The Wisconsin Investor
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. This show is dedicated to helping Wisconsin real estate investors elevate their game. Along with interviews, I'll also dive into hot topics in solo episodes and feature experts from various real estate sectors across Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Investor
How to Fund Every Deal (Even in a Tight Market)
What separates a stuck investor from a scalable one? 💡
It’s not more hustle—it’s smarter capital. This week, we unpack the four funding buckets that fuel every real estate business: HELOCs, private money, community banks, and hard money.
Corey walks through how to stack them for maximum flexibility, minimize risk, and stay competitive in any market. Plus, a real duplex case study that proves—buying right and borrowing smart beats perfect execution every time.
🔥 In This Episode:
💪 • The two levers that matter most: find deals + find money
🏗️ • Why ARV lending and structure can save thin projects
🏦 • How to unlock and guardrail a HELOC at low rates
👨👩👧👦 • Turning family equity into yield with fair spreads
🗣️ • Private money scripts that avoid the awkward ask
📈 • Proof-then-scale strategy for bigger private checks
🤝 • Building credibility through sharing and consistency
🏛️ • Community banks vs. big-box underwriting limits
📊 • Amortization trade-offs + credit union seasoning
💸 • Hard money for speed, reliability, and deal backups
🧱 • The four-bucket capital stack every investor needs
📩 Have a topic idea for our live Zoom series?
Email corey@ibuywi.com
or message us on Facebook.
🎧 Support the show:
⭐ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts (help us hit 60!)
📺 Subscribe + comment on YouTube to grow #TheWisconsinInvestor community.
What's going on, everybody? I'm your host, Corey Raymond, and you're listening or watching the Wisconsin Investor Podcast. So thanks for tuning in, guys. Today, I believe when this drops, this will be about our 60th episode, which is pretty crazy to think about. So for all of you guys who've been tuning in, I really appreciate you guys watching or listening to the show. Uh, it's been a lot of fun getting to interview a lot of great people. And uh, for those of you guys that are reaching out with feedback and giving me some insights, man, it's been awesome. So thank you for that. Keep keep bringing me some of that feedback and some of those insights, and we'll keep bringing you guys great guests and solo episodes and different topics that hopefully can help you guys move the needle forward and help you guys in your real estate investing journey. So, um, one thing I am going to talk about today, I usually do a little sponsorship, as you guys know, on every episode. But today, uh, what I want to talk about is we're looking at starting a little series. Um, we did a few of these a few years ago where we would hop on, I would hop on a Zoom uh like once once a month for a little bit or once a quarter, something like that. And uh we've done some like ask me anything type of episodes of that or events of that. We've done some specific teachings on things. Um, and we're gonna we're looking at, we're exploring starting that up again. But I want to get your guys' feedback. So if you have some specific things you would love to have me on live uh on a Zoom, and you can hop on with some other folks and ask questions and and get some real answers to some things uh that are on your mind as it relates to real estate, um, just send me a message either on Facebook or you can email me coreyc-o-re-y at ibywi.com. And uh I would love to get your feedback on what would be the most impactful for you out there listening to this as you are trying to grow your real estate empire. So um, with that, one of the topics that comes up a lot is financing deals. And so that's what I want to talk about today. So for those of you guys that are out there and you're you're cranking deals left and right, you might tune this one out and say that ah, nothing in here for me. But I'd encourage you to hang on because um, you know, I what I find fascinating is when I have conversations with experienced investors, sometimes they are still using financing options for certain deals that are still a little bit perplexing. And I think if they would restructure some things a little bit in their in their capital stack and the way that they're doing things, they they would probably be able to be more competitive on offers or be more profitable on the deals that they are working. So I'm not gonna go into every detail today, guys, on every type of financing option out there. So, you know, if your feedback for me today would be, oh Corey, you didn't talk about this thing or that thing, like I get it, right? There's gonna be some things I'm not gonna know about or or probably be able to dive into today. Um, but if you're out there listening and I don't talk about something in particular that's been helpful for you financing deals, um, please do let me know that because I'm always looking for um different ways to to finance deals for us or for our for you out there on the buyer's list. So um one of the things we'll talk about today, and you guys hear me, you know, talk about this all the time. Uh the two most