Requirements
Merchants Mortgage & Trust lending requirements
The published qualifying criteria for Merchants Mortgage & Trust — the thresholds a deal is screened against before anything else about it matters. Verified Sep 17, 2026.
Minimum credit score
660
Merchants Mortgage & Trust sets its credit floor at 660. A borrower scoring below that is not eligible for this program, independent of how the property itself cash-flows.
Minimum DSCR
0.75
A 0.75 minimum accepts a property whose rent covers only 75% of its full monthly payment — principal, interest, taxes, insurance and association dues. A property renting for $1,500 against a $2,000 payment scores exactly a 0.75 DSCR and clears this floor; the same property would be declined outright at a program whose floor sits at 1.00. See How DSCR is calculated.
Maximum leverage
80% LTV / 80% LTC
Maximum loan-to-value is 80% of the property's appraised value — the borrower brings at least 20% of value in cash or equity. Maximum loan-to-cost is 80% of total project cost — purchase price plus rehab budget. That is the binding number on a value-add deal where the finished value will exceed the purchase price, since an LTV cap alone would understate what Merchants Mortgage & Trust will actually lend against the project.
Origination channel
Direct
Merchants Mortgage & Trust originates directly — there is no broker in the loan.
Reading these thresholds together
Merchants Mortgage & Trust publishes 4 of the 7 criteria categories this directory tracks (credit score, DSCR, leverage, loan size, entity requirement, origination channel, and state coverage). Any category not shown above is not publicly disclosed by Merchants Mortgage & Trust as of Sep 17, 2026 — treat an absent category as unknown, not as "no requirement."
None of these thresholds are guarantees. A deal that clears every published floor still goes through underwriting on the specific property, borrower history, and documentation and entity structure . These are the gates a deal has to clear before that review even starts.