when the collateral is short-term-rental income specifically.
Cash-out works a little differently. Proceeds run without a specific dollar cap at or below 60% LTV, with a cap on cash-in-hand above that leverage point on the portfolio program specifically — a structure worth walking through directly with a broker rather than assuming, since it varies by which of the two programs the file lands in. Exact terms depend on the lender’s guidelines, property type, leverage, and a full review of the borrower’s file.
For a comparable read on how a similar bank-statement structure handles a different property type, Lendmire’s luxury condo bank statement financing guide breaks down the same mechanics for lower-density luxury buildings.
Where the General Rule Breaks — Named Edge Cases
Condotels are not the same problem as non-warrantable condos, and the difference decides financeability. A non-warrantable condo just fails a GSE eligibility test — the owner still controls their own unit’s occupancy. A condotel is run by building management as a hotel program, and if rental participation is mandatory, the owner doesn’t control who occupies the unit or when. That loss of control is often the difference between a unit that qualifies for DSCR-style investment financing and one that typically can’t, because the lender is financing an asset the investor doesn’t actually control.
Buildings still under construction, or where the developer still runs the HOA, get excluded outright by most non-QM programs. A certificate of occupancy has to exist, and control of the HOA has to have transferred to the unit owners, before a loan can close. No amount of bank statement strength changes that.
Post-Surfside disclosure requirements have tightened well beyond the agency space. The industry-standard condo questionnaire was rewritten following the 2022 collapse of Champlain Towers South, a 12-story, 136-unit building in Surfside, Florida, where long-term degradation of reinforcing steel and concrete from water intrusion was the primary cause, per J2 Building Consultants. Associations now have to disclose outstanding structural or safety violations, whether a funding plan exists for deferred maintenance, and whether a reserve study has been completed in the past three years. Non-QM lenders’ own HOA packages increasingly mirror those same questions even though they aren’t bound by the agency forms.
Reserve-funding minimums are rising on the agency side, and that’s reshaping what “financially healthy” documentation looks like industry-wide. Fannie Mae is raising its minimum reserve allocation from 10% to 15% of budgeted assessment income for applications dated January 4, 2027 or later, per The HOA Guide. That rule doesn’t bind DSCR or bank statement underwriting directly, but non-QM lenders’ condo reviews are increasingly referencing the same reserve benchmark when judging whether a building is well-run.
Short-term rental income can’t be forced onto the standard rent form. Fannie Mae’s Form 1007 is built to estimate long-term monthly market rent on one-unit properties — the equivalent form for 2-4 unit buildings is Form 1025 — and it cannot be used to translate a nightly rate into a monthly figure by simple multiplication. High-rise investors planning to run a unit as a short-term rental need a lender comfortable stepping outside that process entirely, and that’s typically a different conversation than a straightforward bank statement purchase.
Master policy deductibles are a hidden cash-flow risk in older high-rises. Deductibles on association policies often run higher on aging buildings, and a repair bill below that deductible gets paid out of the reserve fund or through an owner assessment — a cost that lands on your monthly carry indirectly, even though it never shows up as a rate or a payment figure on your loan.
What the Decision Actually Looks Like
Two things are true at once for most high-rise bank statement buyers: the deposit documentation has to hold up to screening, and the building has to clear a project review that’s gotten stricter since Surfside. The practical friction shows up fastest for an investor trying to scale — a bank statement borrower has to re-document 12 or 24 months of deposits on every single new application, which is a real drag compared to a property-income approach.
That’s part of why many investors buying multiple high-rise units eventually shift toward DSCR financing. DSCR loans qualify primarily on the property’s own rental income covering the payment, rather than on personal deposits, subject to lender guidelines. Bank statement loans and DSCR loans both sit in the non-QM category, but they solve different documentation problems. One replaces traditional income documentation with deposits. The other replaces personal income entirely with the property’s cash flow. Lendmire’s complete DSCR loans guide walks through that qualification path in full.
