Question 1

Why does Tyler work well for SBA owner-occupied loans?

Accepted Answer

Healthcare drives it. Education and health services make up 27,700 of the metro's 122,100 nonfarm jobs, 22.7% of everything, anchored by CHRISTUS Trinity Mother Frances, UT Health East Texas, and the UT Tyler School of Medicine, with 230 resident physicians training across the UT Health East Texas system. A dental, medical, or veterinary practice buying the building it operates out of, instead of leasing, is the textbook 504 borrower, and the trades that build out those practices fit the SBA's owner-occupied use case as well. See our SBA program page for how we structure a file.

Question 2

How much of my Tyler building do I have to occupy myself?

Accepted Answer

51% of an existing building, 60% of new construction, and new construction is the stricter rule. Under 13 CFR 120.131, buying an existing building requires your practice or business to occupy at least 51% of the rentable space, with the rest leasable. New construction requires at least 60% owner occupancy, caps permanently leased space at 20%, and needs an absorption plan for the remaining 20% (occupied within three years, fully occupied within ten). A Tyler clinic sizing a new building around future growth needs to plan around that ceiling, not around "occupy 60%, lease the rest." Talk to your attorney or CPA about how your entity and lease plan line up against it.

Question 3

What does it cost to permit a new medical or office building in Tyler?

Accepted Answer

Cheap, and priced in the code. City of Tyler nonresidential construction runs $5.00 per $1,000 of estimated construction valuation, minimum $50, plus a 25% plan review fee on nonresidential, commercial, and industrial permits. A $500,000 clinic buildout runs about $2,500 for the permit and $625 for plan review, roughly $3,125, and that permit fee covers the fire inspection, with plumbing and electrical billed separately. The residential per-square-foot rate does not apply to a commercial building, so do not size a medical or office permit off a house number. Tyler also sells an expedited plan review, if staffing allows, at 300% of the normal fee plus $100 an hour, a real schedule option to price against your construction timeline. None of this changes the SBA occupancy math above. See our ground-up construction page if you're financing the build itself outside an SBA file.

Question 4

Does it matter which Smith County city I buy my practice's building in?

Accepted Answer

Yes, by a real margin. Property tax runs about 1.63% of assessed value on a City of Tyler parcel (county 0.364231 + city 0.236452 + Tyler ISD 0.845000 + Tyler Junior College 0.185068 per $100, 2025 rates) and about 1.46% on an unincorporated parcel inside Tyler ISD with no city rate at all. Move the same building to Bullard and the stack rises to roughly 2.17%, driven mostly by Bullard ISD's higher rate. On a $500,000 building that's $8,154 a year on a Tyler parcel (500,000 x 1.630751%) against $10,829 in Bullard (500,000 x 2.165834%), a gap of about $2,675 a year, before you've financed a dollar of the purchase.

Question 5

Is Tyler's real estate market stable enough to justify a 25-year SBA loan?

Accepted Answer

It's exactly the kind of market a 25-year loan is built for. Tyler's median list price has slipped a modest 6.2% from its July 2022 peak to $370,250 in July 2026, essentially flat rather than falling out from under you, while rents have kept rising (Tyler up 0.9% year over year, Whitehouse up 5.7%). That's a slow, healthcare-anchored metro with 122,100 nonfarm jobs and steady population growth (252,549 in 2025, up from 234,205 in 2020), not a market built on speculation. A practice buying its own building here isn't betting on appreciation. It's locking in occupancy cost for the life of a 25-year SBA term instead of renewing a lease at whatever the landlord wants next.

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