Commercial Loan Program
Isidro Beccar Varela has developed hotels as far away as the Middle East and as nearby as Cape Cod. He wasn’t necessarily looking to expand his work into Vermont, but then he saw the Brandon Inn.
There was no need to figure out how to give the inn a sense of place or make it something different and special, he said — it had that already. The hotel had been dormant since before COVID, not officially closed, just slow. In its first year since he took over, Varela said the inn is now up by over 50% in terms of reservations. He’s working to get his staff up to speed and is ready to see the growth continue.
If not for VEDA, he said, he would have worked with the Small Business Association alone. He’s worked with them before and things have gone well. But, he said, as a larger agency the SBA is by nature more hands-off. He received a check, through a third party, end of story.
With VEDA, things were different and, for Varela, better. His loan officer Eun-Young Denny is “a great responder,” he said, “The most detail-oriented person I’ve ever met.” Still keeping her in the loop on business news because he knows she’ll be genuinely interested.
Another nice part of working with VEDA, he said, is the collaboration, not just with him and the staff, but with VEDA and other lenders — he even learned about VEDA through the National Bank of Middlebury, with which he also works. There is a lack of competition, VEDA financing for Varela is in the form of a second mortgage and the collaboration between VEDA and the National Bank of Middlebury is, as he put it, “Seamless; never heard a contradiction between them.”
“It’s a great program, this idea of taking a subordinate place, controlling the risk — but making it easier for commercial banks to come in — many of these businesses cannot happen because if you don’t have enough equity traditional lenders are unwilling to take the risk.”
-Isidro Beccar Varela, Owner
