Seth: Hey everybody, what's going on? This is Seth Williams and Jaren Barnes, and welcome to the REtipster podcast. On today's show, we have Justin Bogard talking with us. Justin is one of the leading experts in the realm of real estate note investing. Justin is the president of BrightPath Notes where he actively buys, sells, and creates real estate notes nationwide.

So, for those of you who might not know what note investing is, a note investor is someone who invests in the loan against a piece of real estate. So, for example, say a real estate investor goes out and buys a property for, say $40,000 and then they turn around and make some improvements and sell it for $100,000. But they don't get paid all the cash immediately at closing. They sell it with owner financing. In other words, the seller kind of becomes the bank and they hold a note with the buyer. And the note stipulates that the buyer will owe them the remaining balance of the $100,000 sale price or whatever the remaining balance happens to be and lays out all the terms of how quickly the money will be paid back and how much interest will be owed among other things. And if they wanted to, this real estate investor could potentially work with somebody like Justin by taking their note for $100,000 or again, whatever the balance is and selling it to a note investor at a discount, say, I don't know, $75,000. We're actually going to get into that in this conversation with Justin.

But the idea with a note investor is to not pay the full amount of the balance owed, but a discounted portion of it. And the benefit for the real estate investor is that even though they wouldn't be getting the full loan balance, they would make the bulk of their money back immediately rather than having to wait years to get paid back. And the note investor would receive all the equity in the deal plus the remaining principal and interest for the remainder of the term of the loan. Since they bought the note, it's now owed to them. And this can be a great solution for both parties when the real estate investor wants the liquidity now, and the note investor wants the semi-passive cash flow without doing all the work to find and work the deal.

So, now that we've kind of done this a primer on notes and note investing, let's go ahead and dive into this interview. So, Justin, thanks a lot for joining us. How are you doing today?

Justin: Well, thanks for having me, Seth. I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing?

Seth: Pretty good. Pretty good. Just to kind of kick this off, maybe we can sort of lay the groundwork, on your website you say that you believe note investing is the best way to build wealth. And that's kind of a bold statement. So, I'm curious, why do you think that?

Justin: Is there any other way to make money? I mean, it's only about notes, right?

Jaren: Well…

Justin: I say that because when I got into real estate, I did the traditional things like someone that watches HGTV like myself, I got into fix and flipping, which taught me about wholesaling, which coincidentally got me into being a landlord, which I didn't end up liking that much. And then I discovered note investing. And so, I learned about note investing, how you can invest in notes, buy, sell, trade, partials, get loans against them, all these neat things that kind of fit my kind of financial sense in my head. It taught me that I can get a slow dime as opposed to a fast nickel and to help me build my future. And so, it wasn't an overnight success. It takes a longer time to get that well, so to speak. And I feel like notes is that solution for me. And hopefully, others eventually will find a piece of that to be part of their wealth creation as well. So that's why I feel like notes are the best way to build wealth.

Seth: Yeah, I got you.

Jaren: So, what do you think are the biggest benefits to investing in notes? I mean, you say that for you, it worked out, but why was that the preferred path of investing for you?

Justin: Well, it's kind of the least path of resistance. And I mean, resistance as in like when we all fix and flip houses and have rentals and things like that. We're dealing with contractors, we're dealing with tenants, toilets, trash, so on and so forth. And those things are stuff that you don't have to deal with or monitor or be a part of by being the bank. And so, those are the things that make me feel like I can get a lot of return on my time by investing in something that's lower risk with a very high to moderate return on investments. So, the passive income part of it is higher than traditionally what you can do with standard investments like the stock market and things like that.

Seth: Yeah. And just to kind of clarify. So, your involvement in this business is you are both a note broker, so you buy and sell notes on behalf of others. And then you also invest in notes yourself. Is that accurate?

Justin: Yeah, exactly. About three things we do. We buy notes, we sell notes, we help create notes as well. And in the process, I will be the middleman for someone because most people don't have the education yet to understand how to do the due diligence on these notes and stuff. So, it helps having a note professional like myself to be involved.

Seth: And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, just somebody like myself, I think I kind of get it, but as we were talking before, we even started the recording here, there's a lot of people who sort of think they get the note business, but they don't. And I think that's actually true with most real estate strategies where it sort of seems simple at a high level and when you start digging into it, it's like, “Oh, okay. There are all these challenges I have to figure out”. When I think about, especially on the first time ever going through it, it would be super helpful to have somebody looking over your shoulder or even like a source of deals. Somebody that can connect you with other people.

Jaren: Yeah. I mean, Justin knew his stuff when I brought him a deal and he brought uphis custom calculator for due diligence on notes. And I was like, I have never seen so many features on a calculator. This guy's the guy to know.Justin: Yeah. Yeah. Truth be told, I don't know what most of those features do either.

Seth: But that's something you keep to yourself, right?

Jaren: Yeah, you don't tell anybody that.

Seth: Yeah. One of the questions that we had here was, where does somebody find an existing note to buy? Is there some like MLS system out there for existing notes that you can invest in or do you have to just know the right people? Or how does that work?

Justin: A little bit of both. So, there is no MLS per se, that just kind of has notes listed out there, but there are a lot of websites and a lot of hedge funds that release their notes via like a website portal. So, you can look at them like a, just a stack of assets vertically on a website and they would just be pictures of properties and the information about the details of the note that's important to you. And so those places, and they have exchange sites as well, that people just, anybody can post their note for sale and someone else can buy it. And then the person that traditionally runs the exchange site also posts their own notes for sale as well. Like I put stuff on my website for sale and I use other REIA groups that have platforms to post things for sale. And so, you can find things that way. But then you also have to be careful. They have a side of the coin of who you're buying it from. Because you don't know who you're buying it from really. And so, then that's obviously where the due diligence comes in to verify who you're buying from.

Seth: I mean, just off the top of your head, are there some well-known websites that like any of us could go to right now to find notes that are for sale?

Jaren: Like the Zillow of note investing or something?

