The Note Investing Strategy Banks Hope You Never Learn: The Wisconsin Investor Podcast with Corey Reyment

Welcome to the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. I'm your host, Corey Raymond. Oh, hey there, guy. Each week we bring you interviews with some of Wisconsin's top real estate investors who share their tips, tricks and strategies that you can implement right away. Oh, crepes. This show is dedicated to helping Wisconsin real estate investors elevate their game. Along with interviews, I'll also dive into hot topics and solo episodes and feature experts from various real estate sectors across Wisconsin. You betcha. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show. What is up, people? I am back with another episode here and I am bringing you guys as usual, I think I do this all the time, but I'm bringing you guys a great guest today. At the time we're recording this, I had the opportunity to be on his podcast just a few days ago. So when this drops, it'll be a little bit older because we got some other ones in the bank right now. But go back and, and I'm going to introduce our guests here in a second. Before I do that though, I'm going to get into today's sponsor as I do on every episode and that is Wisconsin Discount Properties. We are bringing you guys deals to your inbox every single week. 6:00am it hits your inbox. So if you're looking for off market real estate and you're not on our buyer's list, what the heck are you doing? So get on the list, go to the website, put your information in. What we're also doing right now is we are giving away our BRRRR for beginners course. So this is a huge opportunity, guys. If you're out there and you're looking to get started and you want to do the BRRRR process and you're not sure where to start, this is an action oriented course. So it's not just education. You're not going to come in here and learn the fundamentals of it. You're going to actually be in and forced to take action to get your first deal in the first 45 to 90 days of taking the course. So to get out to get the course for free, join the buyers list and somebody from our team will get on a call with you and after that call, we'll get you the discount code to get there. All right, let's get into today's episode because I got a gentleman here who's got tons of experience and it's going to bring you guys something we haven't had on the episode yet, which I'm pretty excited about. So I have Mr. Scott Carson with me who is the owner and manager of weclose notes.com so he's based out of Austin, Texas. So we've got nothing against Texas here. We love Texas. Great, great place. So not at Wisconsinite, but this guy does business all over the country, guys. He's got the Notes Closer show, which has millions of listeners across 130 countries. So this guy is, this guy knows his stuff. He's got tons of people that follow him. He does an online summit and a conference called Note Camp, which you guys can get access to as well. There's a ton of other things. So we're going to dive into the note world a little bit today. Raising private money, short sales, non performing notes, all kinds of fun stuff. But with that, let me bring in Mr. Scott Carson. Scott, how you doing, buddy?

I'm doing great today, Corey. Excited to be here. We were talking about Tampa last time last week, a Tampa shirt here for you. You know, pink flamingo all over the place here for you, man.

My man. Bringing it. I love it, buddy. I love it. Well, I'm excited to have you on, man. We had a great time recording on your podcast and so I'm super excited to bring you to our audience and, and, and get to flip the script a little bit with you today and, and be the one asking the questions today. So tell, tell the audience a little bit, man. You've been in the game for a long time. You know, can you remember back to when you started and, and what it was that had you even getting into this crazy world we call real estate investing?

Yeah, I can. I mean, it's like many folks reading Rich dad, poor dad and say you want to do something different and then going and network at the local real estate clubs. And I actually bought a couple investment properties on my own without any training or education and fell flat on my face, you know. Okay, that's a little bit of like. I thought I knew everything because I grew up in a hardware store down in South Texas. My dad. So I thought I could be like Tim the Tool Man Taylor and fix everything, you know what I mean?

The young audience has no idea who Tim the Tool Man Taylor is, by the way.

Exactly. Yeah, ye been for tools, baby. You know what I mean? That's right.

Oh, man.

But no, I mean, I fell flat in my face like some folks do. The only person who made any money was a realtor, stuff like that. So I licked my wounds for a couple years and yeah, was fortunate enough to, you know, get our assets out of a sling, as I like to joke from being a distress bar to getting back on track. And then a couple years went by and I met a buddy of mine who's starting a mortgage company with a couple, I guess, say, educators and investors here locally who were traveling the country speaking on real estate. And I said, that's what I want to do. So I left banking and. And threw my lot in with them. And for four years I had an apprenticeship with them, not only in the mortgage side, because we were doing originations for investors and stuff like that. Really learning the creative side of real estate investing all across the country from the likes of like Ron LeGrand and some folks. So I remember that and then sending out like my first batch of letters to the postcard, you know, letters to postcard. I mean, letters of foreclosure listings, people facing foreclosure. And the first phone call I got was this lady who hadn't paid in like a year, she hadn't had water on in like six months to her house. She was letting her four dogs run wild throughout the house and defecating and doing all that stuff. So when you walk into the house on the carpet, it goes squish, squish. You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

It was so bad that the lower, like 18 inches of the sheetrock was all yellow from the dogs. They were just running all up, licking her on the face. There's, you know, food that. Yeah, just real positive environment, you know what I mean? Wow.

And that's your first one. This is your first experience of direct to seller.

Exactly. Walking in and do that. Meaning she hadn't. She was still using the toilet. So each toilet was full of excrement. And then she was doing it in a five gallon homer bucket.

Oh, my gosh, dude.

What's running through my head is hearing Ron LeGrand saying the smell of. And piss is a smell of money. And so I'm like, okay, this is how it goes. Well, that was my first. You know, I go home, showered off and anyway, we didn't buy in that one, but that was my first indoctrination into real estate investing the right way.

Oh, my goodness. Man. So how long have you been in this game? When did you get started? When was that first experience?

Yeah, so basically, technically, I bought my first investment Property back in 2001 and we found without trying to be landlords, but that was in 2000 and 2006 was when I bought my first. Once I bought it, we took over a property subject to.

Okay.

And then we optioned another one and got rock and Rolling. But I sink my teeth into the, you know, distressed note side and bought my first non performing Note back in 2007 on this condo in, in Arizona. And I bought, that's what I love. I love buying the distressed debt side of things without having to deal with toilet stands and trash outs, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Tell everybody out here so what I want to today, Scott, for, for my sake too and for our audience sake, somebody who's, this is their first time being introduced maybe to, you know, some of the terminology you're using, that kind of stuff. Let's make this, you know, in crayon. Third grade level. Can you explain what the heck. How do you buy a non performing note? What is a non performing note? I mean, you know, I kind of know what that is but like just explain it in third grade terms and how do you get access to some of these things?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Great, great stuff there. So non, non performing mortgage. Non performing note is exactly like it sounds somebody who's not paying on their mortgage debt. You know, like if you guys target like foreclosure list. Well that's listed. It's a full list of non performing notes where people haven't paid in six months to six years or longer. And so we, we buy that debt not to buy the property because I don't really own the property. When I buy the mortgage debt, I literally am replacing the bank. I'm buying that mortgage debt not from the homeowner. I'm buying the actual physical mortgage from their bank or lender at a usually a substantial discount. The borrower still owes. What they owe is just swapping out one bank for another. Technically I'm the bank and I have all the same rights that the bank does to reach out to say hey Corey, you haven't paid your mortgage in six months. What happened? What's your, you know, what's your country western song? You know, did grandma get run over by a reindeer? Did the packers lose? And you spend it all on Bud Light? You know, after the loss, you know, did you, did your job at the cheese curd factory lay you off for a period of time? You know, what's the situation?