important things I think, as anybody's trying to grow their real estate portfolio, there's two things you could do that would really basically ensure your success. Okay, you could mess up in other ways, but if you do these two things, you will be successful in real estate investing. Number one, find good deals. Okay, I think we have the best source of that at Wisconsin Discount Properties. I'm a little biased, okay? But one great source. And we've talked about how to find deals on other episodes. We'll probably do another solo episode at some point just on finding deals. So finding deals and find money. If you could find those two things, and you the cheaper money you can get, the better terms you can get, all that, the more competitive you can be on your offers, uh, the more options you're gonna have, the more deals you're gonna have, and all that sort of stuff. So those two things find deals, find money. Just focus on those two things, and you will be super successful. Now, you're still gonna need property managers, for example, if you're doing rentals, or contractors if you're doing flips, or somebody to run your contracts uh or your projects, or whatever the case is, depending on your level and all that sort of stuff. So those things will come. But if you just focus, like I said, finding deals, find money, you can have the worst contractor in the world. And if you got a good deal and you financed it correctly, you're still gonna make money on it. I'll share a quick example of that. 2018, I had an upper lower duplex in Green Bay that I got from one of our marketing pieces. Came in, old guy in his 90s, tough to negotiate, tough to hear. And he was still self-managing this thing. And um we settled on, I offered him 50,000 for it. The place needed one of everything, right? Uh, I think we had a tenant in it that was like literally dealing drugs like while we were outside talking. There were people coming up to the door, and I'm pretty sure that's what was going down. Um, she had locks on the inside, um sorry, on the outside, so she could lock her her kids in the house, which again, I don't know what their situation is. I'm not here to judge, but anyway, it was a very it was one of those pit bulls you didn't even have any kind of stereotype you can think of. Um, but we bought it at 50,000. Now, at that time, that was that was a really good deal even then. Um it now, if you get something like that today, it's even more credible. It was a three-bedroom each unit, and we had to stick a bunch of money into it. Um, believe we financed that one with commercial financing. So at that time, rates were probably about where they are now. Um, and the the lender that we had financed 80% of the after repair value. So that's something we'll get into a little bit today. And so what that meant is they'll come in, they do an appraisal on what is this thing gonna be once once it's fixed up, and you give them your scope of work. So you tell them, hey, I'm planning to do X, Y, Z to this property, and then they give you a valuation on that. Say, hey, once it's done, this is what it's gonna be worth. And then the lender will say, Great, we'll give you up to 80% of that. Okay. Now, those loans used to be a lot easier to get. They're a little bit tougher these days. All right. So uh we still have commercial lenders that are doing these loans for us on our flip projects and and burrs, uh, but they're just more rare, especially if you're just trying to start out. And so we'll talk about some other financing options of how do you get to that point in a relationship where you can get some lenders to give you these 80% ARV loans because think of that. If you have no money into these things, they're covering your rehab and they're covering your purchase price, you can do a lot of deals, right? I mean, pretty much unlimited until that bank tells you no. So we did this deal, and I had a contractor that had done some work for me on a couple other projects, and he wasn't, you know, maybe the neatest guy or like the the best craftsmanship, but he was cheap and he would get it done, right? Like it was tough, it's still just like the same struggle today, right, as finding good contractors. That was a struggle, right? So I would say if there's three things in real estate you were gonna focus on find deals, find money, find contractors. But um, we had him come in. It was a big, much bigger scope of work than I've ever had him try to tackle previously. And he had other guys that worked for him and stuff like that. So it wasn't like it was just a one-man band in here. And anyway, I didn't do a good job of coming back to check on him enough. He would hit me up for draws and um I would pay the draw, you know, and he'd tell me, hey, yeah, we're at this stage, whatever, and I would do it. And finally I went over there to check on it because it was going long way longer than it should have gone. And I walked in, and I probably at this point had given him like$40,000 in draws, and he had done about$12,000 maybe of work. And of that$12,000, I probably had to have somebody come back and fix a good chunk of it, right? From some of the stuff he didn't do right. So uh would have lost my rear on that had I have been using like hard money, for