You Own the Plant. You Have Never Borrowed Against It.
The asset a manufacturer knows best is usually the one it has never financed, because the balance sheet describes it in a number that stopped being true years ago.
Take an illustrative case. A manufacturer does $30 million of revenue and $3 million of EBITDA. It runs equipment finance with $1.8 million outstanding and a receivables line drawn at $2.4 million. It needs $5 million for a new production line and the working capital to run it.
The manufacturer also owns its plant outright, with no mortgage on it. The balance sheet carries that building at $3.2 million, which is what remains after years of depreciation. A current appraisal would put it near $9 million.
Nobody in the financing conversation has mentioned it.
The first route is a loan
Lenders advance against owner-occupied industrial property at a loan to value that commonly sits between 65 and 75 percent. At 70 percent of $9 million, the capacity is $6.3 million.
Draw $5 million of that on a twenty-year amortization at an illustrative 7.5 percent and the payment is about $40,300 a month, or roughly $483,000 a year. The company keeps the building, keeps any appreciation in it, and in twenty years owns it free and clear again.
A mortgage on the plant is ordinary secured lending against an asset the business already holds. Thalos Capital does not finance real estate projects, and this is not one. It is collateral a manufacturer operates from.
The second route is a sale
A sale-leaseback sells the facility to an investor and leases it back on a long lease, so operations do not move.
Sold at $9 million against a $3.2 million book value, the gain is $5.8 million. At a blended 25 percent, which is genuinely situation-specific, tax takes about $1.45 million and net proceeds land near $7.55 million. Rent is set off a capitalization rate, and at an illustrative 8 percent that is $720,000 a year, typically with escalators around 2 percent annually.
So the second route raises about $2.55 million more than the first.
The comparison nobody runs
In year one the mortgage costs $483,000 and the lease costs $720,000. The difference is $237,000 on $2.55 million of additional capital, which is a cost of roughly 9.3 percent.
A 9.3 percent cost on the incremental capital is defensible on its own. What changes the picture is that it does not stop. By year twenty, escalators have carried the rent to about $1.05 million while the mortgage payment is unchanged at $483,000 and is in its final year. In year twenty-one the mortgage costs nothing and the company owns a building. The lease costs about $1.07 million and rises from there.
A sale-leaseback is not expensive debt
A sale-leaseback is not debt at all. It is the sale of the asset, with the rent as the visible part and the transfer of ownership as the part that gets less attention.
A sale-leaseback is sometimes exactly the right transaction. It is right when the extra $2.55 million earns more inside the business than the spread costs. It is right when an owner would rather hold operating capital than a building, or wants the property value realized in cash ahead of a sale of the company, or has a facility that is genuinely surplus to how the business will run in ten years.
The risk deserves stating plainly, because it is real: the transaction converts a fixed asset into a fixed obligation. A mortgage payment in a bad year is a payment on something you own and can refinance against. Rent in a bad year is rent, it escalates on schedule, and the asset that used to sit behind it belongs to somebody else.
Why the building never comes up
Partly vocabulary. A mortgage is a loan a finance team arranges. A sale-leaseback arrives through a property broker. The two rarely reach the same table at the same time, and almost never as alternatives to each other.
Mostly, though, it is the book value. At $3.2 million against $6.3 million of borrowing capacity, the balance sheet actively understates the largest source of secured capital the company holds. Depreciation is an accounting schedule, not a valuation, and no monthly report flags the gap between them.
How Thalos Capital Approaches This
Thalos Capital works borrower-side, and on a manufacturer the useful first step is a full collateral inventory rather than a facility request: the equipment, the receivables, the inventory, and the property the business operates from, each with a current value and a current advance rate against it.
A full collateral inventory is what makes the comparison possible. It shows what the owned facility supports as security, what a sale-leaseback would raise net of tax, and what each costs across the years the company will actually be running. Both routes get sized, and the owner chooses with the numbers side by side rather than one at a time.
A manufacturer carrying $4.2 million of debt against $3 million of EBITDA is not highly levered. It is under-financed on one asset and possibly over-financed on another, and it has never seen the two compared.
Most financing situations have more options than the borrower initially sees. A conversation is enough to map them. Submit your financing request at https://thaloscapital.com/contact.