Sure.

So we buy that debt at discount. So if they, you know, haven't paid in six months and they owe 200 on a $175,000 house, we would probably come in and buy about 50 cents of, on the dollar value of the house. We might pay $85,000 for that, you know, $175,000 asset where they owe more than they're underwater. And so we work, we approach homeowners and say, listen, hey, we know you haven't paid in a while before we foreclose on you, which we have the right to do. Do you want to stay or do you want to go? If you want to stay, let's work out a payment plan. Because we actually, since we bought the debt cheaper, we can be much more flexible with the borrower say, hey, you've paid in a year. Well, can you bring three months to the table? Can you pay your existing payment plus $200 a month to get you caught back up on, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Or hey, you don't want to stay, okay, let's sell the property, let's do a short sale and we can accept a little bit of a loss off of what's owed, but we still bought it at a price that was much cheaper than we paid for. So that's kind of what we do is we literally, we get these lists in from banks, from mortgage companies all across the country and it's going to be like 200 to 500 different notes on properties all across the United States, including Wisconsin. You know what I mean? We see some stuff up in Wisconsin and you know, it's, you know, we can cherry pick this stuff. You know, some people think you need to have millions and millions and millions of dollars and all that does help. No, you don't have to have millions of dollars. A lot of excluding like the big ones like bank of America, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, you're not going to buy a one off mortgage from them. But there are plenty of other lenders that will sell this stuff to you. And the goal isn't, I know a lot of people come from, hey, I want to own the real estate side of things, right? I want to own the property. I want to go out and touch it and rub it and replace the paint carpet. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to get paid like a bank does.

Right.

You know, and so if you, let's put some numbers like we just talked about. So let's, let's just say to simple, they owe 200, it's worth 200 they haven't paid in six months to a year. Why the bank hasn't foreclosed already? Don't know. I mean, they may, it may be a lower valued asset in their portfolio. They may have tried to work it out. It might be in a state that's longer to foreclose on. There's A whole variety of reasons why they can sell it to us. So we come in, we see this, we like the value, we evaluate all the, like the loan documents, the servicing notes between the borrower and the bank. See that this bar may be a good fit. And so if we buy it at 100 and let's say their mortgage rate is at 6%, well they just start paying on time again. Since we bought that 6% mortgage at 50 cents a dollar, if they just start paying on time, it's a 12% cash and cash return to us. Okay. If they bring three or four months to the table, that goes to a mid teens, maybe 20% first year. Wow. We get the bar back on track. Making payments for 12 months. It's now considered a reperforming note. I could turn around and sell it back to Wall street or back to other mortgage companies. Were looking for performing paper, it's a 80, 90 cents of the dollar. So I've now gotten in a year, I got some skin in the game. Three or four grand, 12 months of on time payments. If I bought it for 100, I'm now turn around selling it at 80 cents a dollar. So that's at 160 to 170. Making 60 grand on the note sale. And so that's a pretty good return on $100,000 investment.

Oh my goodness.

The nice thing that I like about note investing is you don't have to do it full time. The great thing is that there are like heavy lifters, you know, fix flippers. You really gotta be spot on for a lot of times, right? Meeting the contractors and knowing your people and on comps and time. Well if I can rehab the borrower, it makes more sense than rehabbing the property to me because most of the heavy lifting is actually going to be by either the servicing company that we're paying a 35 to 95amonth fee per loan to do that borrower outreach. You know, I'm not knocking on doors trying to evict people myself.

Okay.

If not, if they won't play ball, then we kick it to our real estate attorney in that state to do the foreclosure and then they foreclose. And then if they, if we could sell at auction. Sometimes we do that. If we don't sell at auction, we take it back, then we just bump it to our local realtor to handle the eviction, the clean out and then in the rehab side of things. Wow.

So then you end up flipping it. Worst case scenario, held it, you know.

You know, once we, once we foreclose and if it doesn't sell at the auction, it's, it's a, it's our own reo. We can do whatever we want with it. You know, owner finance.

Yeah. You're controlling the property because you control the debt, so.

Exactly, exactly. That's why I only buy in first lien position. I mean there's people that buy second liens and junior liens and that's fine. So much riskier spot to be in. Because if, if, if the first lie is not getting paid, the first link in foreclosing to wipe them all out completely.

Okay. So that's the risk. So like I'm thinking about that as raising private money. Right. Like what do I say to my lenders who have a smaller dollar amount? They want to come in and maybe they want to fund the rehab or do whatever. Like they're going to go in second or third position potentially. You know, for them. Obviously it's a relationship thing when you're doing private money. But like what, what are you communicating to those people or the people out here who are doing that as far as what to explain, you know, to be full disclosing to their, to their potential lenders.

So you're talking about their funding from a second in a second lien position or buy a funding.

Say I gotta say I got a, you know, friend, family member, whatever they want. They got 20 grand laying around, they want to put it to work. But I got a bank note on the first banknote's gonna be in first position.

So always make sure there's a couple things. Make sure that the first is getting paid. That's one of the most important things because that's gonna wipe you up. Make sure taxes are getting paid because that's the thing that would wipe us all out. Yeah. You know, first and second and then also make sure that somebody's really not rehabbing more than you're comfortable with. You know, we've all had deals that were maybe okay, the market's just. And we're at a combined loan to value of 70, 75, 80. You know, I don't really want to get above that unless it's an emergency of something for the most part, but try to stay at that. You know, I guess the golden rule when it comes into it, to stay below 70, 75% of the after repair value. If you're, if you're rehabbing a property. Right. On the note side, we're only raising capital in the first lien position because that's really all that we're buying and then we try to have the investor who funded that note fund a little bit extra for foreclosure costs and servicing and rehab if we need to. Okay, got it.

So that was one of my other questions I had for you, Scott. So when you know, like you said, you don't have to have millions and millions of dollars around to do this. Right. So are you raising private money then to buy the notes and you're keeping some kind of spread or for kind of doing all the work or how is that working as far as being able to buy, you know, several of these. Are somebody out there looking to buy their first note who doesn't have a ton of cash but has a lot of time and grit.

Yeah.

I mean how are they going to do this thing?

So, so here's the golden rolling in. Being a real estate investor is no matter if you're trying to raise 50 grand or 5 million, one of the greatest ways to find investors is a networking. But also we target a lot of self directed IRA investors. People who have used their IRA to either a buy rental property or to lend money other Iraq. And you can literally go to the county records office or the county appraisal districts to find these investors. In just about every state there's a few non disclosure states out there. Oh, so like we go here in Texas or I go to Florida, one of our favorite states there. And if I go I love Florida. Yeah, exactly. It's a lot of money down in Florida, right? Yeah. You'd like to go to Collier county or Lee county and go to the appraisal district and just type in say Equity Trust or type in Quest Trust or Mid Atlantic. I mean Quest is no longer around but there's still stuff that's still floating around with them. And if you type in that in the property owner's name, it's going to pull up a list of people who have used their IRA to buy a rental property. And we all know they're using their IRA to buy property. It's got to be passive, right. It's got to be a hands like ideal for note investors because it's passive. We buy a note, we get the bar re performing at 12, we borrow the money at 8. Great. We're paying our investor back there 8% on a quarterly basis. We don't pay monthly payments, just we do once a quarter. It speeds up a little bit. Okay, keeps ira. But you could literally then the great thing about going back to these county records is got the mailing address you Know what I mean? Sometimes these counties, you can actually do a few buttons and it downloads a full spreadsheet, borrower's address, name and then their mailing address to do a mail.