Justin: Yeah. So, there is a company called Paper Stack, paperstack.com I believe is their site. So, they have one of the more advanced sites as they have already mobile notaries and virtual notaries built into their closing process. So, they make it virtually a one stop-shop for someone wanting to buy notes. Now, there is a lot of different sellers that post loans to their website and stuff. But then again, it's a nice place to look, to see what notes are out there, what's available and what you buy and sell and depending on your investing criteria is what you'll allow yourself to buy. So, I've posted loans on there for sale before and I know that people have bought loans on their websites before. But I've built a lot of relationships with hedge funds and things like that to where I can find sources that other people can't get to.

Seth: Got you. When somebody wants to invest in a note like this, is there like a target ROI that they're looking for? Like, how do you know “Yep, that's a good note deal worth pursuing”? Just in terms of the numbers working.

Justin: Well, that's the fun thing about notes that when you get deep into the conversation, like when Jaren and I had the conversation about his deal that he was working on, we can look at it in a couple of different ways. And most people are just ingrained and they are taught to just look at what's the bottom line or what's the number, what's my return on my investment or earning notes, what's my yield? And that's not traditionally what we should be focused on. We should be focusing on just more than that. Like what's the security, what's the collateral, what's it worth? What's the risk on this deal? Because, as you know, every seven to nine years, these loans either refinance or they pay off because they sell the house, right? So, the time value of money gets truncated a lot shorter as opposed to waiting 25 years for your maturity on your note.

What if you get paid off in seven to eight years? So, your return is going to be much sweeter than it is projected over 25 years. So, to answer your question, they expect to return obviously as the investor wants to make as much money as they can, with the least amount of money involved as they can. So, I tell people the return that you expect to make over the life of the loan is around 6% to 8% and full maturity. And then investors that do this full time are going to make a little bit better return because they have access to different deals and different price points because they buy in bulk.

So, if you buy in bulk, we call them a tape of assets. If you buy several assets at a time, you'll get a better deal. Because you'll be buying across 7, 8, 10 loans versus just buying one loan at a time or buying one house at a time. You buy a package of houses, you'll get a better deal as opposed to buying one house at a time. Right?

Seth: Yeah. So, 6% to 8%. As I understand that doesn't sound that good. I mean, couldn't I do better in like, the stock market or if I were to buy a real estate deal or something like that? Or am I missing something?

Justin: You could. You can get into real estate other ways and make maybe a little bit more money, but then again, there's more risk and there's more activity that you have to be involved with to make more money. So, the higher the activity, the higher the profit, right? The lower the activity, the lower the profit expectations. So, this is a bank's mentality. We set it and forget it. I buy a loan, it sits on the shelf, just continually. It's like a mint. It just makes me money month after month after month. I don’t have to worry about if there’s any overhead with it. So, there's things that offset the active money to make a higher return.

The best comparison is rentals, right? Rentals versus notes is a good comparison because everyone sees a lot of benefits from both sides. But at the end of the day, all the work and everything you do to a rental, traditionally the note ends up getting you about the same and you virtually don't do any work for it. Because you always have to put money back into a rental. You always have tenant turnover. I mean, in a perfect situation, you wish you'd never had tenant turnover, but you always have put money back into it. You get depreciation. When you sell the asset, you get depreciation recapture. And there's a lot of these things that go back and forth with rentals and notes. And so, at the end of the day, you end up making about the same. And like I said, with the time value of money you actually end up making more than that. It's just, I have to set a benchmark to somebody and say, “Hey, if this loan pays for the next 25 years and didn't pay off early”, that's what you would make. To pay it off early you might make 10%, 11%, 12% depending on when it sold.

Jaren: So, what about being the person to sell a property on seller financing? You originate the note. I know a lot of our audience are land investors and they sell properties on terms quite a bit. Is it more advantageous in your mind because it's almost, “Yeah, you have to do some underwriting and follow up on if buyer defaults and stuff”, but if you buy the property and then turn it on to sell it on terms, you have a much higher potential to make a profit and a return on investment, don’t you?

Justin: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's probably the most lucrative way in the real estate space to make as much money and do the least amount of work is to buy a property at low value, do whatever repairs you can do and resell it at a higher value. Or if it's land, you buy the land at wholesale cost and you resell it at retail costs and you do it with owner financing. Absolutely. You can make almost an infinite yield. Sometimes I know that the guys like yourself that do land, you can buy something for, let's just say $500 and resell it for $5,000, have a $500 down payment from somebody, recoup your costs and essentially have an infinite cash flow with no cost basis into the deal, which is why wouldn't you do that deal? Why wouldn't you do it over and over and over again?

Jaren: I think that's one of the most powerful things about land. But one thing that is powerful about knowing somebody like you, Justin, is that if let's say the land investor was strapped for cash, or they had some cash flow management issues and they needed to move property quickly. They could do their terms deals, and then sell off their terms through you and through your network, which I think is a really powerful value that you bring to the table for people. Because like, talking about land, for example, using the same numbers, if somebody bought a property for $500 and then was selling it for $5,000 on terms and asked $500 down and they wanted to get paid tomorrow, well, they could sell their note for let's say $3,500 or even $2,500 and then get there a lot of profit out of the deal. So, it will leave some meat on the bone for the end note investor, but then they're out of the deal. I think that that's a really powerful strategy using somebody like yourself, who knows how to move note properties or note deals.

Justin: Absolutely. You discover another way to exit, right? Another way to exit a deal, just another tool in your tool belt. So, you can keep it for long term cash flow, or like you said, you can just flip it real quick to somebody else and get out of the deal and still make good-sized profit too.

Seth: Isn't it harder to sell a note on a vacant land property? Given the challenges with appraising land and just a different kind of property that most people don't want to touch with a 10-foot pole? Is that ever an issue?

Justin: That’s a great point.

Seth: I usually think people like houses. And I don't know, just, I wonder that.

Justin: No, you're exactly on the right beat there. So, a land note would be a little more difficult to sell because you have to have a buyer for everything that you sell. Right? And so, the easiest thing to sell is a note with a single-family residential property, because that is the collateral that everybody sees and that's where the most borrowers are buying is single-family residential real estate, south of $150,000.

So, with that being said, yeah, land will be a little bit more challenging to sell, but every deal is a good deal if the price is right. So, if someone feels like it's a riskier deal with land, and like you said, Seth, how do you value land? It’s just like how you value a house. It's somebody's opinion or it's comparable sales around the area. So, my thought to that is just if I'm investing in that deal, I just look at the cash flow. And if I feel like the collateral isn't as strong as I want it to be, I lower my risk by lowering my bid price to purchase that loan. Like what Jaren said, if it's $4,500 on that deal, when you sell for $3,500 the next day, then yeah, you've lost a $1,000 opportunity, but you got your cash today as opposed to waiting six, seven years to receive that cash flow.

