Live Oak Bank

The Live Oak Story

We started Live Oak Bank in 2007 to provide veterinary business loans to small, independent businesspeople looking to expand, remodel, refinance and/or acquire an existing practice. From the beginning, we took a personal approach and saw our clients not as numbers, but as real people facing real-life opportunities and challenges. We offered big bank expertise and experience without big bank attitudes. It worked - for us as well as our clients - and we expanded our veterinary funding programs to serve the needs of private pharmacies and dental offices.

Today, Live Oak has clients across America, but we still see each one as an individual entrepreneur who deserves our undivided attention. We're their bank and we take that responsibility very personally.

Veterinary Business Loans

Live Oak Bank's team has provided veterinary business loans for more than 20 years. We understand your industry, speak your language and know the issues unique to your business - huge advantages in evaluating funding options. When you work with us, you'll spend less time on veterinary clinic financing and more time caring for animals. Live Oak is your bank, whether you're fresh out of veterinarian school, starting a new practice, remodeling or expanding. Learn more

Dental Practice Loans

Live Oak has more than two decades of experience providing small healthcare practice financing. When we expanded our lending programs to specifically serve dentists, we brought loan specialists on board who know the industry and are well-equipped to address the issues you face. Whether you need help funding a startup, expanding, remodeling, refinancing or purchasing commercial property for building, we'll be with you every step of the way. Learn more

Independent Pharmacy Loans

You take care of people in the community; Live Oak takes care of financing your dreams. We have 20+ years of experience providing loans to small healthcare practices, which means you can move forward with confidence. When you're ready to expand, refinance, remodel, or buy an existing pharmacy, you can rely on Live Oak Bank. We're your partner, and seeing you succeed is success for us.

Our focus is essentially with three deal types:

Real Estate Transactions

• Building purchases or construction expansion projects
  • Can offer both the SBA 7a and SBA 504 loan programs
  • Feature longer terms - 20- 25 year financing
  • Fixed and variable rates
  • Building purchases – up to 100% of the value
  • Construction - Most appraisals don’t support the construction projects! We can be creative and go beyond 100% of the appraised value if the deal is strong. Most banks (local or national) will only finance 90% of the appraised value. If it costs $1,000,000 to build the building and the appraisal comes in at $900,000, then the typical lender will finance 90% of $900,000. Creates an enormous gap. This is often a deal killer. This is a why a dentist needs a lender that focuses on these projects and can be creative. We financed over $20M last year to dentists for construction. Most of them had issues with their local bank or dental practice lender.

Practice Acquisitions

• We can look at all practice purchases. We generally don’t compete well on the average deal, but we have made great strides in financing deals well beyond the conventional dental lenders’ comfort level.
  We see this in two areas:
  • Larger deals – Deals that exceed $1MM
  • Multiple practice purchase scenarios. Dentists looking to finance 2nd, 3rd or 4th practices. In these scenarios we typically will refinance all their existing practice debt in addition to the new loan purchase.

Debt Refinancing – Practice and Commercial Real Estate

• We can look at any practice debt and or commercial real estate refinancing opportunity.
  • On real estate transactions, we can go out to 25 years and cover 100% of the building refinance amount.
  • Often on a real estate refinance opportunity we can throw in the practice refinance loan(s) and this can all be done over 25 years which will buy the doctor better cash-flow with the longer term.