Oh my goodness.

And the great thing about IRA investors is that we know they're investors just like you and me, Right. They've got money that they need to put to work most of the time. And two, I mean three, they're always looking for deals. Yes. And if, and actually if you've talked to most of the IRA companies and custodians out there, actually paper is one of the biggest things these people are invested in. Now if they're lending you money, they're in the paper game. Right, Right. So they're lending on a first lien. Well, how about you fund a first lien investment, you know, a note deal, you're still going to get paid your interest. You're going to be either codenamed on the, the assignment of mortgage, which what transfers ownership, not a deed. Because when you're buying a mortgage, the property doesn't change hands, it's just the, the lender does.

Okay. Okay.

And so that's a great thing for folks now finding people who have lent money other ira. If you go to the clerk or the recorder's office and do a same search for like Equity Trust, Quest Trust, it'll pull up and do a deed search for that. You'll pull up people who have lent money on their IRA and who they lent the money to and how much they lent out as well and retract. We will do a release of lean search and do the same search and you see people who've gotten paid back of money sitting on the sidelines now. So it's not as easy on the county clerk side because you got to look at deeds and stuff like that. But it's a great to hire a VA to do and, and let them go off and running for it. But literally, I mean even if you're in a non disclosure state like Minnesota's, non disclosure, Virginia, Maryland, non disclosure because of government, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Ohio, the land from where Equity trust is located.

Yeah.

You can literally find thousands of people who have a self directed IRA to fund your no deal or fund your real estate deal. Right.

And they don't have to be in your state, they can be anywhere.

It's a thing with a thing called zoom, you know what I mean? So the only direct mail market we do in the note business is actually sending out to IRA investors. That's literally it. Because all of our deal flow, for the most part, comes direct from our, like our online marketing via LinkedIn or targeting servicing companies or mortgage bankers that we can find in any state. You know, they have to be registered that state as a licensed mortgage banker.

Okay, I was just going to ask you that. So going back to when you said, you know, you'll get some tapes, I think they call it, in the, in the business. Is that right? That's like 200 to 500 of these things on a tape. And you're going through and kind of evaluating them all and doing these kinds of things. And again, I imagine you probably have a system or VA that can do all of that and then kind of highlight some of the ones that you want to go for.

Yeah, that's all. I mean, you're getting a spreadsheet, so I always take the OTSC syndrome out of that. Oh, that's so cute. You know what I mean? That property is so cute. I just want to buy it. I'm like, no, don't do that. Do not fall in love with the property. Fall in love with the numbers. The way I look at it, then, like the property. So on this spreadsheet. Yeah. On this tape, we'll have the borrower's name, how, you know, how far behind they are, the. What they owe, as far as the unpaid principal balance, potential legal balance, an estimated value of the property. You know what I mean, what the seller will give us. Of course, it's usually Zillow, but we just use that on the front end. We'll always do deeper due diligence. So we can run formulas based on what we think, the. What they tell us. As far as pricing, some of them will say, well, we want full value, which they call parents. I'm like, we don't want to pay for Paul. We want a discount. Right? Right. We always want a discount. So run some formulas based on what we would buy that note at and then what their monthly P and I payment should be or what we would modify it for. You know, we can run some quick formulas to understand. Okay, here's a top 20. Here's a top 30 out of this list of 200. And then we just submit a bid in on all 30 of them in just a few minutes. Knowing that the banks, the lenders are not going to accept all 30. If they did, we probably bid too much, which we. Okay, yeah, but knowing that out of 30, okay, we get 10 that are accepted, and once those are accepted, then we do the deeper dive, then we're gonna Send somebody out to drive by the property and pull a broker price opinion to give us a true value of the property, not a zestimate. Okay. We're gonna check taxes, we're gonna talk to the attorney and attendant, see how far they are in the foreclosure process or if they haven't started, if the borrowers file bankruptcy like a BK chapter 13. Where are they on the payment plan process? Because we like BKS because it basically turns into cash flow. If the condition of the property comes back, then what we see the online stuff, we can reduce our bid. If it comes back and there's six grand or ten grand in back taxes owed, we go reduce our bid, you know, and stuff like that.

Okay. Because you're going to have to catch them up, right?

Yeah, usually. Exactly, exactly. We kind of figured that into our bid to reduce it by taxes owed.

Okay.

But if the, if the property looks good and our little bit of due diligence on the borrower and the bar responses and of course the collateral file, which is. This is really. This is what we're buying right here. This is a file note. You know, this is in Kankakee, Illinois. It was worth bar was supposed to pay 578amonth on it. And we paid what we paid. We paid 25 grand for this note of $80,000.

Come on now, come on.

No. Yeah, they owed 110, they were upside down. But we bought it at 25 and so at 578amonth, that's their P&I payment. Five hundred and seventy eight a month. We figured this real fast. Five hundred and seventy eight times 12 months, that's 69, 36. That's a pretty good ROI divided by 25,000. Right. What do we got? That's a 27.8% cash and cash return to us. Now we got to take some servicing costs out of that.

Still, you're still going to be over 20.

That's what we shoot for. We want to try if we can get them back on track, shoot for at least a 20% cash and cash return. When you figure in servicing costs and you know your servicing costs on a non performing is about 90 bucks a month performance 25. Okay. If we have to foreclose, that's. Illinois is not usually the fastest. Avoid Cook county like the plague. But yeah, he's not bad. So that's going to cost us probably another three to five grand to foreclose, you know.

Okay.

And go from there. So my biggest goal is to like to rehab the borrower you know, not rehab the properties. I've done plenty of that. We still will do. There's still deals that we'll just buy to foreclose on to take the property back. You know, if they're vacant or they haven't paid in five years, we know we're going to foreclose. You know, if it's, you know, you guys have a little bit of an older community up in Wisconsin, you know, in Green Bay. So we deal with a lot of reverse mortgages.

Okay.

You know, where the borrower is deceased and nobody's there paying, you know, paid in a couple years. So we'll buy those and.

Okay.

At a big discount with the know that we're just going to have to rehab it and go from there. Okay. That's the thing, I mean that's the great thing is you get these lists in from banks. Most of the time you can just cherry pick. You know, like I said, if we submit an offer on 30, we're hoping to get 10 back. If we close on two or three out of those, we're, we're sitting very happy for the most part.

Yeah. So 20% plus is, that's no joke these days that's pretty tough to get. So that's pretty awesome that you're, you're able to do that and, and sounds like pretty consistently.

Yeah, we, I mean we bought over a billion dollars in notes in residential and commercial. Commercial is a little bit trickier.