Seth: That actually brings me to my next question. What is a typical acquisition price for a note? I assume it's based on what the current balance owed is. And is it like a discounted percentage of that?

Justin: Exactly. You're on the right path.

Seth: When I think of just typical single-family house with all the due diligence and everything's checking out, it looks the way you want. I'm assuming that would probably get a higher price. Whereas if it's a vacant lot with all kinds of stuff you can't verify, just everything's a mess. If the thing can even be sold, it would probably be a much steeper discount. Is that accurate?

Justin: Yeah. There are six values that make up a note value so to say. So, we got interest rate, we've got the terms of the deal. We've got the papers written on. Excuse me, we've got the borrower, we've got the down payment and we got the pay history. So, we got like five or six things that we focus on. Not all of them are going to be A quality. Some it might be B or C quality or D, but they're all going to balance out and wherever they balance out to maybe in total, like a B quality note, I feel like that's strong enough to pull the trigger on. So, other factors help when you're creating a loan, like we just talked about. So, if it is a land deal, we'll get a larger down payment. Have the risk be less for the end buyer, another note investor by having a larger down payment and then having the unpaid balance be significantly lower than what you perceive the value is. So, there's lower risks for that investor. So, they know they can turn it and flip it pretty quickly if they have to take the land back. Right?

Seth: Yeah. So, for like, an ideal credit, if the note balance was $100,000 and everything is looking good, like what would a typical purchase price be for that kind of note?

Justin: Well, it's tough to say. It could be 90% of value. It could be 95%. It could be 70% of value. It really depends on all those factors. Because if you sold me a loan, let's say the house, say, houses just because that's what I'm used to selling. $120,000 purchase price. Somebody put down $10,000 as down payment and they have $110,000 unpaid principal balance. If you were to sell that note the next day, you probably would have to take a pretty steep discount because there's really no proof of pay history because you bought it with very early seasoning. As opposed to waiting four or five years and you see a very long history of payments coming in, then maybe that note can be sold for 90% or 95% of current principal balance value at that time.

So, it's tough to say, but traditionally, most loans they're going to be purchased around the $30,000 to $45,000 entry point to get into them and they'll probably be at a 90% to 95% discount for performing loans. Now, nonperforming loans, something that isn't paying is going to get a much deeper discount. Because obviously it's not paying, so you're not really going to really be making any cash flow. You're going for a different type of exit with the borrowers. So those can be bought at 70% or 60% of current balance. Sometimes even 40%, depending on how long it's been delinquent.

Seth: Yeah. And when I look at a lot of land deals, some of them I would just say no, because I'm just not interested. But sometimes there's like a property with just a lot of things wrong with it. It's landlocked, the terrain is terrible. I mean, you name it. But in a way, you can always justify making an offer for anything as long as the money makes sense. I'm wondering with a note like this, is there ever a scenario where you just say, “No, there is no way no scenario where this ever makes sense”. Or can you always come up with some number that sort of balances out?

Justin: I haven't come up with a scenario where I would say no to a deal if the price was right, but there might be something out there. When you first start out, you pretty much want to buy almost anything you can if the price is right, but after you buy a few hundred loans, you kind of can step back and you don't have to be as picky. So, I guess it depends on the seasoning of the investor at their time in their life, their life of investing is when they're going to pull a trigger and not pull a trigger on something. So, right now I have a certain mindset of stuff we buy for our company portfolio versus our retirement account portfolio.

So, in our retirement account, we're going to be a lot more conservative. And we're going to make sure that we're very well-protected in the retirement account, because we want the longer-term play. In our company account, we'll take more risks on and we'll do different types of deals. So, that's the advantage of having a total diversified portfolio within personally and in the company.

Jaren: So, you were touching on some of the risks there, Seth with your question, like what are the potential red flags that you look out for? And I know you guys kind of touched on it, but I want to talk about what happens when things go south? Like, what's the worst thing that can happen as a note investor? I'm assuming it's the borrower stops paying, but what do you do with that? And then coupled to that question is I know there's some investors out there that intentionally buy nonperforming notes. So, I'd like to touch on that a little bit if we can. As to what's the strategy there, if there's no money being made, like how do you invest in it?

Justin: Yeah. Why would you invest in a nonperforming loan if it's not paying, right? It sounds silly.

Jaren: Exactly.

Justin: Yeah. It's back to the fix and flip mentality. You buy something that's blighted or dented and you want to fix it and you want to resell it at a higher price than what you have into it, right? So, same thing with nonperforming loans. There are basically three ways that you get out of a nonperforming loan. Number one way is to communicate with the borrower and negotiate either a refinance for them to figure out how to make their payment lower and find out what the story is, what's their pain, why aren't they paying? Is it because their old servicer wasn't listening to them? Is it because they lost a loved one? I mean, what is the challenge? Because there are federal programs and state-level programs that can help get them upside right, if you will, to where they can get caught up on all their payments and all their arrearages. And that pays who? Pays this guy, the note investor, right?

So, you can essentially have a small amount of money into a deal. I'll say it's $100,000 note and you buy a nonperforming note loan for $40,000. And then they still owe $100,000, right? That doesn't change. Their rear age account is building and building and building. So, you can go in there, you can modify their loan and be like, “Hey, look, I'll forgive another $25,000 of debt. I'll lower your payment to this and get you cash flow again. Does that solve your problem? - Oh yes, it does. Thank you very much”. And you got $40,000 into a deal that is still a $75,000 principal balance. So, then again, you have a very, very high threshold of yield, right there built in cushion.

So, you're helping them out, step one. Step two would be, if they really can't afford to stay there, then just ask them to sign the deed back over to you. Just do a cash for keys or do a deed in lieu. And then if that doesn't work, the worst-case scenario is going through foreclosure. It's a little bit more money, usually $3,000 to $6,000. And it could take 6 to 12, sometimes 18 months, depending on what state you're in to foreclose on a property. And then you just repeat and rinse. You'd get the property back, you can fix and flip, you can rent it, you can seller-finance again or send it to a wholesaler.

