In this Q&A style video, seasoned real‑estate professional Chris Prefontaine (34.5 years in the industry, 13 focused on rent‑to‑own) explains how his company’s rent‑to‑own program dramatically differs from the majority of offerings that suffer an ~80% default rate. He emphasizes a strict, ethical buyer‑qualification process designed to set true buyers up for success rather than merely collecting rent. By vetting candidates rigorously—excluding long‑term credit problem renters and those lacking financial discipline—his program achieves a low default rate of 2‑10%, far below the industry average. He also highlights his son Nick’s expertise in the disposition side of deals and promotes free educational resources (smartrealestatecoach.com, 3paydaysbooks.com) and a free class for deeper insight into the qualification checklist. The overall message is that a disciplined, buyer‑centric approach can make rent‑to‑own viable where most programs fail.
Chapters
A question we get literally all the time is, how does your rent-to-own program differ from others? As I hear, rent-to-own doesn't work. Okay guys, first of all, I've been at the real estate game for about 34 and a half years, and we've been at the rent-to-own laser focus for about 13 of those years. And I'll tell you, our program differs dramatically. So let me go through a few things with you. First of all, and these aren't in priority order, First of all, the quality of our buyers by way of our qualifying. Okay. Very, very important. You will hear on YouTube, you will hear on different podcasts, different educators, you can call them gurus, talking about doing rent-to-own and not caring whatsoever if the buyer ever qualifies for the end loan. And they literally say publicly that they do that because they can just collect another check and put another buyer in there. Now I get it that their legal documents may allow them to do this, but it is bogus when you look at that morally and ethically. So when I say the quality of the buyer dictated by how we qualify, that means what? That means we want to set the buyer up to win. We want to set them up to buy the house. That's what they thought coming into the deal. So our qualifying process is very, very picky with that to make sure they're a true buyer. They're not a renter that's maybe had a credit problem for 40 years, that's not someone that had a life event. That's someone that has not learned how to do that yet, how to control their finances yet. So we want to help these people succeed. Most don't. So that's the short answer. I will tell you that my son and partner Nick has mastered the disposition side of this, the selling side of this for over 12 or 13 years now. And he's done it with our deals and the community deals. And I'll tell you, here's the big statistic for you guys to know. When you say, how does this differ from other programs? Our failure rate, our default rate with buyers in homes that couldn't cash out because of life event. And gosh, we've seen them all— death, divorce, everything, fire. We've seen them all. Our default rate is 2 to 10%. That's it. And I'm going high in the 10%. I used to say 2 to 5. I'm being very conservative just because life happens. And the more time you give the buyers, we've learned They tend to have life happen, right? So we try to keep it very, very strict with how we do the qualification process. And you'll learn that as you go through our materials. Now, what's the industry average on defaults? Not sure where to get started? Go to smartrealestatecoach.com/getgoing for free books, strategy calls, and a whole bunch more. We're going to help you get going the wicked smart way. We've been after this for over a decade doing exactly that. It's like an inverse relationship, even worse. It's about 80% default rate. Guys, it's awful. That means most buyers are getting set up to fail in the rent-to-own program. We by far are the foremost experts in the nation on rent-to-own. So I hope that answers your super good question. I want to make sure we address it properly. If you want to learn more about this, you can do a couple of different things, guys. You can grab my free books. Just go to 3paydaysbooks.com, 3paydaysbooks.com/youtube. Now, if you want to learn how to, you know, really, how do you guys qualify? What's the checklist like? What, you know, how do you go through all this stuff? Go ahead and check out my free class. I'm big about free. I want you guys to understand what's going on. Go to smartrealestatecoach.com/mastersyoutube, and we'll see you next week on the next Q&A Thursday.