Did you sell that a second, Scott? Back to train up. Did you say billion with a B?

We bought over a billion dollars in distressed debt since I started doing this back in.

That's insane, bro.

Yeah, I mean we bought a lot of stuff during, you know, 2010, 2014, Miami condos for five grand, you know what I mean, to foreclose. But it was still like I can, I can throw five grand after a, you know, a fifty to two hundred thousand dollar condom. Let's sit there for a while and see what it appreciates. Back to.

So that's insanity, bro. So let me say this, step one, first of all, what you're sharing right now is awesome. Like this is totally making sense to me. I've been in the note realm as far as hearing about it. Like I'm a note, I made note supplier, so to speak, as far as doing some private money lending and hard money lending and I've had, I've given people private notes. I've been on that side of things. I've never bought non performing debt before. So this is a whole New world for me in which I think are, I'm gonna guess 99 of our audience. This is probably new information for them and you're breaking it down in a very easy way right now, which is awesome.

We're a much smaller community. I mean when I started back doing this back in, in 2007, 2008, there's not really a market for it. I mean there's people that were around in like the 80s for the, like the savings and loan crisis, the RTZ, Resolution Trust Corporation and all the banks were failing it. All this distressed debt, stuff like that, that happened. And then 2008 when everything crashed, we saw more commercial notes than we saw residential because it took longer for the residential stuff to hit the markets as banks were filing bankruptcy and delaying things.

Sure.

You know, with the commercial defaults, we've seen that taking place since 2020. You know, we've bought a lot of small balance apartment complexes, even like 300 plus units that we bought the debt at a big discount and then stepped into cash flow or stepped into taking over the complex and working it and working with the bars to walk away in a lot of cases. But it's, it's, it's, it's a different market out here. I mean when we used to buy pennies on the dollars, now it's not like it was 10, 15 years ago, but it's still, you know, 40, 50, 60 cent on the dollar. What's owed is a good price to buy stuff off of value, not overvalued stuff. You know what I mean?

Okay, got it. So if I wanted, let's say Scott, I was like, hey, I want to go do this today, like I want to start buying some non performing notes. How do I get this tape? Or how do you start? Like what's step one? For somebody out here listening to this that says like man, this sounds like the lane I want to go down. What's step one besides get, get connected with you to get some coaching?

Right. There's two, there's two paths and that's one. If you're already targeting foreclosure list, like you're buying a monthly foreclosure list from a list provider. You can look at that foreclosure list and then look at the lenders or banks that are the foreclosing aspect. Now I wouldn't target, like I said, the top five or 10 banks. And if the foreclosure, like here in Texas we do everything so fast. If the foreclosure is next month or in two weeks, I'm not going to target that bank for that property. I don't care about the property. What I care about is making the right. Getting the right department in the bank and then getting their list of stuff all across the country on a regular basis, you know, okay, so that one foreclosure at 123 Main Street. You know, I'll contact the attorney foreclosing, or I'll call the corporate office, the bank and the lender. And depending where they're at and how big are they, go by a couple different names. And so you can target the special assets department, the secondary marketing department, the chief credit risk officer, if it's an insurance or reit, the whole loan trading department. Those are the four job titles. Special asset manager, secondary marketing manager, whole loan trader or chief credit risk officer. All right, and you can actually go over to LinkedIn and type in those same names and find people that do all these same jobs, which is the easiest way. Right? So that's two things, you know, and it's like just dropping a direct mail. Hey, saw that you might be the right person handling note sales for ABC Bank. Do you have anything on your books you're looking to get rid of this month or this quarter?

So good. All right, everybody stop, pause, go back, relisten to that again, get those titles written down. If you're driving, earmark this part. Go back to it after you got a spot with a pen and paper because that was just some gold right there. Carry on, Scott.

Yeah, and that's the thing. Just it's all about drip marketing. I mean, we spent a lot of time on LinkedIn and follow up with people. Hey, what do you have in your books this month? Nothing. You could also go to back to the county records. You know, if you go back to the recorder's office and just do a search for assignments, assignment search in the last six months or a year ago, that will tell you what mortgages have been moved from one lender to another. Because it's not a deed, it's an assignment of mortgage that gets recorded at transfers ownership. Okay, so whenever I get a tape in a listing that's, you know, we look at. Okay, redirect to the seller. That's important. Who's the lender on this? You know, what's the motivation? How upside down is the bank? You know, okay. You know, there's some things you can do by going to like the fdic.gov websites or looking at the bank's quarterly report to see how much distressed debt they have on their Books, residential, commercial, and how much of their portfolio is distressed.

Okay.

And that leads to getting a better price. The more distressed they are, the better price we can usually get. Depends on.

When you say the more distressed you're talking about the bank. The more distressed the bank is itself versus the actual property you're looking at.

Exactly. I know the mortgage is distressed, obviously, but a lot of banks, when you understand banks, when they have a non performing note on their books, they have to hold money back in reserves that they can't lend out.

Yes.

And so that's why banks will often sell to us at a discount because they'd rather get 50,000 or 50% of the note. Now they can go out and rinse and repeat and leverage it 10 to 15, 10 to 50 times versus holding on to the snow, you know, it's going to drag them down and they have to keep these reserves. So that's, that's the thing we're looking at. You know, we don't target like one off banks because they can't take a big discount. We don't talk target the top five or 10 because they do want you to have $50 million. But there's a whole lot of regional banks, smaller banks, smaller mortgage companies, mortgage bankers that have stuff on their portfolio that they're motivated to move off their, you know, off their bank book so they can move it to somebody else and, and lend and rinse and repeat and lend on a regular basis.

I love that, I love that. When you're doing the, dude, the due diligence Scott, you talked about, right? You got the bpo, you're getting done, so you're really getting a true valuation on the property. Right. Are you, are you able to go in the property ever? Like, are you able to get in there and see like what is the condition of this thing inside? Because that could question a big swing if you got to flip that thing.

Yeah, well that's a great question. And that's the number one question we get from fixing flippers. Because you gotta have the whole, I gotta see everything, right?

Yeah.

And the answer is most of the time, no. If it's occupied, you're not going to be able to go knock on the door, hey, can I walk in and see the property?

You know, I'm the bank.

Exactly. They don't do that now sometimes. Now of course, if that bars list that property for sale, then you get online photos, you can finagle about that. If the bar is passed away and it's a reverse mortgage, oftentimes hud before they're selling the stuff off, will go in and take photos and send in an inspection, you know, okay, and take a look at. You can't go knock on the door of the baller and say, hey, I'm thinking about buying your note. Can you start paying on time again? That's a violation of fair debt collection practices. Although the, okay, although this consumer, the cfpb is not really around to step on your toes or swat your hands. You shouldn't do that. But the thing about looking at an asset is that we're literally getting the, you know, the phone conversations we're seeing, hey, this bar called in and tried to talk about doing a loan mod or the opposite way. We called the bar and they told us to F off, you know what I mean? You can. And that's why we send somebody by to look at the property. Is the property in good condition exterior wise, is the lawnmower there, toys in the front yard? Is there an American flag out in front? You know what I mean? Is it a good neighborhood or is it the hood? You know what I mean? Those are important things. And one thing that offsets that fear of all I got a rehab or if it's trashed outside is, is the insurance side of the business. Okay. By a non performing note, if the borrower has insurance, which we ask as part of our due diligence, they don't, then what we do before we fund is what, we'll put insurance on the property so that if we do, when we do close on it and the bars are responsible, we go knock on the door. Then if they don't answer, if it's vacant, we can actually, we are allowed because we're the bank to go in, open the door, change the locks, make sure to secure our investment. Just like Fannie or Freddie would do.