example, or had I have been um had I had I paid too much for that property. So those two things, again, you'll hear me say that on a lot of episodes, fine deals, find money. And today, so we're gonna focus on the financing piece of that. Okay. So there's several buckets of money. And in uh, for those of you guys who have been listening to the podcast, one of the things we talked about as well is our free burr for beginners course. In the Burr for Beginners course, we break this down in much more detail. You get some scripts on how to reach out to some of these lenders, how to have that conversation, who to talk to, and all that sort of stuff. Um, but we're gonna just break down a few of these here, some of my favorites in um investing. So cash is king in this business, they say, right? Well, if you don't have cash, but you have equity in your house, you can tap that equity with a HELOC. So a home equity line of credit. Not a home equity loan, a home equity line of credit. Okay, and this is one of the most powerful tools in real estate because it's probably one of the most accessible ways for most of our listeners out here to get some quick cash. All right. So one of the lenders I prefer using is Johnson Bank. You can get their information right off our website under the resources tab. We've got a whole lender's list there. And I haven't found any other lenders. So if you guys out here listening to this, have lenders that are doing better deals right now at the time of this recording, please let me know. But if it's your primary residence, they will lend up to 90% loan to value. Okay, so that means if the house is worth$100,000, you owe$50,000, they'll lend up to 90%. So that means they'd give you a line of credit for that additional$40,000 of equity that you have. Okay. Now you can basically be like your own private lender in this case. All right. So you can, you know, take that home equity line of credit and you can use that either for down payments if you have a lender that is not going to do these ARB loans that we talked about a little bit earlier, or you need it for the rehab or whatever you need it for. I mean, you can use it for that. Now, some of the feedback I get from people when I talk about that, and maybe it's a spouse, right? So maybe you're listening to this and you're the gas pedal and your spouse is the break, and they're gonna say, Oh, I don't want to put our house on the line. Okay. And I get that. Like everybody's got different risk tolerances uh in this business. But here's what I would say where a lot of people get in trouble with HELOCs is they see this big wada equity and a lot of access to cash. And pretty soon they're putting a boat on this thing. You know, you're buying all other things, you know, vacations, all this other stuff, and you're basically financing that just like you would a credit card on certain things and certain purchases. Now it's a much cheaper rate than a credit card, but it's still you're paying interest on something you you don't need to pay interest on. It's not going to make you money. Okay. So when you're doing it with real estate, though, think of it like you're paying a private lender this money, but the private lender is you or your line of credit. So, for example, with Johnson Bank as it sits right now, um, they have a 6.49% rate on these HELOCs, which is incredible. Like cheaper than any commercial loan you could get, even. So if you have equity in your house and you have not tapped into that equity yet, I would highly recommend you go do that right now. The other reason I say that is equity in your house, you think about this. You've either paid that money in to pay your loan down, or it's appreciated, or most likely both. Okay. But you can't you can't use that money if it's tied up in your house. It's just stuck in there, right? So you either have to, in other, in a different scenario, you would have to sell your house to get that money unlocked, right? What the HELOC does is it allows you to tap into that money that you've already paid in to this house, or thanks to the appreciation is appreciated. So it's an amazing tool. We highly recommend um people get get access to this. And one thing of comfort, maybe for a spouse, is you don't pay anything on it unless you use it. So, you know, you get access to it. They maybe they would charge you a five$50 a year fee or something. Sometimes they just have like a maintenance fee to keep your line of credit open. But it's a um, otherwise it's a it's like a credit card. You don't pay for it unless you use it type of a situation. So if you have no, you know, you just want to have it there, um, you have access to it. The other thing of security, I actually think getting access to your HELOC gives you more security than if you do not have a HELOC. Okay. Uh something major does happen, let's just say there's a medical emergency, you had to come out of pocket for a bunch of money or something like that, and you don't have buckets of cash sitting around in your bank account, but you got a lot of equity tied up in your house. They always say house rich, money poor, right? Cash poor, whatever you want to call it. The uh the equity now you have access to it. So you don't have to try to now, when you're