Senator Bunning finally gave up his objection yesterday evening and a 30 days extension introduced by Senator Landrieu was approved along with the unemployment benefits. This will allow the 90% guarantee and the upfront fee waiver to continue for 30 days or until the additional $60 million budget allocated runs out. Hotel loans in queue can now qualify for funds immediately.

The Markup for S.2869 is planned for Thursday. If this bill is approved by the Congress, the SBA limit will increase to 5 million and the 90% guarantee and the fee waiver will continue for the remaining of 2010.

March 1, 2010

On February 22, 2010, Senator Reid stripped the SBA guarantee and fee waiver extension from the Jobs Bill which was finally approved last week without the SBA extension. Provisions of S.2869 was then introduced and stopped by Senator Bunning who incidentally stopped the unemployment extension bill this Saturday. The fate of this bill is in question. There have been a number of attempts to introduce and to push similar bills that would raise the SBA limit to 5 million including the House Bill HR.4302 and all have either remained on the sidelines or had to be reformulated into other bills such as S.2869.

A major issue in these bills is that they are too comprehensive raising contention in this divided Congress. For us in the hotel industry, a major deficiency of the SBA 7a is the 2MM limit. A simple bill raising the limit to 5MM may have been going through but when combined with the fee waiver and 90% guarantee, it gets tangled in nto the Congress's political web and dies out.

As of February 26th, the lenders are encouraged to pull their SBA loans from the queue as the extension of the 90% guarantee is in limbo. With all the uncertainty on the extension and the fate of the S.2869, Scientific Capital has asked the thousands of hoteliers on its network to email and call Senator Reid, Senator Bunning, and their own Senators and urge them to push for S.2869 approval. It is strongly believed that the increase of the SBA 7a limit to 5MM will change the landscape for the hotel financing.

This page will be updated to reflect any movement on this bill or the extension of the SBA Stimulus package during the next few days.