Jaren: Interesting.

Seth: Is it important for a note investor to know exactly what to do in the worst-case scenario in terms of how does foreclosure work? How do I do that?

Justin: Right. So, I would never recommend buying a nonperforming loan if you haven't bought a performing loan before, because you just haven't walked through the process. There are a lot of really educated and really good real estate investors out there that haven't bought a loan. And I would still recommend that to them. So, I would have them do that first. You can also partner with no people like me with nonperforming loans, to where they can put up the cash and we can help them work through the deal and split up the profits. That's a very common thing. The loose term is called joint venture. Even though we don't like to use that word, it's kind of like partnership on a deal. And once investors get some performing loans on their belts and they realize they want to do nonperforming, that's perfectly fine. There are plenty of them out there and they're going to be more coming in the next probably year to year and a half from all the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seth: Got you.s

Jaren: So, just going back to underwriting. What do you do from a borrower standpoint to avoid a performing note to become nonperforming? What do you do? Because with every strategy there's some process that you have to look out for. Like there's some due diligence process with any strategy that you are in. So, let's dive into due diligence a little bit. Like what do you look for? What are the red flags of a bad note deal or a bad borrower?

Justin: So, it's similar to how you would screen a tenant. So, when you have a rental and you screen your tenant, you're going through like a background check and to making sure, if there's going to be a problem for you. With note investing, when you're creating a loan, you take that step further, obviously. You need to look at financials to find out long-term is this going to be viable for them? Can they even afford to make the payment, even though they want to get in the house? So, underwriting, like you said, Jaren, is critical to do, not only to be Dodd-Frank- and CFPB-compliant, but just to do the right thing. You focus on as being a note investor, the ability to repay, not necessarily what's their credit score. Does that make sense? So, big banks focus on credit score. We focus on the ability to repay. Because their credit score could be nothing because they have no credit. That's actually better than bad credit, right? Theoretically.

So, underwriting that stuff is crucial, looking at their bank statements, looking at their IRS tax returns, just to verify they can afford to stay there. And then our underwriter, well, our third-party underwriter will say, “Okay, their debt-to-income fits within the protection window”. And that's all you can do to say they are the best chance for success for themselves and for you as the investor.

Seth: This is kind of a dummy question, but in terms of like getting this stuff, the bank records and credit report and all this stuff, where did you get that? Are you asking the seller of the note for this? Are you talking to the tenants directly or I don't know who…?

Justin: The borrower.

Seth: The borrower, yeah.

Justin: So, when you're creating a loan, you're usually selling a property or a piece of land and your person buying it from you is going to be your borrower. So, you're getting that information from them and they're either giving it directly to the underwriter or they're giving it to you to pass to the underwriter. So, you're asking them for bank statements and stuff, just so they can get the owner financing from you.

Seth: When you say the underwriter, there's another person involved in this?

Justin: Yes.

Seth: Okay.

Justin: So, you have to have a degree of separation from you as the lender and the person qualifying this individual, just like a bank does. A bank has some underwriting in house, but there are separate departments for the intentions of, to keep things unbiased, so to speak. So, you want to make sure a third party verifies all this information and qualifies them. And that also prevents you from being looked at a predatory lender, because obviously, we’ve all heard stories about some of these big hedge funds and stuff that would produce all this funky paper and people have $5 to their name and just put, throw them in a house for $50,000 when they bring in $100,000 a week of income. They just won't have any success. So, if you've used a third-party underwriter to verify, they can make those payments, you give yourself the most success for you and them.

Seth: Where do you find this underwriter?

Justin: Yeah. There's not very many of them that underwrite like this. This is kind of a special way to underwrite. And so, there's a few people out there that do that. We use a guy exclusively for our deals and it's kind of a part of a package when people have us create a loan for them. We use this guy as part of our process as well. So, they get qualified in all the states they have certificates and they can put their stamp of approval on everything that they qualify for a borrower for.

Jaren: So, a lot of land investors who generate these terms deals, they're intentionally not underwriting the borrower because it's an exit strategy for them to move property that would be otherwise hard to sell in a lot of cases. Not always, but in a lot of cases. And there's different degrees of underwriting depending on the land investor. But by and large, if we speak generally for a moment, a lot of the times terms deals for land can have a borrower that if they were to go through a third-party underwriting, wouldn't be approved, but they are paying and all of that. So, if somebody were to bring you a land deal where they asked for $50 down, $25 a month on something that was landlocked in the middle of nowhere, Florida, for example, how would you coach through? What would you do? Would you just not take on that as a broker and bring that to your buyer's list? Or what would you do with the deal like that?

Justin: Certain deals have a certain amount of risks to them. And if it's a low enough cost for the land deal, and you're acquiring a very low payment, like a $25 payment, it might even not be worth anyone's time to go through underwriting because that's just a very low-cost, low-entry point deal there. As opposed to getting a $30,000 note with a $300 or $400 payment, that would be a little bit different. So, I guess it comes down to the cost and if it was that specific deal you're talking about, I probably wouldn't put through underwriting.

Jaren: What about if it was a little bit different? Because I used an extreme example. But let's say a typical, I know a lot of guys will do like $250 down, $400 a month, somewhere on $250 down, $250 a month for let's say three years, three to five years on, I don't know, let's say $10,000 to $15,000 range. Would you want to go through underwriting? I guess the reason why I'm asking this question is if potential land investors that are listening in our audience right now, want to start using the option of selling off the notes as a way to liquidate their property. I want to know if they should start heavily qualifying their borrowers moving forward, or if it's okay for them to just not worry about it. Just like what's common practice in the industry right now.

Justin: I don't have a lot of land deals that we run across to do underwriting for. So, I'm going to step out on a limb and answer this question the way I think it can be answered. And that is the land deals would probably have to be more in value for you to want to have underwriting. Like I said before in the previous conversation, it kind of depends on your risk. If you've got $10,000 in a deal, that's a lot less risky than if we usually invest $50,000 - $60,000 - $70,000 - $80,000 - $100,000 into a deal. So, it's not as risky, I guess, for the lender, because if they had to turn it back over, they may feel like they don't have a lot to lose, so to speak. I mean, no one wants to lose money, but a $10,000 deal versus a $50,000 deal is a little bit different of risk, I guess.

