Podcast – Distressed Pro

Raising capital for your next note investment can be hard, that’s why on this episode, we have Paige Panzarello to teach us how she finds funding for herself and her clients.

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Podcast Audio:

Brecht Palombo: In today’s episode of the Distressed Pro Professional Podcast Series, I speak with Paige Panzarello. Boy, that’s a lot of Ps I just had in that whole sentence, about raising money, about raising capital.
Paige has raised a lot of money and she’s been through the whole cycle. Started back early in the late ’90s and so has been in real estate and in notes for over 20 years, Went through the global financial and housing crisis here in the US. She emerged with a very big healthy business, and in this episode today, she walks us through a lot of the considerations, including some tactics and strategy for raising money.

Brecht Palombo: We go deep in on that, I hope this is going to be really helpful for you. I think you’re going to learn a lot and just pay attention to what we talk about in here, because if you are thinking about getting out there, doing the work to find the deals, and you’re going to be raising some money. Then this episode is for you. All right, so enjoy and here’s Paige.

Brecht Palombo: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Distressed Pro Professional Podcast Series. Today I’m very happy to have Paige Panzarello here from CashflowChick.com.
Paige is going to talk to us about raising money. Who reached out to me over there, somebody reached out to me a little while back, and its taken us a while to connect, but I’m really happy that we did. Paige I understand you raised a lot of money. Is that right?

Paige Panzarello: I have, I have. Yeah, I’ve been really fortunate Brecht because I have over my career as a real estate investor, but specifically in the last, you know, since I got into the note space. I’ve been very blessed that I’ve been able to raise quite a bit of capital.

Brecht Palombo: Yeah, cool. Tell me a little bit about your trajectory as a investor. What brought you here today, and if you could just walk us through. I know a lot of times, people here this and they think, “Oh, well she was able to do this, because she had this sort of benefit that nobody else that. You know, that’s why she’s special and I can’t do it. That’s going to be my excuse.” If you could just take is from what your beginnings, so that people understand how you’re here today.

Paige Panzarello: Absolutely. Okay, I’m not special, I can tell you that. In that, I didn’t have any ... I started my real estate investing career over 20 years ago. And kind of by virtue, by default. I was thrown into the deep end of the pool by knowing nothing about real estate investing. My grandmother past away and she had a very large estate. She had some commercial property, she had some townhome units. We had a sewer treatment plant, and then we had some land.

Paige Panzarello: Of course I was quite young, and I went off to Arizona ’cause that’s where a portion of the estate was. The townhomes, the sewer treatment plant and the land. The estate was about four million in debt. I actually started my real estate investing career in the hole. If I can do it, anybody can do it, no excuses.

Paige Panzarello: I literally knew nothing. I very quickly realized, that because I’m a very helpful person, I love to help people, that’s one of my passions. I realized very quickly that I was not a good property manager, because I have a really big heart and everybody has a story. I put property management in place, and then I really started surrounding myself with people that had the answers that I sought. I was able to kind of parlay all of that, within three years we turned the properties around. I got us out of the whole, we were back in the black in three years which was great.

Paige Panzarello: Yep, we sold the sewer treatment plant, we leveraged. And then we started selling the townhome units. I realized that I really want to build on the land, and my family really wanted no part of that. I ended up buying the corporation, and I started my own construction company knowing nothing about construction.
This is the late ’90s, early 2000’s, and we started expanding and growing. I brought in a qualifying party, we grew in three years to 36 employees. We were building everything, we held all of our licenses except HBAC and roofing. And we didn’t hold those because the insurance was too high.

Paige Panzarello: But you know, we were rocking and rolling, we were really building. As you know Brecht, that was yo...

Due Diligence is the second most time-consuming part of the note investment business (right after finding them). Scrubbing tapes and verifying mortgage details can take many hours to complete and add days to your investment process. On today’s podcast you will find out how to successfully automate that entire process

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Podcast Audio:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/dp-site-files/audio/Note+Investing+Club.mp3

Transcript:

Brecht Palombo: Welcome back everybody to another episode in the Distressed Pro Professional Interview series. Today I have Liz Brumer-Smith and if you’ll just give me a moment, I’m going to get her profile right here. She’s the principal at Seasoned Funding, LLC, a privately funded real estate investment and note buying company, who specializes in finding first lien, residential, non-performing notes for the company’s portfolio. They purchase one-offs and small and mid size pools nationwide with preference in Midwest, Southeast, and Florida. Liz, you’ve been doing this for how many years?

Liz Brumer-Smith: We’re going to seven years pretty soon.

