Marcia Kaufman learned to lend from the other side of the desk

Marcia Kaufman had spent years deciding whether other people should receive money to buy property. Then the mortgage business came apart, and she became the person who needed the money. In the years following the financial crisis, she bought approximately 50 one-to-four-family properties across New York's boroughs, renovated them and sold them. A lending career had acquired a second education: the borrower's.

It is a useful detail to remember when Kaufman talks about bridge financing today. The chief executive of Bayport Funding has occupied several seats around the same transaction. She has evaluated real estate, owned it, arranged its financing and dealt with the work between purchase and sale. A property can look admirably tidy in a spreadsheet. Owning it makes the untidy parts rather harder to ignore.

Her career is a story about returning to a familiar profession with a different understanding of it. The detour through renovation gave her a way to recognize what a developer is asking for, and what that developer may be underestimating. She now runs a lender whose business depends on helping projects move while deciding which projects deserve to move at all.

The borrower’s side of the desk

Kaufman’s earlier career included senior leadership roles at Arbor National Mortgage, Bank of America, Preferred Empire Mortgage Company and American Home Mortgage Ventures. She also built a real estate investment and brokerage business, Select Mortgage. That history spans large institutions and independent enterprise, with all the different decision-making habits those settings bring.

She has described the 2007-2008 mortgage meltdown as a period when she had to work out where opportunity would survive. Her response was practical: buy properties that needed work and turn them into homes ready for their next owners. This meant applying her knowledge of real estate and finance to transactions in which her own execution mattered.

Consider the change in perspective. A lender wants evidence that a renovation budget is credible. An owner must get the renovation done for that budget. A lender needs an exit strategy. An owner must find the buyer. The vocabulary overlaps; the responsibility feels different. Kaufman’s subsequent lending work draws on experience with both sets of obligations.

When asked in 2024 to identify her biggest career accomplishment, she chose obtaining her own mortgage banking license. She had gone through the process assuming she could meet its professional, financial and underwriting requirements. Only afterward did she appreciate the height of the bar. It is an unexpectedly procedural answer from someone who could have picked a transaction total.

The choice says something about her account of professional independence. The license gave her the standing to operate on her own. The renovated properties added experience she could carry into another business. Neither was merely a new title. Each required her to take responsibility for something concrete.

A return with a different set of questions

A mutual friend introduced Kaufman to Bayport’s Ami Bar-Mashiah, who invited her to join during their first meeting. She became president in 2018 and CEO in January 2023. The move brought her back to lending with direct experience of the assets her customers were buying.

Bayport’s business covers the interval between a property’s present condition and the point when it can be sold, rented or financed for the longer term. In a September 2025 podcast conversation, Kaufman discussed bridge funding for building upgrades. The subject is straightforward enough: an owner has work to do now, while the building’s next financial chapter lies ahead.

That interval is where much of the uncertainty lives. A half-finished project has costs, deadlines and a business plan still being tested. An upgraded building may have a different value or earning capacity. Financing has to connect those conditions without assuming that every anticipated improvement will arrive precisely on schedule.

In her account of Bayport’s 2023 expansion, Kaufman described following experienced sponsors into new markets and examining those markets carefully. The East Coast offered familiar property types and borrowers; Dallas and Washington, D.C., became part of a wider footprint. Geography entered the conversation through relationships, then had to survive the diligence.

She also described adding a two-percentage-point interest-rate stress to underwriting as rates rose, despite internal resistance. That is a revealing management moment. The difficulty was persuading colleagues to make a less comfortable assumption before the market made it unavoidable. A cautious spreadsheet rarely wins a popularity contest. It can still be worth keeping.

The numbers need their own introductions

For 2022, Bayport closed approximately $250 million in loans across 220 financial transactions. Those figures helped earn Kaufman recognition in the 2023 Connect CRE Top Mortgage Brokers and Lenders awards. They describe a year of activity, with many separate decisions underneath the headline amount.

HousingWire named her a 2024 Finance Leader, highlighting Bayport’s expansion, its Webster Bank credit facility and the launch of Loan Lender, a third-party origination platform. The recognition points to the operational work of extending a lending business: finding capital, building distribution and serving borrowers in more markets.