So, some of those, I probably wouldn't underwrite for the fact that you seem like you're going through a lot of work to get a little bit of return monthly if it's like $100 payment. So, I guess it kind of depends on scenario by scenario. Now, the Dodd-Frank and CFPB rules apply to single-family homes and so land deals wouldn't fall under that because there's no dwelling place for the borrower, right? So, then you don't have to really follow those rules because it's not really owner-occupied really.

Seth: Yeah. In terms of Dodd-Frank, let’s pretend for a minute that we're talking about houses, just like normal dwellings and that kind of thing. I take it, it's very important for somebody to adhere to Dodd-Frank if they're planning to sell this note or even if they're not, I guess.

Justin: Yeah.

Seth: If somebody just totally disregarded it, just didn't pay attention, did their own thing, is it literally impossible for them to sell that note or they could only sell it to somebody who was willing to take on a lot of risk?

Justin: No. A lot of loans are not created under Dodd-Frank and CFPB rules. In general, say, the rules of if you have an entity and you are selling and creating more than three of these in a year, you should be using an underwriting or a third-party service to underwrite the borrower so that you create a very compliant loan. If you're only doing one of these a year, the rules say you don't have to follow that process and you're okay to do it. So, you're okay to buy a loan that hasn't been underwritten. It's just you just want to know that upfront that's the risk that you're taking.

Now, when I'm buying a loan that is seasoned for two or three years, it doesn't matter how it was underwritten two or three years ago because your financial situation, Seth and Jaren, was probably different three years ago than it is today. Right? Just like for me. So, it doesn't matter what happened two or three years ago. Now, if it was a couple months ago, that would be nice to have the underwriting stuff. But if I had a long pay history, I guess what I'm saying is I'll take one of the other. If it's an unseasoned loan, I want to see some underwriting. If it's a very seasoned loan, I just look at the pay history to make my decision.

Seth: Got you. Is there any kind of like a license required to be a note investor?

Justin: There's not. There's not. There's a license to real estate investor in California, which I believe is one of the only states. But other than that, you don't have to have a license to do what we do. The loose term is we're called a broker, if we help somebody acquire a deal from somebody else and just be the middleman. But in actuality, we're not really a broker, we’re just a concierge service if you will.

Jaren: What about if you generate like you do a lot of seller financing? Because I know a mutual friend, Brett Snodgrass of Simple Wholesaling, I think he said when he started doing more notes, working with you that he actually got his securities license.

Justin: He did?

Jaren: I don’t know if that's true or not.

Justin: I don't know.

Jaren: Is that a best practice at all to get any kind of licensing like that?

Justin: I haven't really heard of anybody getting a securities license to do much of seller financing. I mean, I guess it wouldn't hurt to have it. The reason why you would have a securities license is that you're dealing with the SEC and if you don't have a fund that you're building and having a private placement memorandum or offering memorandum there's probably no need to have a securities license because you're not really selling mortgage-backed securities.

Seth: It kind of reminds me of when I get my CDL license when we upgraded to driving a minivan. I thought that was necessary.

Jaren: I feel like I got to call Brett like on the air right now. If I knew he'd pick up, I totally would. And I'd be like, “Hey, did you get this? Or am I making this up in my head? Did I have some crazy dream?”

Justin: I'll have to ask him next time I talk to him.

Jaren: Yeah.

Seth: But you're saying you don't need a license to be a broker either?

Justin: No.

Seth: Cool.

Justin: No licensing required.

Seth: It's kind of like the Wild West then, huh? You can just do whatever you want.

Jaren: All right, Seth, let's go. New business venture.

Seth: Yeah. That's easy. Low barrier entry.

Jaren: Yep.

Seth: Actually, it does make me wonder how do you make money as the broker? I assume there's some kind of commission involved and who is paying that and like what percentage is it and how does that work?

Justin: Exactly. So, I'll be sandwiched in between a deal between you and Jaren, hypothetically here. So, Jaren is looking to find a note deal and you have a deal, excuse me, to sell. And I'm the guy that sourced you Seth, to find that deal for Jaren. So, Jaren and I would work together and we do the due diligence on the file. We'd buy it from you and exactly Seth, you would be paying me a commission for helping get rid of some of your inventory, that otherwise, you might not know how to do. So, a lot of hedge funds will like people like myself that can basically advertise to other people, their notes and then get them sold for them. And so, they'll just kick back more like a commission check, if you will, for helping sell their loans.

Jaren: What does that typically look like? So, like in land, for example, it's a little bit more expensive than houses. Like land is typically around 6% to 10% of the purchase price because the purchase prices are lower.

Seth: You're talking about an agent commission, right?

Jaren: Yeah. An agent commissions. Yeah. So, what's the typical range?

Justin: Well, it kind of fluctuates and depends on the negotiation between me, the note pro, the note broker and seller of the loan. Sometimes the buyer and the seller both kick in a little bit to help the transaction in between. But traditionally, if it's a professional seller, then I will be getting a commission from them, and it really depends on the deal. So, it's not necessarily, it's not usually a percentage. It's what we feel that I can get for the deal, because we're keeping in mind, the end buyer Jaren in the situation, we don't want him to have too much risk by paying too much money for the deal. But we also want to take advantage of the fact that I can get a little bit better pricing for myself. And then selfishly use that as kind of a squeeze in between what I can sell it to Jaren for.

Jaren: So, it's kind of like wholesaling, kind of like you make as much as you can with the deal, so, it’s making sense.

Justin: Exactly. Yeah. Just like a wholesale deal. It's like, if you got it for a great price and then Jaren is still getting it for good value, then even if that's a large spread, it doesn't really matter Jaren because he got what he wanted and he paid for what he was willing to pay for. Really, the sky is the limit. I've been able to acquire deals really cheap from people and resell and make a real good spread. And sometimes it's a real thin margin, maybe a thousand dollars or less, or even a little bit more. It's kind of all over the board.

Seth: Yeah.

Jaren: Very cool.

Seth: So, there's like full-time note brokers out there, right? Like all they do is just connect people.

Justin: Exactly.

Seth: Is broker kind of just like a side thing that people fall into when they're buying their own notes?