in a bad spot, say your credit's now going in the tank or you don't have money to like get a bank and show them, oh my gosh, I'm bankable because you're in this difficult predicament. Well, you already proactively tap the equity in your house. So now you have that equity to be able to use in a in a situation if something did go south, not related to real estate necessarily, but just in general. Another thing with creditors, if you're using this, somebody tries to sue you and take your house. If let's say you had that equity out there working on a deal, well, now there's very little for that creditor to try to go after, right? You have 10% basically equity in your house that they can try to sue you for. The rest of it's all debt. So what are they gonna what are they gonna go after you for? So you make your target on your back a lot smaller when you actually are utilizing that equity in a responsible way. Okay, so it is about responsibility. Again, I'm every everybody has to make their own decisions about their risk tolerance, but I'm guessing if you're looking at getting into real estate investing, you're not like a traditional stock bond uh treasuries type of a person. You're somebody who's looking to move the needle a little quicker and do some things alternatively than what mainstream uh, I guess you would say, mainstream culture would have you looking at doing by going the real estate route. So I applaud you for that. If you are listening to this, and that is the direction you're going because you're making some smart moves here. All right, so that is one of my favorite, easiest one to use. Now, the other thing is you might say, hey man, I rent or I just bought my house, I don't have any equity, I did 5% down, I don't have any equity. What should I do? Okay, so using this Johnson bank example, let's say you're, you know, somebody my age, your parents maybe have had a house now for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, they're gonna have some equity in that thing, right? So maybe you go have a conversation with them and say, hey, look, what if you guys borrowed your home equity line to me? Okay, and so you're gonna get charged 6.5%. What if I pay you 10%? That's money that's just sitting around dead in your house, not making any money. And I can pay you basically just like what the bank does. They they take your deposits, they give you 0.001% on your deposit interest, and they go lend it out at 6.5%. Okay, you're basically doing the same thing. You're saying, hey, you're gonna get it at 6.5%, you're gonna borrow it to me, I'm gonna pay you 10, 12, whatever percentage you negotiate with them. Okay. But now they're making some money. You have access to a lot more capital. You didn't have to go through a traditional bank to get it, and nobody had to drain their bank accounts to lend to you. All right, so that's another option. Along that line, private money, this is one of my other favorites. All right. So what is private money? This is friends and family, okay? So these are people in your network. They know you, they like you, they trust you, they know your history, they know your character, right? If you're a trustworthy person and you've got some some relationships in that way, uh, that those are going to be people who would probably borrow to you, okay? And one thing I've noticed over the years on this, when you are having a conversation with people about borrowing money from them, all right, sometimes it can feel like, man, like the feedback I get, and I get it. Like I was like this on my first one. Ah, well, like what if I don't pay him back, right? It's a fear that kind of kicks in. What if what if this deal goes south? What if I can't pay this person back? Thanksgiving and Christmas is gonna be really awkward. All right. Um, or I don't want to chase people down for money. Like, I don't like hounding my friends or family for anything, especially asking them for money. Okay. So a couple reframes for you guys. It's all just a mental thing, right? And you just gotta try to reframe this in your brain a little bit. When I think about talking to friends and family about um private money or raising capital, I really truly believe this. That, and I was like this early on, too. So you have to anything you're gonna sell, you gotta believe in it, right? And if you believe in yourself and you've done your homework, you've listened to this podcast a bunch, you've you've researched other stuff, you're in the course, you're you got a network of people here to keep you from falling off the rails, like you're doing all the right things, and you're gonna go do that first deal, right? How do you know that that thing's not gonna go south? Okay. Well, number one, you don't know that, all right, but you got confidence in yourself, okay? So what you need to reframe it at is hey, I have an opportunity here that I'm gonna be um flipping this house, rent getting a rental, and refinancing it, whatever the case is, and uh, and I'm bringing some other people in that wanna put some money to work. I'm paying a 10% return on this. Do you do you happen to know anybody that would be interested in putting some capital to work and getting 10% on their money? You know how many people out there have