Yeah. On a vacant property, any property going up for auction, same, same look.

Exactly. So if it's occupied, it's great. I mean that's where we're calling utility departments in the city. And since we're the bank and the lender, oftentimes the utility departments will give us more information because we have a vested interest. Okay, so like hey, we're the bank, we're calling to check on 123 Main St. Corey. Is the borrower on this? Can you tell us if the utilities are still on? Is the water still on? Oh, it's been turned off. How long has it been turned off? What's the outstanding balance that we would need to pay you when we do that? And so they'll give us information. I have one lady like, oh yeah, they were in here last flight last week. Him and his wife were fighting. They got in a fight. We had to call the cops on them or you know, or. Yep. It's been the same borrower at the house for four years. They paid on time. So that tells us a little bit about.

Sure.

The, the interior condition of the property. I mean, I know we're going to. Usually if we do take the property back, it's going to be paint, carpet, new appliances in 90% of the time. Yeah. I mean.

Yeah.

Since we don't aren't targeting the property we really base our first line of return on, is it occupied and what's it going to look like if we can get that bar back on track if they just start paying, Is that a good day or is it a bad day and going from there?

Well, you mentioned something I think is interesting for the audience to hear. You said something about like. And maybe you can expand on this a little bit. There was something about phone records or something you get with this where they'll actually put notes in the system on this particular borrower and you get those notes if you're doing your due diligence.

Yeah. It's called servicing notes. So most mortgage companies are going to be servicing a note by calling if you stop paying. Right. Okay. So I mean we'll see the payment history, you know, all that stuff in the spreadsheet. If what they paid over and that kind of things, which is really nice, but somebody hasn't paid, then we're really, especially a non performing. We're going to look at what's been the conversation. Has the servicing company been reaching out? What's the conversation been? And we'll see notes like bar called and try to do a loan. Bar called and try to do a short sale.

Okay.

You know, even since we get this collateral file a lot of times, sometimes we'll even get like hardship letters that the borrower sent in. So like one, I bought this note in South Beloit, Illinois a few years back. Where the file went, the scan file was thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. Like why is this collateral file so thick? You know? And turned out this loan had been sold like five times over four years. And the lady was trying to do a loan mod and so she was faxing in her W2s, her hardship letter, her bank statements, all this stuff, trying to get a short sale approved.

Okay.

And every time she did, the note would be sold to somebody else and she'd have to do the whole thing again.

Oh, my goodness.

So I. When I saw this, I was like, oh. I'm like, they late owed 60. The house was maybe worth 36. It wasn't that, you know, high value asset, but they were willing to sell like 30 cents on the dollar of what they figured, 36 cents on the dollar of what was owed. You know, I'm sorry. Of the value of the property, 60 was owed, 36 was the value. So they sell the note to me for 12. And her monthly payment was like 452amonth. I'm like, looking, I'm like, this lady's been trying to do a loan mod for four years.

Yeah.

She's lived in it for 18. Her. In her hardship letter, she lit out and we raised our three daughters here. My husband had a heart attack, has been out of work. She literally said, I can't make. I can't bring the full four years or five years of back payments to table, but I can start making on time payments, get paid a little bit extra. He literally even outlined this in the hardship letter. Mike, I'm buying this note. So we bought it for 12. The day after we funded on it, I called her up and her name was Sheila. Okay. And William was her name. I'm not gonna say the last names, but I can remember talking to Sheila. She picks up the phone, I say, hello, Sheila, my name is Scott Carson. I'm the Verse Acid Fund. I'm calling about your property. And she's like, oh, my God. Yeah, so, well, we just bought your notes. Like, oh, you could literally just like, oh, I have to go take this again. And I like, listen, I understand you've been trying to do loan models for a while. She's like, yeah, yeah. I said, it looks like your loan's been sold like four times in five years. She's like, yeah. I said, first of all, how is your husband doing? How is William doing? Is he back to work? She's like, oh, you actually read my hardship letter. I'm like, yes, I did. Is he back to work? Yes. Okay. I said, this is going to be a good day for you. She's like, oh, really? I'm like, you owe 60. The house is 36. We know you owe 60 because you pulled a little cash out when the value went up a little bit, you know, south. It's a little white house, you know. I said what I said. I said, this is gonna be a good day. Can you start paying at 452amonth? She's like, yes, I could do that. Can you bring five grand to the table? You know, it's a full year. She's behind by five years. She was like, oh, I can't bring five grand. So can you bring 2, 500 to the table? Yeah, like, I can do that. I said, can you pay an additional 200 per month on top of your 452? And she's like, yes, I can do that. I said, okay, this is what we're going to do. You bring 2,500 to the table to my attorney's office about an hour north, hour south of you, you're going to start making a 652 payment for the next year. After 12 months of on time payments, we're going to appraise your property and we're going to reduce what you owe down to the true value. So if it goes from 30, if it goes from 36 to 30, I'll drop your balance to 30. If it goes from 36 to 45, you know, we'll drop it from 60 down to, you know, 45 for us. It will even take off from that negative equity. Are you serious? She's like, yeah. And here's the kicker for you, Sheila. You do this on time for 12 months, I'm going to drop your interest rate from 9.9% to zero. She's like, what are you talking about? I said zero. And we want make on time payments for 12 months, and we'll drop it down because that way you'll have the house paid off in 72 months instead of 33 years. And I didn't want to own this $36,000 asset, right? But I wanted to make it good. So if you figure the numbers, I paid 12 grand, I basically got 90% of my money back in that first year. And then she paid on time for six years, never missed a payment, and she was gonna be like a day late. She would call me, like, sheila, you don't have to call me. Call the servicing company who you're mailing the checks to. And 12 months, you know, after we modified, dropped it to zero, it was like around Christmas time, I got a Christmas card from her and her family. There's a picture of the whole family. And I noticed that one of her daughters in there had a baby.

Okay.

And she's like, we just want to say thank you for allowing us to stay in the house and working with us. Our daughter, our oldest daughter, who was he raised here, had her first child and we named it Carson after.

No, come on. Yeah, dude, Seriously, did that get you teared up, bro? Oh, my God.

Every time I tell, I'm like, chills.

Yeah. Dude, that's crazy.

You know, we have the ability to help people stay in their houses, and we prefer that I want to. About 70 of the time, we keep people in the house. I mean, look, I'm a capitalist pig just like everybody else. I want to make a good return. Okay. You know, I made 85% year one on that deal with Sheila, and I think I made like 20% going forward after that for six. Yeah, she made a ton of money. I mean, there's one lady who was a single mom of four kids in Cleveland. Her house was a pos. I mean, I didn't want to own it, but her husband left her and all this stuff. She's trying to raise four kids, but trying to go to, like, nursing school.