Brecht Palombo: Wow. Going on to seven years, and over that time, Liz has developed some systems for her business, like any good entrepreneur should. And today she’s going to share one of those with us. In fact, she teaches more about this, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, but she’s going to share with us how to automate your due diligence. And I don’t want to hold everything up here. I’m going to ask you, Liz, if you would just go ahead and let’s dive into it. I’m really looking forward to this. We hear a lot about folks who are looking for due diligence information. It’s one of the things they think, “Well, geez. If I ... ” We really focus on helping people find the notes, but a lot of people get nervous and say, “Well, after I find it, then what?” And, hopefully, this right here will help to answer that for them. I’m really looking forward to it.

Liz Brumer-Smith: Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and to be able to share the systems I’ve created for my business and hopefully be able to help other note investors improve their systems, especially in regards to due diligence.

Brecht Palombo: Cool.

Liz Brumer-Smith: I’m going to share my screen with you guys, and this presentation will be available. We’re gonna have lots of information that I’m going over. As you’re watching or listening to this, please make sure to take note, and at the end, I will also give you more resources for a place you can get more information about this entire process.

Brecht Palombo: Cool.

Liz Brumer-Smith: Great. Okay. Today I am going to be talking about automating your due diligence. I have two companies that weren’t quite mentioned in the intro, and that’s because we were going to introduce them here. Note Investing Club and tapetechs.com are both of my due diligence support systems, or the programs that help you and other note investors with their due diligence. I’ll be talking about the difference between the two, but just so you understand what those two companies are, they are companies for due diligence.

Liz Brumer-Smith: This is me, Liz Brumer-Smith. I am the owner of Note Investing Club, Tape Techs, and I obviously am a note investor myself. I purchase non-performing notes and have purchased them for about six years, almost seven years now, and like he mentioned before, like Brecht mentioned before, we do purchase nationwide.

Liz Brumer-Smith: I am a full time note investor. I was previously a kindergarten teacher. If a little of my old teaching habits come out in today’s presentation, forgive me, but hopefully it’ll actually be an advantage, making this easy to digest and understand as I move forward. I do now also teach how to invest in non-performing notes. We offer an online program with two fellow note investors, Kimberly Banks Fawcett and Chase Thompson, at Note Investing Academy. Let’s get started with due diligence.

Brecht Palombo: Let me just say ... Let me jump in here for one minute, Liz, and just say that I’m going to go ahead, I’m going to put my side on mute so we don’t have any background noise. I want to bring up ... Liz, is it okay that we mention that you’re traveling the country full time?

Liz Brumer-Smith: Oh, of course.

Brecht Palombo: I think this is something that we should just bring up here because a lot of times, people start thinking about the note business. I get a lot of questions like, “Can I do this from anywhere? Can I...

In this episode of the Distressedpro.com Professional Podcast series, Bill Mencarow will teach you how to get started with note investing for retirement and long term wealth building. Bill is an experienced note investor and in this interview, he talks about how you can approach note investing to maximize your returns for your retirement.

Transcript:

Brecht Palombo: Welcome back everybody to another episode in the DistressedPro Professional Podcast Series. Today, I’m very happy to have Bill Mencarow.

Brecht Palombo: On the podcast, he is, as far as I know, the authority on notes and note investing. When I first started ... Geeze Bill, how long have you been in business with Paper Source?

Bill Mencarow: Paper Source was started in July of 1987.

Brecht Palombo: Wow.

Bill Mencarow: Yeah I had just left Capitol Hill at that point, I was working as a congressional staff in the U.S. House of Representatives for quite a few years and realized that you get old in that job real fast and I had done everything I wanted to do on the Hill.

And so I was kind of between jobs, didn’t know what I wanted to do and so I had been investing in, I bought a piece of, a single family house when I worked on the Hill, as an investment. And I had all sorts of trouble with tenants. I didn’t know how to be a landlord at all and didn’t have very deep pockets. So I started reading all I could and going to seminars on landlording and I met people there who invested in notes. And this was all new to me, so that’s how I got started in the early ’80s.

And then when I, going back there for a minute, when I left Capitol Hill, I thought, well there’s no newsletter on notes. A lot on real estate but nothing about notes. So I started that with my wife Allison, out of our guest bedroom and it kind of took off. I thought it would just be a temporary thing, just to have some fun with and try to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up. And it just took off from there.

Now we have a monthly publication, we’ve published every month since 1987. It’s about a 14-page publication on notes. It covers all aspects of it, new laws, court decisions, legal things going on, how to negotiate, what to do, how to find the notes, all those kind of things.

And we have an annual convention. The first one that was ever started for the note industry and that’s at the end of April every year in Las Vegas. And we sponsor another seminar, a small boutique kind of a seminar on notes each year.

In fact, we have one coming up in June in San Antonio, Texas. Tom Henderson, who is a very well known, very well respected note teacher, is going to be teaching a two-day class for us. So if people are interested in that, that’s at papersourceseminars.com and we can talk about that later if you want.

Brecht Palombo: Great. Well so when I first even learned that an individual could purchase a note, which is probably 11 or 12 years ago now, and I set out to learn a little something about it, your site was one of the first things that I found and I immediately subscribed to your newsletter. In fact, kept a three ringed binder with all the back issues so I could go back in there and read through them because it really is... You know the panel of experts that you have there and the fact that it reliably comes out every month and always has good information and it really sets a bar, I think, for note investor information. You really provide a lot and it’s very very reasonably priced. It’s 100-something bucks a year, maybe, or something like that for your-

Bill Mencarow: I wish it was that much. It’s $79.

Brecht Palombo: $79 a year. A steal at any price. It is excellent. So, I thank you for providing that and it was really one of the first places where I, like I said, where I started to learn anything about notes. Having come from the real estate side and of course, my initial experience with notes was mostly foreclosing on them and cleaning them up.

And so that’s not what we’re going to talk about today though. I think what I’d love to hear today is, as somebody who’s been investing in notes and has been in this industry for as long as you have as really a pioneer in it and an authority, I’d be interested just to talk with you a little bit about how my audience can get started with note investing. Because the way a lot of folks find us, sometimes they find us because they are, they’ve already been introduced to notes and they’ve heard something about nonperforming notes and now they wa...

Junior mortgage notes or seconds can be a cheap way to source notes in the current frothy market if you use the right buying criteria. On today’s podcast episode, Sándor Lau will be sharing his strategy for buying junior liens and a few tips on what to avoid when looking at seconds.

Podcast Audio:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/distressedpro-files/podcasts/Sandor-Lau-Seconds.mp3

Noted Financial

Get $50 Off The PaperSource Symposium using the coupon code: “SANDOR”

Transcript:

Brecht Palombo: Welcome back everybody, to another episode of the DistressedPro Professional podcast series. I’m here with Sandor Lau. Did I say that right?

Sándor Lau: It’s Sándor. Like Sean Connery walks in the door. Or, you can remember Sándor, Lord of Gondor, if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan.

Brecht Palombo: Oh, okay. All right. Sándor Lau.

Sándor Lau: Yes.

Brecht Palombo: Now I’ve got it. All right, thanks. And I asked Sándor to be on here today because it was a Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and I had this wild spike in my traffic. We had our organic traffic tripled, almost quadrupled on a single day. And I said, “Wow, everything I’ve been working on has finally come to fruition.”

But in fact, what had happened was I looked, and you were written up in the Wall Street Journal. You were in the Wall Street Journal, and whatever keywords were in that article, people went to Google them and searched them, and just blew up the traffic on my site. And then I had to ... I actually didn’t have the membership, I had to buy a subscription to the Journal, just that day, to get in there to read your article.

Sándor Lau: Rupert Murdoch and the shareholders thank you.

Brecht Palombo: Ought to thank you, I guess. And so I went and I found Sándor, and invited him on here to talk to us about what all the buzz was about, there. And hopefully to educate us a little bit on how he’s doing what he’s doing and why.

Brecht Palombo: So can you tell us a little bit about your background in this, and how you came to be featured in the Journal?

Sándor Lau: So, yeah. It was 2007, beginning of the recession before really the data had come in. I had come back to the United States from New Zealand, where I had gone to grad school and had a career as a filmmaker, and realized, “Oh!” The artist part is really great. The starring part, not so great.

Brecht Palombo: That was good, yep.

Sándor Lau: So I read up, tired to figure out what I could do to build a financial future, and I realized: Real estate. This is it. I read all these investing books, I tried to find one that told you about the stock that pays rent, but I couldn’t find a single one. So I realized, this is my thing. I got a regular job, so I can get a W2 and invest in real estate and get loans.

Brecht Palombo: Yeah.

Sándor Lau: And realized that collecting rent is a little bit harder than it was described in the books.

Brecht Palombo: Right.

Sándor Lau: So I said, “Okay, there has to be a better way.” Changing the world and changing other people is way too hard, but changing yourself in adapting can yield great results. So I’m a voracious reader. I’m always reading books about business, investing. And I read this book that had one paragraph in the entire book. It says, “Oh yeah, instead of ... ” It was about buying foreclosures, or you could just invest in those. Then I’m like, “Oh, doin’ that.” I read all the books I could find, publicly available, at the time, which was three.

Brecht Palombo: Yeah.

Sándor Lau: And one of ’em had the author’s post office box in Florida, and one of ’em that’s got an email. I’m like, “I wanna learn. Will you teach me?” He was like, “No, but go to the Paper Source Conference and learn from the people there.”

Sándor Lau: And I did. That was 2013. I was still in a rough spot myself. I had to pay all these mortgages, fix things when tenants break and steal things, mess with the electrical, and then called the city and said, “Oh, look at this. Slumlords providing substandard housing. Look at this electrical that’s all broken.”

Brecht Palombo: Yeah.

Sándor Lau: Among other shenanigans, microwave out the window, naked people running down the hallway.

Brecht Palombo: Oh, perfect.

Sándor Lau: Bodily fluids off the balcony onto the other tenants.

...