cash sitting on the sidelines that would be like, yep, right here. Okay, it's not, hey, could I please get some money from you? That is gonna make people run away from you. That's the the smell we call it of stinky clone, somebody who needs the cash. All right. You don't need the cash, you have an opportunity for somebody to put their money to work and you're gonna pay them a nice rate of return, potentially a double-digit return on their capital, which is incredible, right? So um that that source of or that reframe can really, really be a powerful thing. Another thing with private money, guys, something to remember, somebody in our team actually just went from potentially having maybe$100,000 from a family member to now maybe almost unlimited funds in the sense of what their goals are. I mean, maybe we're talking seven figures here of potential private capital from one source. And what happens sometimes with private money is they want to see the proof in the pudding, right? So sometimes maybe you just got to take a small amount, maybe 20,000 or something like that for a rehab and put that money to work. And then when you pay them back, they go, hmm, that was pretty easy. I didn't have to do anything. I had a nice little rate of return here. And you show them the rate of return, you show them the money they made just from doing nothing. And now they're like, hey, do you, you know, I got more cash here. How do we get a how do we do this on a bigger scale? Right. And pretty soon they're gonna become your biggest fan, your biggest advocate out there because they want you to go get find deals now because they you found the money. Now they want you to go find deals so that you can put their capital to work. And it's a really, really cool thing. I've I've seen this with so many um private lenders that we've borrowed from over the years. Once they realize how easy it is to just get a rate of return, and I'm out there doing all the work and and doing all the hard decisions and uh moving you know contractors around and making making moves, buying the deals, doing all that stuff. So like, I got the easy part of this this gig. I just gotta scratch a check or send a wire, fill out a mortgage satisfaction when it's all done, and bada boom, bada bang, you know, it's it's pretty easy for them. So private money. So we got HELOCs, private money would be the other one. Uh, if you guys are listening to this podcast, we did an episode with Jay Connor. I don't remember when that was, maybe 20 episodes ago. But if you go back to that, we deep dive private money into that episode. And I was also on Jay Connor's podcast a couple times. So if you if you search up him, he's got a great podcast. It's all about raising private money. He's got a book on it, he's got courses. He is like the guy you want to learn from as it relates to private money. So check that out. That's another great, great source. Again, no credit checks, no background check, nothing. It's all about your relationship capital that you have with people. Um, the other thing I would just say before we transition to some of the other money sources is uh with private lenders, okay, uh, you don't know who has cash out there. Like you can assume that you, oh, I know that person doesn't have a lot of money, so I really don't want to ask them, right? When you do the third party ask, as I kind of gave you guys a little earlier, so I'll say it again here. This is a third-party ask, like, hey, I've got a deal coming up. It's gonna be a good deal for us. We're looking, we're opening it up to some other uh people who would want to partner with us on it as capital partners. Uh, do you happen to know anybody that would want to get a 10% return on their money? Now, again, you can say that to anybody, right? You're not directly asking that person, so it avoids some people's what would you say, um, conflicts of asking their friends and family for money. You're asking them who do they know? Now, if they have cash and they they want to know more, they will tell you that. All right. Um, but just I would say just don't assume you know people's financial situation unless they've already disclosed that to you in a previous conversation. Uh, example of this, uh, another investor in our network was sharing with me a few years ago, had a guy who drove school bus his whole life, right? We know school love our school bus drivers out there taking care of kids, making sure they're safe, all that stuff. But they we know they're not the highest paid people on the planet, right? They do it most likely because they they love it, or there's some other motivating factor for them besides the financial gain of being a school bus driver. But he brought this up to them, kind of did the third party ask. And this individual had over$200,000 that they were getting a mediocre return on. And uh, yeah, I would love to get to a deal with you and get 10%. So again, just don't assume, don't judge the book by the cover, as they say out there. And you know, just talk to a lot of different people about what you're up to. Another thing that we share on this podcast every time is like, hey, share this episode with people. You know, if you get some value out of it. And again, it's not necessarily it