Okay.

And so we literally, like, we forgave her 20 grand of what she owed on this property and just deeded her the property. The release of lien. I says, merry Christmas, Happy New Year. You know, I paid like a grand for it because it's part of a bulk deal, but I'll just. I'll just write that off. I mean, I'm not worried about that. I don't want to own that and.

Right.

You know, that's the beautiful thing about helping people now. Sometimes people are just scumbags. We bought one down in near Miami a couple years back. House was worth when we bought about a million. They owed 1.2 on it. They hadn't paid in four years. You know, doing every crazy trick in the book they could to delay the foreclosure process because Florida is about a 12 month process of foreclosing a good time. Right. Okay, well, guess we bought this note at 440. Okay. Borrower playing tricks. Then Covid kicked in that delayed foreclosures. Yeah, that was a big delay. That kind of. We didn't expect that. So it took us another two years to foreclose, two and a half years to foreclose. We finally, we foreclosed. We took the property back. They'd moved out. It was immaculate property. But they about took about $50,000 worth of rehab, dupliances and some other stuff. But we listed it for 1.25. We sold it for 1.1 with an offer basically in 10 days. And when you add in legal fees of two years and going back to shenanigans, our cost basis was closer to about 800 on that.

Oh, my goodness.

So still a very Good day. Yeah, you know, and stuff like that. And you got to expect that you start dealing higher valued assets, borrowers are going to hire attorneys to delay foreclosures, and you just have to expect that. Yeah, we like to find that the really the cookie cutter, the best bang for your buck is going to be from that really $100,000 up to about 250 price range for the most part. If you want to turn into cash flow, I mean, you can buy stuff less than that contract for deeds. We buy a lot of those as well, too. For cash, sure. But really, anything above that, you're probably gonna have to foreclose for the most part. Okay.

Okay, got it.

Wow.

Man, that is crazy. So you guys bought it for what did you say, 440 on that 1.41 and you rack and you racked up. What was that? Almost like 350,000.

Well, I take that back. Our payoff was that because we did have an investor funded to the deal at 12%. So he funded the deal and that was with the interest. But we did have over roughly, golly, we had 75 to $100,000 in attorney fees for just holding and go on that route during the process.

So.

But we knew that. I was like, when we buy this, this guy is going to probably drag it out another two years. And then kicked in. I was like, oh, thanks, God. But we knew we bought it, right. You know, like, okay, I'm, I'm willing. You know, we had the attorney review all the legal beforehand. So they said, yeah, this is guy's just a creep. Just gonna drag it out. He's gonna play on it. You know, he showed up, said he was dying of cancer. Then he showed up to the judge and said he didn't speak any English, which was, you know, when she was out in the, in the, in the lobby speaking fluent English, you know, there's some scumbags out there. I don't mind foreclosing on those folks.

But yeah, for sure. Talk about real quick. I want to go into short sales real quick. So can you. First of all, for the audience that is not familiar with short sales? These were big back in 2010-2016. Really? Yeah, we don't really see much of them anymore. But can you just explain what is a short sale in general terms?

Yeah, so short sales, I mean, we're starting to see more come back, though, in different markets because of values kind of, you know, depreciating a little bit or markets kind of coming back, you know, like Austin, we've Had a little bit of, they say a crash, but its values kind of dropped down 5, 10% in negative growth the last year or two. Okay. Because the market. But a short sale is where a borrower owes more on their property than the property's worth. So let's just go back to that same number we gave. So What? It's a $200,000 house. That's what the value is right now. If they haven't paid in a year or maybe the market dropped, maybe they owe 225. Okay. And they don't have the 25 grand and change in their pockets to pay at closing to sell that property. Right. Always got to figure about 9 to 10% for closing costs and commissions on a property anyway.

Yep, Yep.

So if we bought that note at 100. Okay. I'm the bank. I can kind of help determine the short. You know, me taking a short really isn't me taking a short. But a short sale is where the borrower or the. It works with a realtor to go to the lender and say, hey, borrower's in trouble. Borrower can't pay. We'd like to try to sell this property below what's owed on a technical kind of short. Right. So the lender has to approve. You often see these lists in the email list as third party approval required. They should be listed no more at 85, 90 cents of the dollar because you want to get foot traffic in, you know, people looking at it. If they're going to have to wait around for a short sale to take place for 90 days of going back and forth negotiations. You want to do the discount Me, if I get, you know, I buy a note and I see it's listed for sale, or the bar wants to list it, I'll buy knowing, okay, I bought it at 100. Okay, I'll let, I'll let you list it for 180. It's worth 200. I'll let you list it for180. Let's get multiple bids to bid it up to 190. 195. Yeah. I'll gladly take a short of 30k, 40k off what's owed because I know I'm going to make 70, 80 in the back end.

What's interesting is I think you're playing chess when, when other people are playing checkers here with this. Because where I'm going with this is we, we run into this, you know, not often, but I would say at least once a quarter, maybe twice a quarter. One of our, one of our Sellers is in a predicament where they owe. We just had one down in the Milwaukee area. They owed 170. We put it out to the buyers list. Just trying to help them more than anything for like, I think it was like 175. Like our normal spread on. On deals is 20 plus. We're not trying to take anything less. But this, we're like, let's just see if we can. Couldn't get anybody to buy it at those numbers. We had it set up that they could do subject to so they could take over the mortgage, catch them up on payments. Like we had all these options. Right. Trying to help these people out. Nobody was biting.

Right.

So we went to a realtor that we know that does some short sale negotiations and they tried and the bank wasn't willing to do really much on it. Where do you know you're gonna. I don't remember. I don't remember. But what I think is interesting is you're. You're kind of bypassing that step. It seems like of let's go through the realtor to try to negotiate with the. And try to do a short sale here on the borrower's behalf. And you're going to the bank and providing value and saying, hey, you've got this distressed asset. I'll take it off your plate for you at this versus just them going through this. Because most of the short sales I've run into is like if you're less than 80% of what they perceive the value at, they're not willing to play ball. Where you're getting them at 40 to 60%. It sounds like doing it just varies.

Yeah. Vendors on a lender by lender basis, a ton of equity. We're not going to get it. We'll probably got to come in at 90 cents of what's owed, even if there's a ton of equity.

Okay.

You know that we don't chase equity a lot of times now. We did have. We had one deal recently. Borrower was in the house. Little old lady been in the house by herself for 15 years. House was worth 450. She only owed like 175.

Okay.

And I think we paid like 125, 150 for the note. Still a pretty good deal in Texas. We can foreclose quickly. Okay. I'm like, well, if we foreclose, we're gonna be 175. That's about 50k at, you know, before we pay our investors off. I said we're probably gonna get out by the auction there's no way we're gonna end up taking this asset back at 450, which would be great because we could, yeah, make a ton. So what we did is we bought the note, we reached out to the bar, said, hey, what do you want to do? Do you want to stay? Do you want to go? She's like, well, I don't want to stay, but I'm worried, You know, I. You know, I don't want to nestle. I mean, she's old enough. She could have done a complete reverse mortgage to stayed in the house. Okay. After that, we could have stayed. We hadn't offered that. Didn't want to do that. I said, okay, what if we do a friendly foreclosure? She goes, what do you mean by that? I said, how about we give you some cash to walk? So we avoid it going to the foreclosure auction and getting outbid and somebody else making the lion share the profit. So she's like, what do you have in mind? I said, well, we went back to heat and hot a little bit. So how about we give you 75 grand to sign the property over and walk away? And she's like, that. That would be great. So we gave her a grand assigned, got her out of the house, got her into a. An apartment. She still had some money and some friends. We got into that. Then since we were the bank, she deeded the property back to us. So now we'd have to worry about foreclosing because we did a friendly foreclosure with her.

Okay.

Put 20 grand, rehab, paint, carpet, new appliances, and listed it for 450. And it got a full price offer in seven days. Oh, my. So we ended up making more money on the. On the back end side of that versus just the 50 grand. And we actually did some good, gave her some cash because. Right, here's the thing. Not everybody would have done that. Most people just foreclosed. And she wouldn't probably not gotten anything at the auction. Right. And run that risk. And this way, we were able to help a lady out make some lemonade out of lemons. You know what I mean?

Yeah, man. I love it. Because what you're able to do is everybody's winning. That's always. What I always say is a great real estate transaction was everybody leaves that. That table feeling like they all won, right? In some aspects, right? Nobody's feeling like they got taken advantage of or anything like that. And. And in our business, in the wholesale business, you know, that can sometimes some. Some. You know, you meet with the sellers, then they get sad or they. Somebody talks to them and then they want more money and yada, yada. And that's when sometimes our deals can, can get a little messy. But typically these people are thanking us up and down at the closing table and they're excited and we're excited. And sometimes real estate agents that I talk to, they think, you know, we're the scum of the earth and we're ambulance chasers and all this stuff. They don't understand. They don't get to see these sellers in tears when they're getting this problem property off their plate and they didn't have to go through the traditional route and that kind of thing. And you're doing the same thing with notes here. It sounds like you're able to come into a position where somebody's stressed out of their mind about getting foreclosed on and what it's going to do to their credit and are they ever going to be able to get a place and blah, blah. And you're able to help keep a lot of these people in their houses and make a profit for you and your investors.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, if you think about what damage a foreclosure does not only to a block, but a market, it really deprecates the whole, you know, the whole block. $10,000 in value on a foreclosure or more, depending on what happens at the auction. So we're able to kind of keep that up, you know? Yeah. You know, if instead of foreclosing, we can still do a friendly foreclosure and then the price isn't listed anywhere, and then selling it at full value to reclaimed it up boosts the actual economy, boost the valuation and stuff like that. But there's still people that, you know, we still have to foreclose on 25, 30 of the time. They don't want to work with us. They don't want to communicate. I had a guy just recently called me the week after the foreclosure auction. Isn't it always when people call off a foreclosure list, they call the week after the auction, hey, I need help. It's too late now.

I want to work with you. It's like, oh, buddy, what are you doing late? Yeah.

I'm like, man, you didn't communicate with us for two years. I said, I'm not, you know, I don't feel sorry for you. Well, I got little kids. I'm like, I'm sorry, man. I don't Feel sorry for it. We sent out door knockers. We, you know, flew a plane by. Please call us at this number.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, unfortunately, I mean, and that's the thing is too, people always ask me, what, what does the market foretell? Are we going to see more foreclosures? You're not going to see foreclosures. You're going to see more things where banks are selling the portfolios of the debt off to investors like me because they don't want to necessarily be on the hook for the foreclosures and it costs them a lot more to rehab the property. It's vacant for a while. A vacant property is a non performing asset on a bank's books. Banks don't really want to own foreclosures. Whether you believe it or not.

They learned that in 08. They don't.

Oh yeah, they're not, they don't want to own them. Yeah. Nope, they do not want to own them. Calling the bank saying, I want to buy Arias, they're just going to send you to a voicemail box. But if you reach out to the right department of the banks, like I said and said, hey, I want to buy your non performing notes for my own portfolio. I mean, you can wholesale notes just like you wholesale real estate too. It's very simple. Yeah, but it's all about buying for your own investment. And then the banks actually like to hear you say, hey, we're trying to keep people in their houses. If they won't play ball, obviously we'll foreclose and go that route. But since we're kind of that smaller war dogs living on crumbs kind of mentality aspect, we have a lot more flexibility in what we can do and some more options that we can offer the bar to try to work with them.

Yeah, that's awesome, Scott. Well, if somebody wanted to get some help on this stuff, Scott, because this is awesome. Like this podcast has been great. It's one of my favorite episodes so far because I'm learning a ton about this, this whole different world in real estate. What would I mean, I know you offer some. You, you have Monday nights. Are you still doing the Monday night?

Yeah, we've got, we've got a ton of videos. We've got the number one YouTube channel, number one podcast out there with a no closure show, stuff like that. We did, we broke down 187notes last Monday night. Wow. For people to take a look. We're only one of the few people out there that actually will like bring up A tape and literally go through, hey, here's where the deals are, here's the duds. Avoid this and avoid that. We've got a free course, a free three and a half hour course for you to learn about the basics of note investing for. You should just go to noteweekend.com sweet. You can register, it'll send you the replay. I guess you just taught it live this last Saturday for three hours to people on how to find fun and flip these deals. And then of course we have, you know, quarterly classes and coaching and stuff like that.

But awesome.

You know, if you've got, if you really like this, you can use your ira, you can use opm. Don't let what you have or don't have in your checking or savings account stop you from doing because there's a lot of good deals out there. And you and I both know, Corey, we wouldn't be where we're at if we just tried to use only our money over the years. Right? You know? Yeah. Use other people's money. So.

That's right. That's right. I mean I think that's such a great, great point to make because I think that's one of the limiting Factors when for 99% of people not we are, we don't have rich uncles who gave us a bunch of cash and you know, we weren't blessed with trust funds. It's all self made. And you gotta realize like I wouldn't own over a hundred doors just with cash that I had sitting in the bank account. Doesn't happen without using private money or leverage or creative financing or community banks that'll fund it all. Like there's a million different ways to do it. So if you've got grit and you've got a strong intensity to change your life, it's all about getting connected with the right people who've already done this before. And Scott's one right here that we've, we're bringing to you guys today on the Wisconsin investor that he can help you guys and guide you. And I'm definitely going to be going out there to noteweekend.com and I'm going to be getting myself that little three and a half hour course and well.

You and I have already talked. Anything I see up in your neck of the woods, Green Bay, Wisconsin or Milwaukee, I'm gonna shoot it to you.

Let's go buddy.

And, and partner up with you on some of these.

Let's go. Let's do a little case study then Scott, we'll promote that baby out to the audiences and show them how we do it. Go from zero to one. Let's do it, man. If somebody wanted to get in touch with you, Scott, is what's the best way for them to reach out to you if. If they have questions on this or have more information? Is it go to the YouTube channel? Is it what.

What's the best way to go to our website? WeClosenotes.com is always the easy spot there. Book a call directly on my calendar at. On there by going. Just booking a call with me or going to talkwithscottcarson.com they'll take you directly my calendar and book a phone call. And I'm always glad to let you pick my brain for 30 minutes or ask me questions. And, you know, it's. It's a great thing. It's not for everybody. I'll tell you that right now. If you're an engineer and have an engineering mindset, you might freak out all the different opportunities, you know, and structure stuff like that. You know, the, the big, the riskiest part of note investing is making sure you're buying the right price. Never buy a note you don't want to end up owning, okay? Always check taxes, Always check title. If you do those things, you're going to be pretty well off because most times you're buying at a discount. Worst case, you sell the note to somebody else and get paid back and moved on there. People screw up because they come from, I got to do everything myself. I got to handle the workout. I got to try to handle the foreclosure. I'm like, no, no. Pay the 90 bucks a month to service or pay the attorney. They're two grand or whatever. Let them foreclose and let's move on. You don't run a charity. You donate to charities because people will try to drag this out by, oh, you don't want to foreclose on me. Yes, I do. You know, pay you. No, stay. You know what I mean?

I love it, man.

Well, we've.

We've been talking a lot on the, on the, on the recordings lately about one of my favorite books, who, not how. And that's what it sounds like. As we were talking. I'm like, well, this sounds like a who thing. I could get a va. You know, my. My brain is going like, I could get a VA to get all the basic stuff. Then all I got to do is make the final decision. Then we got a servicing company, attorney title company. Like, it's just a who thing. It's just Getting your team set up. And I'm sure you can help structure that for anybody who's interested in. So it's pretty easy. Scott, we always wrap up with a.

With.

With a little fun question here. I know I prepped you a little before this because you're from Austin, Texas, but you did have a pretty good one when I asked you the final question. The favorite place to visit or Wisconsin tradition? Tell the audience a little bit about what you got here, man.

So my family's originally from the land of 10,000, likes your neighbor, you know, to the west, Minnesota. You know, I was born in Rochester and Stuartville and stuff like that. I'm actually going back up there here in a couple weeks. But one of my favorite memories as a young kid, I love apples, I love fruit. Is going to an apple festival right on the border. We're in Wisconsin, some city named Last Valley. You mentioned it. And I could.

I think Hudson. I think Hudson Valley.

Hudson Valley, yeah. And I remember walking through this apple festival and there's literally like hundreds of booths of apples. Was like, I remember eating so many apples, I got sick on the way home and stuff like that. But, you know, my mom and I got an uncle that lives in Wisconsin. And, you know, there's nothing beats good cheese curds. It's just one of the great things when you get a good cheese curd.

Yes.

Up there, the milk tastes different. You know, just the greenness of it. Farmers in the Dairyland up there are the salt of the earth. We got to protect, folks.

I agree 100%. I agree. Guys, if you got some value out of this and you want to. Want to help the audience or help other people, people get started in real estate. Share the episode. Guys, go out, like, follow Scott as well. I mean, he's got tons of great, like, if. If you don't know where to start. This guy's got a ton of content he's cranking out. So you will not fall short of any kind of education gap here. If you follow Scott. So go follow him on his different platforms and on the. On the links that he gave us. We'll put all those in the show notes as well. So if you. If you forgot all those, we'll have those in there. And then if you guys share this episode, remember that's going to help you guys raise private money. It's going to help people tell you what you're into. They're going to know you're into real estate investing, and you're going to start more conversations. That is ultimately Going to help you build your network out there. So if you're not ready to get on the buyer's list, like I mentioned at the start, but you do want to just start having some conversations like this, you know, obviously Scott made a generous offer today. We're also willing to help have some conversations about how to help you get started here in Wisconsin on some of your real estate investing. You can just go to the Wisconsin discountproperties.com website. Just go to the contact us page and or give us a call on the website on top and we'd be happy to have that conversation if you're not quite ready to start evaluating deals yet. Scott, this has been awesome, man. I appreciate you being on, brother. Any last words for the audience here before we roll?

Just get out for your ass and take some action, you know, no matter what it is, reach out. Those are the most successful are the ones that are most giving of their time to help. Sure. You make sure that you avoid the pitfalls or the hurdles that we hit when we get started. Yep.

Awesome, buddy. Appreciate you being on. Thanks guys for listening. We'll see you on the next episode. Hey, this has been another episode of the Wisconsin Investor. Thanks for tuning in. If you got some value out of the show, please go like rate, subscribe, share, do all that fun stuff. And if you're new to investing in Wisconsin and you want to have a conversation with somebody from our team, we would love to have that conversation with you. To do that, just go to our website, Wisconsin discountproperties.com hit the contact, contact us for them. Put a little bit of your info in there and somebody from our team will reach out and have a conversation, hopefully help you start moving forward in your investing journey here in Wisconsin. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you on the next episode.

Hey real estate investors, this is Scott Carson. I'm known across the country as the note guy and I've been an active note investor focused primarily on the niche of non performing US distressed mortgage notes on residential commercial properties for almost 20 years now. My company is weclose notes.com and I know there's a lot of different things when it comes to the note world. Are you buying performing notes? Are you buying owner finance notes? Are you buying institutional debt? Like I would focus on? Are you buying first seconds contract for needs? There's a lot of questions and it can be very confusing about what you can or cannot do. So one of the great things that we've hosted for the last couple years that we do on just about a regular monthly basis is we host our one day class called Note Weekend. If you go to noteweekend.com you can register for a free three and a half hour class. We'll talk to you and share with you how you find fun and flip non performing notes. And yes, you can buy non performing notes from banks, hedge funds and a variety of different hard money lenders out there for your own portfolio. No, you don't have to have millions of dollars to dive into the non performing note game. We've got students that have bought plenty of deals with 2530 grand getting their ball rolling using their self directed IRA who are tired of dealing with toilets, tennis trash, desks, tired of battling contractors and GCs to get properties rehabbed. We all know the market is changing and while it may not be like 2008, 9 and 10 again, it we do see a lot of distressed debt out there on both the residential and the commercial side. So if you're thinking about diving into the note game, becoming a note investor, a lean lord as you'd like to say, versus a landlord, or you just want to figure out what it is about the sexy side of real estate in the note space, well check it out. Noteweekend.com doesn't cost you anything. We host it live usually the first or second Saturday of each month. You can go today. Register at the website noteweeking.com Register for the next live class we host. You'll get sent a replay to the previous class so you can start learning about the note business today. No questions asked, no credit card needed. This is a great way for you to dip your toes in the water and see if it's warm because I guarantee going through Art three one day class. You want to dive into the deep end and become a note investor. So check it out. Noteweekin.com you can also go to our website. We close notes.com check out our podcast. Check out our YouTube number one YouTube channel. We are here to help support you whether you're experienced investor or you're brand new investing Note weekend is a great place for you to get the ball rolling. People often say we cover more in our three hour class than most people cover in their three day class. So check it out. Love to have you be part of our note family but get signed up today@noteweekend.com thanks and have a great day.