Financing options give you more than an advantage at the kitchen table. They give you leverage. With so many partners out there to choose from, how do you know which suits your business – and thus, your homeowners – best?  

If you’re not evaluating your financing strategy right now, you should be, and these five criteria can help you build a financing process that closes more jobs and leaves more satisfied customers. 

1. Approval Depth: How Many Credit Tiers Does the Partner Cover? 

Start here: everything else is irrelevant if your customer can’t get approved.  

As a general industry benchmark, a single-lender setup typically approves somewhere in the range of 40–60% of applicants, while a true multi-lender waterfall platform pushes coverage to 70–90% or more (at Comfort Connect, our waterfall approves roughly 90%+ of applicants across credit profiles). Those are benchmarks to measure against, not guarantees, since your actual results will depend on your market and your customer mix. Ask the partners you’re considering for approval data that reflects contractors like you.  

2. Speed: Two Clocks Are Running

The first clock is the customer’s: how long until the homeowner gets a decision? If it happens while your tech is still at the kitchen table, the sale keeps its momentum. If it takes a day, you’ve now given the homeowner time to seek a second quote.  

The second clock is yours: how long after installation until the money is in your account? Funding delays don’t show up on a rate sheet, but they show up in your cash flow. This is especially evident when you’re carrying payroll and equipment costs on jobs that haven’t paid out yet.  

Ask the financing providers you’re considering for both timelines in writing, as well as details on what typically slows them down.  

3. True Cost: Dealer Fees and How They Scale

Financing that costs your customer nothing rarely costs you nothing, and dealer fees are where that cost often lives.  

When considering dealer fees, you don’t just want to look at the headline rate. You want to understand how the fee is structured and how it behaves as you grow.  

Ask whether fees vary by loan term, promotional rate, or credit tier, and whether they come down as your volume goes up. Then ask the question that reveals the most: what does a contractor doing twice my volume pay? A fee that looks fine at 10 financed jobs a month can quietly eat into your margin at 50 if the structure never rewards you for the growth you’re bringing.  

Once you have your answer, convert the fee to a percentage of your average ticket, and you’ll actually be comparing real costs. 

4. Customer Experience: One Application or Several?  

Consider a scenario where a homeowner is declined by a partner with a single lender. In many setups, you’re now asking them to fill out a second application with someone else, which means another credit inquiry, another waiting period, and another chance for them to end the conversation with a simple, “let me think about it.” 

A better model is a single application that routes through multiple lenders behind the scenes, so the customer doesn’t see the handoff. They never have to fill out their information a second time, and they don’t have to hear the bad news before the good.  

When you’re evaluating partners, ask to see exactly what a declined homeowner experiences. The answer tells you how many of your almost-sales are being recovered and how many are walking out the door, which can completely shift your close rates.  

5. Compliance and Support: Who Does the Heavy Lifting?  

Consumer financing can come with various legal obligations, which vary by state and change over time. Some partners handle this end to end, and others leave a portion of it with you. Ask directly who is responsible for what, and, as with everything else on this list, get the answer in writing.  

But that’s not all. Be sure to test the support side. When a homeowner has a question 45 days after installation, you need to understand who they’re going to call (and who you call when something goes sideways). A partner that takes more of the compliance burden off your shoulders and answers the phone like a real extension of your team is worth more than a quarter point difference on a rate. 

The Honest Truth About Finding Success with Financing Partners

If you run potential partners through these five considerations, you’ll see the pattern:  

• Approval depth and customer experience determine how many sales you close.  

• Speed and cost determine what those sales are worth to your business.  

• Compliance and support determine how much of your attention they consume.  

Finding a partner that scores well on all five is hard, and here’s the honest truth: finding one that does it without pushing you into multiple lenders, multiple dashboards, and multiple support lines is even harder. To get this, you need a single platform that brings financing, the customer experience, and the back-office weight together in one place.  

Our waterfall platform does just that. We offer multiple financing paths while always considering both the homeowner’s experience and the contractor’s support needs. This all starts with a first look designed to get the best possible terms in front of as many people as possible on a single application. And when that doesn’t go according to plan, we have other paths to finish the sale, so tougher credit profiles don’t always mean lost jobs.