Justin: Well, when people start in the note business, they usually don't have a lot of money to get involved with just like people start out in real estate investing. They traditionally just go to wholesaling because they can or be a BRRRR dog just to get some fee income and build up and build up so they can buy their own fix and flip property, in this case, their own note after this. And some note investors have their own mind to buy notes and they still want to broker loans as well. I can't buy every loan that I see that I want to buy because I've run out of capital quickly. So, then I'll sell them to somebody else that has money so I can still make money on the deal. Right? So most professional note investors are constantly, even the big hedge funds, they're brokering deals too, because they'll buy them and then resell them quickly as well.

Seth: I got you.

Jaren: Justin, is there a centralized place to find note brokers similar to the realtor association or something? It sounds pretty like autonomous. Like there's no real structure to it. You just kind of have to know somebody, is that the case?

Justin: Exactly. So, like your local RIAs, we'll have probably some note guys and then they focus mainly on notes. And then LinkedIn is a great source to find people that are wanting to buy and sell nonperforming and performing loans. Then again, on the flip side, you have to be careful of who you're dealing with because a lot of people are just interested in making the flip money on a note and not really a long-term solution for you or a partner that can help out, or really even know what to do with the note or how to do due diligence on it. So, they may say, “Here's a tape. Do you want to buy it? Okay. Pad 2% to it and that's my fee for making the connection”. I would say within a broker business, there's also the note pros versus ones that are really loose about how they find and source deals and help the end buyer make money.

Seth: Yeah. I got a random question. Just came to mind from what we were talking about earlier about underwriting. Am I correct in understanding? You need an underwriter in two circumstances. One is if you are creating the note and you also need one if you're buying an existing note? Or is it only when you're creating it?

Justin: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to confuse you. And I think I did.

Seth: I think it's very easy to confuse me.

Justin: So, the answer to the question is there's only one time you need to use an underwriter and that's when you're creating a loan.

Seth: Okay.

Justin: If you're buying a loan in the secondary market, as we call it, you don't need an underwriter. You just need to look at the due diligence files.

Seth: You sort of are the underwriter in that case.

Justin: If they had underwriting done, then you would look at that. But yeah, sorry. I realized I confused everyone there.

Seth: Yeah, no problem. So, Justin, just looking at your own situation, like of all the deals you're involved with, how much of that is notes that you're actually buying yourself and how much of that is notes that your broker? Where would you say you play a bigger role?

Justin: In brokering. There's a lot of notes out there, a lot of good deals and there's way more than I can handle. Even if I had seven figures lined up behind me, there's just more than I can handle. So, I definitely broker more than I buy myself.

Seth: And how have you managed to find these other buyers who you can broker for? Is that all just LinkedIn or RIA groups?

Justin: Everything. It's branding in general and marketing, it's just hustling every day, getting the message out, showing case studies, what you do, how you make money. You're looking for the avatar, the right person. There are people that just want to invest in land. There are people that just want to invest in rentals. There are people that just want the passive income from a note investment. And so, you have to find those individuals and market to them. And so, it has been years of just building my brand and educating the local and regional area to know that I'm one of the few guys that does this full time in the area. So, I have less competition, which is nice too.

Seth: Yeah. That's actually an interesting thing. I know like, I mean, this is sort of different but real estate wholesalers, for example. You would think they'd be a dozen, like, it's not hard to find them, but I literally do not know of one in Grand Rapids. I'm a hundred percent sure they're there, but I don't know where to go to find them. So, if any of them had done what Simple Wholesaling does in Indianapolis, like really taking seriously the whole branding thing and getting their name out there, they'd probably have just crazy amounts of business, but nobody does that. So, it's probably a similar thing if you're a note broker, just make it your business to be known as that guy. Like that's who you go to.

Jaren: To piggyback off that Seth. A genius marketing idea is that if you're a wholesaler or a house flipper or whatever type of local real estate investor, you should start the city name plus real estate investing podcasts. So, for example, Grand Rapids Wholesaling podcast or Grand Rapids Real Estate Investing podcast. Because not a lot of people have that name and it's awesome for people looking for real estate investors locally.

Justin: Absolutely.

Seth: I had a dear friend told me that that's a great idea, but I should start doing that in Northwest Indiana. But so far, I don't really buy real estate in Northwest Indiana. Maybe that'll change in the future, but right now I'm in Florida. So, it'd be weird to have the Florida Land Investors podcast and I'm like in Northwest Indiana. I feel like I'd be kind of a faker or something.

Justin: Coming to you from Sydney, Australia, the Florida Land Investor podcast.

Seth: Actually, it's another just reminder of like, if you do choose one thing, just do one thing and go all in on that, it's probably not actually that hard to be the best. Because so many people are spread too thin, like chasing after five different dreams at the same time. But if you can just throw all your weight behind one objective, that is a pretty powerful thing.

Jaren: I asked them to add there, not to take too much time away from the interview, but for those in our audience who might not know, I just recently bought a triplex that we're renovating and going to be moving into, renting out the others. The other two units are already rented out. And I'm doing a lot of construction work and I'm working with some people through my church and some of their connections. And I just spent some time working with this 21-year-old Mexican guy who is a straight up master at construction.

Like it's very rare when you deal with somebody who is a true master, but just like you're saying Seth, when it comes to hanging drywall specifically like that's his thing. Like muddying and even the way he screws things in, it's like, it's all second nature. It's something to behold, man. It's like, it's so crazy. And it's something that I've been really thinking and just kind of marinating on in my thoughts, life, about me personally, I don't really feel like I am a master at it. I'm pretty good at a lot of things. But I don't have one thing like, videos, for example, where I'm like, I am the absolute best video maker. Right?

Because that takes years and you're pretty much working in Hollywood at that point. And so, it got me thinking like, yes, it's nice to be able to have tools in your tool belt, but I've been really thinking about what would it look like to have one thing that I truly master. And I think that it's really powerful. So, I'm glad you brought that up because it's funny, it's serendipitous that it all came out while I've been thinking about that a lot in the last couple of days.

Justin: What's the old saying? It's “Master of nothing, jack of all trades”.

Jaren: Yeah.

Seth: Yeah. I wonder why that is so hard for people like me to like, just focus on one thing. I'm not spread that thin in terms of how many different things I'm doing. But there's at least three things that come to mind. But why don't I just do one thing? And I don't know if it's because I get bored or if it's because I'm kind of tired of this part of this. So, I'm going to relieve some stress by doing this over here instead. And it seems kind of obvious, if you just do one thing, obviously you're going to get really good at it.

