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Y2 Lending: a private real estate lender that started with one HELOC deal, at $7K a month
Y2 Lending sells private and hard money lending to real estate investors, developers, and wholesalers, and was at $7K a month in revenue that founder Eugene Nilus reported in a Starter Story interview published in May 2023.
How it started
Nilus had spent more than 20 years in the tech industry when he was laid off in the summer of 2022. The interview describes a decision shaped by pressure rather than by a plan: a mortgage, two kids, private school fees, and a return to corporate work that he expected would make him miserable. He had already bought a few 2-unit properties and one 4-unit property, and had joined a mastermind group focused on buying commercial multifamily apartment buildings.
The first deal came out of that networking. An investor who had been buying, fixing and renting properties asked whether Nilus had money to lend on a project. Nilus did not have the $100K being asked for, so he opened a HELOC, borrowed against it, and lent the money out. In the interview he says he did not yet know how to structure the deal or which documents to use; what he did know was to act as a bank and secure the money with property.
The arithmetic is his own, and it is the part of the story that explains everything after it. The loan carried 12% APR, which he worked out as $1,200 a month in. The HELOC cost him 3.5% APR, which he worked out as $350 a month out. The difference, $850 a month, was his. One deal, funded with borrowed money, produced a monthly spread he could see in advance.
What it sells and how it charges
According to y2lending.com, fetched on 2026-09-30, the business describes itself as offering "PRIVATE AND HARD MONEY LENDING SOLUTIONS," with the stated aim of empowering "real estate investors, developers, and wholesalers by providing financial solutions that generate wealth through property transformations."
The site lists a set of loan programs rather than a product catalogue: Fix and Flip Funding, Rental DSCR Loans, Double Close Funding, Owner Finance Funding, Bridge Funding, GAP Funding, EMD Funding, and Proof of Funds, alongside a Home Loan Programs section. Within short-term financing it separates Fix & Flip Purchase, Fix & Flip Refinance, As-Is Purchase and As-Is Refinance; longer-term and transaction support covers Rental DSCR Loans, DSCR 2nd Position, Ground-up Funding, Double Close Funding, EMD Funding, Gap Funding and Proof of Funds letters. The site also advertises a free community with weekly Q&A Zoom calls on Wednesdays at 12pm PST / 3pm EST.
On pricing, the website does not state rates, points or fees. There is no pricing page; the site's calls to action are "Get Funded," a phone number, and a contact form. Anyone comparing lenders on cost would need to ask directly.
How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going
The first borrower came from a relationship, not from marketing. As Nilus puts it in the interview: "He asked me if I had money he could borrow for one of his projects."
After that first loan, he kept networking inside his real estate group, told people about the deal he had made, and posted about it on Facebook. A few people reached out to borrow, then a few more. The pattern he describes is that demand arrived faster than capital: deals kept coming across his desk while the money to fund them ran out.
The channels he credits are consistent and unglamorous: "One of the best sources so far for me was a mastermind group that I pay for, Facebook posting, online networking, and local meet-ups." Elsewhere in the interview he lists sharing wins on his feed and on real estate social channels, building trust by putting himself out there, making short-form video content, sending presentations to people interested in investing, attending live meetups and conferences, and eventually creating his own event.
The numbers
Revenue: $7K a month, founder-reported in the May 2023 interview. In the same interview he described the range as anywhere between $6,000 and $9,000 a month, describing the work as moving money and keeping its velocity high. These figures are what he said at that date; they are not current revenue, and nothing here should be read as a forecast of what lending income looks like now.
Team: one founder, zero employees at the time of the interview. The business is based in San Francisco and started in October 2022; he says he opened Y2 Lending LLC about six months before the interview.
Start cost: the interview does not state a startup cost. The first deal was funded with a HELOC rather than with savings or outside capital, and no dollar figure for what it cost to open the business is given.
How it compares
The following category figures come from 1M.chat's analysis of founder-reported cases — 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026. That is a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses, so the medians describe the cases in the dataset rather than the industry as a whole.
| Measure | Y2 Lending (May 2023, founder-reported) | Finance & real estate category |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly revenue | $7K | $128K median (41 businesses with founder-reported revenue) |
| Employees | 0 | 10 median |
| Founders | 1 | 54% of the category started by one founder |
| Revenue level | below the category median | 61% of the category is at $1M a year or more |
The most common growth channels in the category, among the 29 businesses with channel information, are word of mouth and referrals at 55%, organic social media at 52%, SEO and organic search at 38%, and paid ads at 31%. Y2 Lending's mix — a paid mastermind, Facebook posting, online networking and local meet-ups — sits in the same two top bands, with the difference that the relationships came first and the posting followed, rather than the reverse.
Reading the comparison honestly: at the point of the interview this was a one-person lender an order of magnitude below its category's median revenue, with none of the headcount that usually comes with it. That combination is not unusual in lending, where revenue tracks deployed capital rather than staff, but it does mean the number reflects a capital constraint as much as a demand one — the founder said as much when he ran out of money to lend.
What a founder can take from it
- Price the spread before you price the business. Nilus could see $850 a month on one $100K loan because he knew both sides of the rate. Any lending or brokered-capital business starts with that subtraction, not with a growth plan.
- Borrow credibility from a room you pay to be in. His first borrower, his funding structure and his best channel all trace back to the same mastermind. If the room is real, the cost is a customer-acquisition line, not a subscription.
- Say what you did, in public, once. A Facebook post about a completed deal brought the next few borrowers. Specific and verifiable beats frequent and vague.
- Expect the constraint to move. He had more deals than capital within months. Decide in advance which side you will fix first, because the answer changes what you spend your time on.
- Meet people in person if the product is trust-based. His own summary of the lesson was that nothing beats face-to-face contact for where real relationships come from.
None of the above is a revenue promise. Lending carries credit, documentation and jurisdictional risk that a single case study cannot price for anyone else.
Sources
Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure