Three things kill deals at credit committee more often than anything else. None of them is the deposit. All of them are fixable — if you find them six weeks before the lender does instead of six weeks after.
1. A feasibility that doesn't reconcile
Hard costs sourced from one quote, soft costs from a different year, contingency that's a guess, sales costs missing entirely. A credit analyst can spot an inconsistent feasibility in minutes, and once they do, they stop trusting every other number in it. The fix is dull and decisive: one model, one date, every line sourced, the contingency and sales costs real. Get this right and you've cleared the bar most deals fail at.
2. A builder who can't be verified
A builder who can't supply their last three completed projects with addresses, or who's offering cost-plus on a deal the lender expects to be fixed-price, is a problem the credit memo can't wave away. The lender is underwriting your builder almost as hard as they're underwriting you. If there's a related-party head contract — common for builder-developers — that narrows the lender shortlist, but it doesn't kill the deal, as long as the structure and controls are presented clearly.
3. A track record nobody can find
A developer who's been "in development for fifteen years" but can't produce a profit-on-cost track record — because everything was funded inside related-party structures and the receipts are scattered — gives the lender nothing to lean on. Experience you can't evidence is, to a credit team, experience that didn't happen. Pulling that history together before you apply is worth more than another half-percent of equity.
The pattern across all three: credit committees decline on doubt, not on numbers. The work that gets a deal funded is the work that removes the doubt before the question is asked.