Peter Pedram

Peter Pedram is a distinguished private lender and the founder of Private Money Lenders LLC, headquartered in Los Angeles, California. An immigrant to the United States, his path through American higher education and finance is, by his own description, a long argument for hard work, resilience, and refusing to settle for the easy version of any decision.

Peter completed his undergraduate studies at UCLA, where the discipline of working through a flagship public university while building toward graduate study set the tone for the next twenty years. He went on to earn two master’s degrees from Pepperdine University — an MBA from the Graziadio Business School, and a Master’s in Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine’s Straus Institute. The combination is unusual in private lending: a finance degree teaches you how to price a loan, but the dispute-resolution background is what teaches you how to keep one alive when a project goes sideways.

In 2003, Peter founded a hedge fund. The starting capital was $75,000. Three years later, the fund managed $500 million in assets. The growth was driven by a directional-trading strategy that earned a feature on CNBC and recognition as one of the “30 Under 30” traders. During those same years, Peter quietly began offering hard money loans to friends and acquaintances inside the real estate community he was lending against in his trading book — specialising in 50% loan-to-value loans at rates north of 12%. The loan book never went large during this period, but it taught him the asset class from a perspective most fund managers never see: as a direct lender to a borrower, not as a paper holder of a tranche.

After a brief attempt at early retirement in his thirties — a chapter Peter has called the most boring of his life — he returned to finance with a clearer thesis. The opportunity that he had quietly underwritten on weekends in the mid-2000s had become a real, scalable business. The institutional mortgage market had retreated; small builders, fix-and-flip operators, and rental investors needed direct capital that traditional banks would not deploy quickly enough to be useful.

In June 2019, Peter founded Private Money Lenders LLC. Six years and one global pandemic later, PML has facilitated more than $650 million in loans across all 50 states. The team spans three continents. The book is a mix of ground-up construction, fix-and-flip rehab, bridge financing, and DSCR-qualified rentals — all underwritten under one roof, with no broker layer and no table-funding partners. Notably, PML did not stop or reduce lending during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has not retraded a closed deal in the company’s history.

Peter’s journey has not been without challenges. The 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic, and the 2022 rate run each tested the model. PML’s response has been the same in every cycle: keep the underwriting standards intact, keep the same team on the file from quote to payoff, keep funding deals when other lenders sit out.