There are two types of personal loan, secured and unsecured.

Secured personal loan means you need to put collateral such as a real estate to the financial institution in return for a sum of money usually value up to 80% of the asset value.  The procedure is pretty straight forward and usually the approval is almost certained as long as the asset has not been mortgage to another financial institution.

Since you have an asset pledge to the financial institution as collateral, the interest rate is usually favorable to you.  But the drawback is, if you do not pay your installment on time, you are risking the ownership of the asset.  That means the financial institution has the rights to take over the asset and resell it to the public via auction to regain the amount of money loan to you. 

If the amount of money collect via the auction sale is not able to settle the loan outstanding, you are still liable to pay the remaining sum.  So this is the biggest risk of taking a secured personal loan.

On the other hand, if you are taking an unsecured personal loan, you will not need to put any asset as collateral, but the drawback is you need to pay much higher interest rate as compare to secured personal loan and the loan amount is very much lower, usually an unsecured personal loan amount is less than $20,000.00.

Secured loan vs Unsecured loan, each having advantage and disadvantage. 

You may want to consider others alternative before apply for a personal loan.