An owner-occupancy ratio is also worth tracking through the HOA even after closing. A building that was comfortably above the standard threshold at purchase can drift toward investor-heavy over a decade as more units turn into rentals, and as that ratio drops, the building gets harder to finance conventionally for a future refinance or for the next buyer. That’s not a temporary quirk that clears up at the next sale — it’s a structural feature of the building’s ownership mix, and it’s worth checking before assuming your building will always finance the way it does today.
Master policy premiums flow through HOA dues, and those dues are part of the expense stack any lender models against rental income on an investment file. A high-rise costs meaningfully more to insure at the building level than a small walk-up association, given its replacement value, unit count, and claims history — and that cost shows up in your carrying costs long after closing, even though it never appears as a rate on your note.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a non-warrantable high-rise mean I can’t get financing at all? No — non-warrantable means conventional agency lenders won’t touch it, not that the building is unfinanceable. Portfolio and non-QM lenders in Lendmire’s wholesale network finance non-warrantable condos regularly, typically up to around 80% LTV on most files, subject to underwriting.
Can I use bank statements and still buy in a condotel building? It depends on how the building operates. If rental participation is mandatory and management controls occupancy, that’s a control problem more than an income-documentation problem — condotel purchases typically run lower leverage than a standard condo purchase, and financing decisions come down to the specific building’s rules.
What happens if the HOA hasn’t completed a reserve study recently? It can slow or complicate the project review, since post-Surfside questionnaires specifically ask whether a reserve study has been done in the past three years. An outdated or missing study is a flag lenders weigh alongside the building’s overall reserve funding level.
Do I need 12 months or 24 months of bank statements? Either can work, and the choice trades off differently. A 24-month lookback tends to smooth out a seasonal or uneven business; a 12-month lookback is faster to document but sometimes comes with tighter conditions elsewhere in the file.
If my high-rise is non-warrantable now, will that ever change? It can, but it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent in either direction. Owner-occupancy ratios, litigation status, and reserve funding all get reassessed at every future financing event, so a building’s status can improve or worsen over time independent of anything happening with your own unit.
If you’re weighing a high-rise purchase against your own bank statement income, or comparing that path to a property-income-based DSCR loan, Lendmire can help you compare options across leverage, documentation path, and property type before you commit to an offer. Reach Lendmire at 828-256-2183 or request a quote to walk through how a specific building and income profile would actually be reviewed.
Tax treatment can depend on how the funds are used and how the property is held; investors should keep clear records and speak with a qualified tax professional before relying on any deduction.
For current guidelines and terms, see Lendmire’s super jumbo bank statement loan programs page.
Self-employed borrowers can compare both super jumbo programs on Lendmire’s self-employed mortgages page.
About Lendmire
Lendmire (NMLS# 2371349) is a mortgage brokerage built around DSCR investor lending, with programs available in 40 markets, including Washington, D.C. DSCR lenders commonly evaluate rental-income coverage instead of personal income paperwork — a practical fit for LLC-owned and multi-property investors. Terms vary by lender, property, leverage, and program. Scotsman Guide named Lendmire a Top Mortgage Workplace in both 2025 and 2026.
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References
1. Fannie Mae Selling Guide – Project Standards
2. J2 Building Consultants – Condo Project Questionnaire
3. The HOA Guide – Fannie Mae Condo Questionnaire
4. Fannie Mae Form 1007 – Single Family Comparable Rent Schedule
Brandon Miller
Founder & CEO, Mortgage Loan Originator, Lendmire LLC
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Disclosures. The information presented in this article is general market commentary, not financial, legal, or tax advice. Lendmire is a mortgage brokerage (NMLS# 2371349) — not a direct lender or depository institution — and loan placement is subject to lender underwriting. Nothing in this content represents a commitment to lend. Loan terms, pricing, and program availability vary based on borrower qualifications, property characteristics, and state of subject property, and are subject to change at any time. Lendmire complies with Equal Housing Opportunity requirements. Consumer access: nmlsconsumeraccess.org.