In September 2025, Bayport announced a $200 million senior credit facility with Webster Bank to support a broader national reach and larger multifamily, single-family rental and mixed-use projects. Webster had also provided a $200 million facility in March 2023. These are dated financing announcements; they should each be understood in their own context.

A credit facility gives a lender capacity to finance its work. An origination total records loans made. Keeping those meanings clear makes Kaufman’s growth story easier to understand. There is the task of obtaining money, and there is the longer task of putting it into projects that can repay it.

Quick decisions, slow assumptions

Bayport’s current description of its operation emphasizes lending on its own balance sheet, underwriting in-house and managing the loans it originates. Kaufman leads strategy, capital partnerships and national growth. The firm says it can fund in as little as 72 hours. The attraction for a developer is easy to grasp: a financing decision arrives while the opportunity is still available.

Speed makes the quality of information especially consequential. Kaufman’s September 2025 advice to mortgage brokers included checking borrowers’ financial documents carefully, even though Bayport requires bank statements to come directly from clients. She recounted a case in which an originator spotted fraudulent statements. The borrower subsequently supplied the same statements directly.

The anecdote is brief, but its lesson travels. Changing who sends a document cannot repair what is wrong inside it. A relationship with a broker carries expectations of scrutiny, as well as introductions. Kaufman wants brokers who understand the work they are placing before a lender.

“We want a business partner out there.”

Marcia Kaufman, September 2025

She also warned that repeatedly using a lender’s offers to shop elsewhere, without completing business together, can damage that relationship. Her idea of partnership includes a return on the time spent evaluating a deal. Being helpful still involves judgment about whom to help and how often.

A building has to fit its neighborhood

Kaufman’s public comments about development often get down to the building itself. Discussing modular construction in December 2023, she pointed to potentially shorter schedules and less exposure to weather delays. She also explained the extra diligence: the lender must examine the modular manufacturer’s history, finances and insurance alongside the developer’s qualifications.

There is a financing wrinkle, too. She described a substantial portion of funding arriving when modules are delivered and installed, rather than following the familiar sequence of work completed on-site. The construction method changes the questions a lender must ask. An appealing production schedule does not eliminate the need to understand the producer.

Her November 2024 writing about the move from flipping houses to owning multifamily property made a related point. Investors need to prepare for longer holding periods, different operations, adequate reserves and suitable partners. Experience in one property business does not automatically supply every skill needed in the next.

Actual loans give these ideas an address. In April 2025, Bayport provided $5.5 million for acquisition and construction of a six-unit condominium project on Clay Street in Greenpoint, replacing a vacant industrial building. In November, it announced $2.87 million for an eight-unit multifamily development in Crown Heights. Kaufman connected the latter project to demand for housing near transit.

The scale is worth noticing. Six apartments here, eight there: individual buildings with specific uses and locations. These transactions show how a lending strategy reaches a neighborhood. The financing announcement is measured in dollars; the completed project is measured in homes.

The work still comes back to people

By December 2025, Kaufman was discussing fix-and-flip investment in terms of aging housing, repair costs and the buyer who may have little left after a down payment. She argued that renovation can spare the eventual purchaser major work. She also warned that television had encouraged unrealistic expectations about executing flips and earning profits.

Her interest in expansion includes more capital for multifamily housing, particularly workforce and affordable housing. The ambition connects her early mortgage career to her renovation years and her current role: people need usable homes, and delivering them requires financing that takes the actual work seriously.

Born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, Kaufman describes leadership as supporting the people around her. Away from work, she enjoys cooking, entertaining and skiing in Aspen. After moving to Manhattan, she said she tried to visit a museum each weekend. There is room in this account of a lending executive for both a renovation budget and an afternoon looking at art.

The thread through her career is the willingness to learn from a changed position. Lending led to ownership; ownership informed lending. Today, when a borrower describes the distance between buying a property and finishing it, Kaufman has some experience of that distance herself. The other side of the desk turned out to be a useful place to sit.