Justin: It's not fun. You got to have those ADHD distractions, man. It's like squirrel. Squirrel. What? Let's do this thing. Let's do a video cast now.

Seth: Yeah.

Justin: That's what I do.

Jaren: I think for me, it's kind of like FOMO too. It's like if I make a decision and I go all in on something, the entire time for like the first, like, I don't know, six months of me doing that choice I'm second guessing that choice. Like, is this truly the most leveraged, amazing opportunity? And the reality is, I don't know. And I don't even think anybody can ever know, because whenever you say “yes” to something, you have to say “no” to like 10 other things.

Justin: Exactly.

Jaren: And so, to go all in and truly pursue mastery, you're saying no to a lot of steps to become really, really good at one. But it's worth it. I'm with you, Seth. I don't know why I don't go more in that direction.

Seth: To some point it seems like there has to be some exploration because if you just say, when you turn 18 years old and you picked one thing and you just never thought twice about anything else, man, you're probably thrown away some stuff you could have been good at too. So, it's not like an “All or nothing” thing. I don't know. It's weird. I don't know the answer.

One of the questions I did have for you, Justin, how much money does a person need? How much cash needs to be in the bank if they want to start buying notes? I'm sure the answer is “It depends”. But just really high level, what would be the bare minimum somebody could even think about doing this business?

Justin: I would say performing loan about $30,000.

Seth: And that's for one loan?

Justin: Yeah. You'll get a good quality loan for that point. When you go lower than that, you're going to have a little bit riskier collateral on that loan, traditionally with that price point. I can buy loans lower than $30,000, but $30,000 is a good benchmark. And then obviously the higher you go, the better the collateral gets as far as your protection. So, if somebody wants to invest $100,000 in a loan at a time, they're going to have a collateral that's going to be pretty nice $110,000 - $120,000 - $130,000 - $140,000.

Seth: Yeah. Gotcha. That's a good frame of reference. Do you have any other questions, Jaren? Did we hit them all?

Jaren: Yeah. On my end, I don't have anything else. I've been really enjoying this episode. I've been in real estate quite a while, like on and off and especially in the blogosphere space. Back in 2014 I worked a little bit at BiggerPockets and I've never been even exposed really to a resource like this, or we've gone this in-depth on, on note investing. But it's in something that has been on my radar for a really long time. So, I really appreciate your time, Justin. And it's been a really good episode.

Justin: You're welcome. It's been a pleasure being on your show and meeting you guys and getting to interact with you. It's fun.

Seth: So, Justin, if people want to learn more about you or check out what you got going on, is there a website they should go to or where can they find out more?

Justin: Sure. Check us out at brightpathnotes.com. That's brightpathnotes.com. And you can reach out to me individually if you want at justin@brightpathnotes.com. I’ll be happy to answer your questions. We got our own Facebook group now, The Real Estate Be the Bank Note Investing Facebook group that we got a couple moderators on. So if you have questions, jump on there and shoot them and we'll help answer them for you.

Seth: That sounds like a great place to learn more about all this stuff if you’re interested in that. And by the way, this is episode 78 of the REtipster podcast. I'm going to have links to a lot of the stuff that we've talked about here. If you go to retipster.com/78 you can see a summary of that. So be sure to check that out too. Well, thanks again, Justin. I appreciate your time very much. WIsh you all the best and hopefully, we can stay in touch.

Justin: You're welcome. Absolutely. I'd love to connect with you guys again.

Seth: All right, man.

Jaren: Awesome, Justin. I’ll talk to you soon.

Justin: All right, bye.

Seth: So, there you have it folks. That was our conversation with Justin. I got a lot out of that. Did you get a lot of that, Jaren?

Jaren: Yeah. I mean, I haven't seen a lot of resources on notes in general, but from the things that I have been exposed to, I felt like that was some of the most helpful, straightforward information on note investing than I've ever been exposed to. That was just like no fluff, just straight content. It was really good.

Seth: Yeah. I don't feel like I'm like ready to do it, but there are several different avenues I now see that I should explore further if I was ever serious about doing that. Whereas before that conversation, I was just like, I didn't know anything.

Jaren: And it's nice that we have Justin. Like anybody listening to this episode can literally just email him like, “Hey, I need help. I need a broker to walk me through the process”.

Seth: He gave us his email address.

Jaren: Yeah. It's pretty, it's a big deal. I'm a fan of that. I'm keeping Justin in my network for sure. Because if you ever need a note guy, they are hard to come by.

Seth: Yeah. The only thing I was like sort of turned off by was the lower returns.

Jaren: I feel like he underplayed that though. I think he was doing that as like a safe, because you know how it's always a good principle to surprise and delight? I've heard other stuff, like I've heard just as a private money lender, you can make 18% to 20% returns. I don't know if that's true or not, but I feel like that's what he was doing. He was like, “Yeah, you might make 8%”. And then you are actually making 12% and you're happy with 12%.

Seth: It could be. Especially if you were going to do the Justin Sliva thing like we talked about in the previous episode and going after land notes specifically, there is inherently more risk going on with that arguably just because of the lack of underwriting down on borrowers. The property itself has like no problem, but the issues that can be lurking beneath the surface. But, yeah. I mean, if you're willing to go that route, you could probably pay much more discounted prices. I feel like there's something there, if you wanted significantly higher returns.

Jaren: Yeah. And with land too, if you know what you're doing and you have the right infrastructure in place, if you have a borrower default, it's not that big of a deal because you just take back the property and then turn and go through the process. Right? Like depending on the state and all the legalities and stuff. But if you go through the process to take back the property, you can just turn around and resell it. I mean, it's not that big of a deal.

Seth: Yeah.

Jaren: I do want to throw a caveat out there. Like that was a ten-second wave the magic wand. There's a lot more to it. Just like with everything. I don't want to paint a picture of like, let's push button easy, but as long as you know what you're doing and you've gone through the proper channels, there are way worse things than a borrower defaulting on a land deal. Especially if it's sold on land contract and the title is still in the name of the seller or the person who originally owns the notes.

Seth: Yeah. Cool, man. Well, why don't we do our little exit conversation here about a random question from our list. So, here's the question today. So, if you could become fully enlightened instantly at any one subject, which subject would you choose?

