Jeffrey Hensel on AI and human judgment in hard money lending
Jeffrey Hensel is a broker at North Coast Financial, which provides hard money loans to California property owners and real estate investors. Hensel explains how AI helps make financial topics easier to understand, why loan decisions still need human judgment, and how useful online information can support borrowers before they contact a lender.
AI can help North Coast Financial explain hard money lending, but evaluating a loan still calls for human judgment about the borrower and property. Clear, accurate online information can help borrowers research their options while keeping trust and lending decisions grounded in human conversations.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
My father, Don Hensel, founded North Coast Financial in 1981, and I joined him in 2015. We’ve always focused on helping California property owners and investors who need financing that traditional banks can’t easily provide. What makes us different is that we’re a direct lender, and borrowers work directly with the people making the lending decisions. We don’t have layers of departments or a complicated approval process. That makes a big difference when someone needs to close on a property quickly.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
A lot of our business comes from people searching online for hard money loans and finding us when they need financing. That’s valuable because they’re usually looking for a solution to an immediate problem. But I’d love to see more business coming from referrals and repeat borrowers. When someone we’ve helped in the past comes back or recommends us to another investor, it tells me we did something right. Those relationships are what I’d like to keep building.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
AI has been particularly useful for helping draft and organize educational content. We deal with a lot of questions about hard money loans, and AI can help turn complicated financial topics into explanations that are easier to understand. Where I wouldn’t rely on it is evaluating whether a particular loan makes sense. Every property and borrower situation is different, and I’ve found that you need human judgment to recognize problems that don’t necessarily show up in the numbers. AI can save time, but I wouldn’t let it make lending decisions for us.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
I’ve noticed that borrowers have more ways to research financing before contacting a lender. Tools like ChatGPT can explain what hard money loans are, how they work, and when they might make sense. That means some borrowers can come into a conversation already understanding the basics. I can’t say exactly how many people are finding us through AI assistants because that isn’t always easy to track. But I do think it’s becoming another important place where people start their research, especially when they’re unfamiliar with private lending.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I’d focus on making your website genuinely useful to borrowers. Answer the questions people actually ask, explain your lending requirements clearly, and make it easy for someone to understand whether you can help them. AI tools are increasingly becoming part of how people research financial products, so having accurate, detailed information online matters. What I’d ignore is the pressure to automate everything just because the technology exists. In private lending, people are making significant financial decisions, and I don’t think a chatbot can replace the trust that comes from speaking with an experienced lender.
Thank you to Jeffrey Hensel and the team at North Coast Financial for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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