Freddie Mac's fixed-rate program for apartment loans of $10 million or less, delivered through its Optigo lenders. Freddie Mac now titles it Conventional Small.
Borrowers and brokers still say SBL. Freddie Mac’s current term sheet, dated April 2026, calls the product Conventional Small. It covers fixed-rate loans of $10 million or less, generally $2 million to $10 million, to buy or refinance apartment buildings, predominantly market-rate properties of 5 to 50 units. Student housing, seniors housing, manufactured housing communities and cooperatives are excluded.
The term sheet lists terms of 5, 7, 10, 12 or 15 years and amortization up to 30 years. For an amortizing loan with a term of 7 years or more, the minimum debt coverage ratio is 1.25x and the maximum loan to value is 80%. A term under 7 years drops the maximum to 75%, and full-term interest-only loans are capped at 65% or 70%. Freddie Mac may adjust these by property and market.
The borrower must be a single purpose entity. The loan is non-recourse except for standard carve-outs, and tax, insurance and replacement reserve escrows are generally required. Standard prepayment is yield maintenance until the loan is securitized, then a two-year lock-out, then defeasance. You reach the program through an Optigo lender, not Freddie Mac itself.
How it shows up in the data here
No field here marks a loan as a Freddie Mac small loan. HMDA shows each lender's multifamily loans made in 2025 and 2024 with median and largest loan size, which tells you whether loans of a few million dollars are its normal business. See the ranking by loans made and multifamily comps.
Go further
- Multifamily lenders by loans made: Lenders ranked by number of multifamily loans made, from HMDA.
- Maximum loan calculator: Size a loan against a coverage and a loan-to-value limit.
- Maximum loan calculator: The loan each test allows: DSCR, LTV and debt yield side by side, and which one binds.
- DSCR calculator: Cash flow over debt service. Type the cash flow and the loan terms, see the ratio and the cushion before it falls to 1.00x.
- Small balance multifamily loan checklist: Most apartment loans are small. Local banks, credit unions and the agencies' small loan programs all compete for them, and each wants the same core package with a different emphasis.
Related terms
- Optigo: Freddie Mac's name for its multifamily loan products and for the network of lenders it buys those apartment loans from.
- Agency lender: A lender authorized to make apartment loans that Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac then buys or backs, under those companies' rules instead of the lender's own.
- Small-balance multifamily: A loan on an apartment building of five or more units that falls under a size cap. Each program sets its own cap, so the phrase has no single legal meaning.
- Multifamily (5+ units): Residential rental property with five or more units. Banks, credit unions and HMDA all draw the line between four units and five.
- Yield maintenance: A prepayment charge sized so the lender or investor earns about what it would have earned had the loan run to the end of the yield maintenance period.
- Defeasance: A way to free a property from a loan before maturity by swapping the collateral: the borrower pledges securities that make the remaining payments, and the lien on the property is released.
- Non-recourse loan: A loan the lender can collect only from the property pledged for it, not from the guarantor personally, except for listed bad acts.
Sources
Plain definitions for orientation, not legal, tax or credit advice. A lender's own policy decides what it will do.