Jaren: For me, that's easy. It would be finances. I would want to become a financial master. Maybe that's what I should pursue Seth when we were talking about mastery. Maybe I should just forget everything and learn how to master money. People on face level might say, “Whoa, that's really weird”. Or people get weird about money or if some people, for whatever reason are associated with being the rich evil person on the hill or whatever. And for me, and for the way I look at the world, good, better, ugly money is how the world runs. And it's a part of the fabric of what makes us human. I've mentioned it several times “Thou Shall Prosper”. Rabbi Daniel Lapin makes a really strong case that money is actually spiritual, lowercase. It’s what distinguishes us from animals. It's something like art and music and culture and cooked food and these things that make us uniquely human. And so, I really embrace money and I wish that I had a much better handle on it than I have growing up. I’m still in my 20s and stuff and I think that I'm going to be okay, but man, if I was like 16 and knew how to manage money well, I would be in a totally different place right now.

And there's two sides to the coin. Like there's the skill set to learn how to generate income, generate revenue. Like for me, it's flipping land or real estate or working at REtipster. But that's only one side of the coin. The other coin is how do I read a balance sheet? How do I understand a profit and loss statement? How do I take profit and make sure that I have the discipline to make sure that I'm profitable? And a really helpful book that I've read recently is called “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz and we should link that. I'm a huge fan of “Profit First” man. Because for me, I feel like it's the missing ingredient for true financial freedom.

Seth: Yeah. Well, and even beyond that, so you've kind of got like the skillset and the willingness to work hard for it. And then the understanding of financials and how to make sense of that, which is a whole other thing. But then on top of that, there's also like the discipline, Like, okay. I know I've got to work hard. I know I have to do this with my money. That means I have to actually stick to it and not take my money and buy like a sports car when I'm not wealthy yet. It's harder than you might think. And everybody has their vices. And that may be people that don't care about cars, but it's sort of like knowing how to eat well versus actually eating well or knowing how to do something versus actually doing it. It's a hard thing, man. It's not just about the knowledge, it's about the willingness to really bust your butt and make it work.

Jaren: And do it. Yeah, man. It's so true. What about you?

Seth: For me, I think, I don't know how to word this exactly. But if I could become instantly enlightened about anything, it would be being a master at human relations, like in the way that I communicate and speak to a person in a way that they can accept and understand and resonate with what I'm saying. And I say that because I spent the first half of my life, really not understanding how to do this. And even today I think I get it a lot better, but I still encounter people that we're just on different wavelengths. Like when I talked to them, it just kind of hits a brick wall and vice versa. Like we don't mesh. And it's weird. I can't even explain why.

It's like a human chemistry thing, but I would love it if I could have chemistry with anybody, like no matter how different or off, or just come from different place they are, I could make it work. Because I think if you're able to resonate with somebody and build a relationship and have that kind of harmony I guess, that's a huge deal. That's what every, every relationship is built on is having something there. If it just falls flat, it's going to be hard to go to the next level with that person.

So, I don't know. I feel like that would be a way to find a lot of success in life is really having that dialed in and understanding how to do that. I don't really know that anybody really does have that figured out. I think everybody, even the best human relations experts and the best communicators and the best salespeople, they still encounter people that are like, it's just not working. So, it's kind of a pipe dream, I think. I don't think I'll ever get that, but if it was possible, that'd be pretty cool.

Jaren: I got to say though, Seth, out of the lot of people I've met on a spectrum you're pretty high up there. Like your self-awareness and your trained skill in communication. I feel like you are close to a master communicator, honestly. You're really good.

Seth: Oh, really? That’s awesome, man.

Jaren: Yeah. I've seen you engage with strangers at Masterminds and conferences and stuff. And I've seen you engage with me and I've seen you navigate difficult conversations and build rapport with people. And I know because of conversations we've had that it's kind of a trained skill. Like you've had to work really hard at it, but you can tell that you've worked really hard at it. Because when I talk to people, like potential coaching clients and stuff with the Land Master class and all that, when I tell them that you're an introvert, they say, “No way, there's no way he's an introvert. He's so charismatic and dynamic on camera” and so on and so forth. So, you've done a really good job.

Seth: Yeah. I've heard Brandon Turner say that about himself, I think, that he's an introvert too. And likewise, I would never think that of him because of how it comes across on podcasts and webinars and videos and stuff. But thank you. I appreciate that. That's a huge compliment.

Jaren: I wonder, I don't know about Brandon though. Sometimes I feel like people just say, “Oh man, after a really long day of talking, I'm really tired. And therefore, I'm an introvert”. But I don't know. I don't know if it's that clear-cut.

Seth: You might be right.

Jaren: Because if I sat there and I talked all day long at a conference or whatever, I'm definitely an extrovert. There's no question. But when I go to some of these conferences with you and at the end of the day, I'm tired. Does that mean I'm an introvert? No. Just means that I've been talking and doing a lot of stuff all day.

Seth: Because you're a human, right?

Jaren: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is where do you draw energy from. And if I really need to relax or to recharge my batteries, I need to call a friend or hang out with three or five people and get together. And that gives me an energy positive. Whereas I think an introvert, they need to spend time by themselves and that's how they recharge. I think that's the biggest difference.

Seth: Yeah. That makes sense, man. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, I don't think I'm there, but I guess it's good to know that I'm not a total failure anymore. Believe me, there was a time when it was not pretty to be around me. It’s funny. I took my three-year-old son to the doctor this morning and I can see in a lot of ways, he's like I was when I was a child. The doctor went up and tried to talk to him all nice and everything and he just turns his head the other way. He doesn't even look at him. And I think part of that is probably just like a child's shyness. It's not that unusual, but it's just like, man, if you do that when you're a grown-up, like, I don't know. Things are not going to go well.  Hopefully, I can get him to read a Dale Carnegie or something like that.

Jaren: Yeah, man.

Seth: Well folks, thanks for listening today. Again, if you want to check out the show notes, retipster.com/78. And also, if you're listening to this on your phone, go ahead and text the word FREE. F-R-E-E to the number 33777 and something really cool will happen. I'll just leave it there. I'll let you give it a shot and you'll see what I mean. So, thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you guys again in the next episode.