is for all, we definitely want more people listening to it. It helps us build the audience, right? That's the whole reason we do this. Um, but being completely honest with you, it helps you out just as much as it helps us because if you are trying to raise private capital, people now realize you are into you're learning, you're you're you're self-educating about real estate investing. And so they're gonna your credibility is naturally gonna build by the by you sharing nuggets you're learning or different things that you're doing, along with clips of this episode or the entire episode. And um, and then that you don't have to just share this, but social media is a great way to just continue to build that awareness that you're in real estate. So when you do need some capital and you go ask them, they're not like, oh dude, I didn't know you were doing real estate, right? When did you start that? You know, like they're gonna be, oh yeah, I saw you've been, you know, learning about real estate for a while or whatever the case is. So you can do it at any stage. If you're just starting out, just start sharing the episodes and let people know what you're learning. And if you've been doing it a while, you know, share the episodes, but then also share some of the things you're doing, some of the deals you're doing, some of the successes, some of the losses, all that kind of stuff. And people will be attracted to that and you'll build your credibility and trust over the long haul. Okay, so those are some two of my favorite sources of capital. The other source I love is commercial lending. Okay, so I'm gonna get into what is commercial lending. Community banks is another way to think about it. So this is not Wells Fargo or Chase Bank or some of the big boys, okay? These are small local community banks, typically speaking. All right. And again, we've got a bunch of lenders here. You can go on our website if you're not on our buyer's list yet, get added to the buyer's list, and then usually Connor or Reese from our team will have a conversation with you and uh help you get set up with some of these folks. But um, the reason I love community banks is because if you have, say, a HELOC or private money, they will typically be your best interest rate and terms, and they can usually turn it around pretty quickly. They're like common sense lending options. Okay. So what I mean by that is if you go to the big boxes, right, they're gonna sell a lot of these loans off on the secondary market. And if that's foreign language to you, it was to me for a very long time. But just know basically they have to have a product that fits within a box that they can then go to investors on Wall Street and say, here, buy 10,000 of these products that all fit within this box that you have designated that you want. Okay. Now, if you're an investor and you're like, well, man, my credit's not great, or I've got a lot of cash, but I have no experience in real estate, and I don't have a W-2, I'm a business owner, right? You're not in the box. Okay. You've got some other circumstance going on outside of that box. Commercial lenders, a lot of times, are relationship-based. Like they're gonna want to get to know you, your story, your goals, your credibility, how you're gonna keep their capital safe. Like it's much more like a job interview uh when you're trying to get capital from a commercial bank or community bank than it is about fitting inside of Wall Street's box. Okay. So I encourage everybody if you are serious about growing a portfolio or doing more than a flip, you're gonna want to have relationships with community banks. All right. And the more relationships you can have, generally speaking, the better. And here's why community banks, number one, uh, the benefits of them, they're gonna be cheaper rates than a lot of other places you can get. Okay. They're gonna have some pretty interesting terms and creative things you can do. So let's say you have a deal that requires, you know, some some creativity. Okay, you can present that to your relationship at the community bank. And if it makes sense, they'll probably do it, right? If they feel like, hey, we're gonna keep our capital safe by doing this deal, we trust this person. It's pretty similar to private money in that sense. They will lend to you, okay. Um and again, they can they can refinance, they can finance you for the long term too. Like a lot of private money, you're gonna have to pay back either short-term private money loans or you know, usually people want their money back within five years, I've seen in the private money world. Sometimes you can get get people who just want to keep it running on on deals, but the community banks typically they'll want to keep keep that money going. That's their job, right? So, in the community bank space, a couple things to be aware of amortization schedules. Okay, so this is something you're gonna want to ask them about. Most community banks are gonna be 20-year amortization schedules. That means if you're trying to do a rental in this market, it's a little tougher to get cash flow if you're on a 20-year amortization schedule because your monthly payment's gonna be bigger. Now you're paying a lot more principal off, which is great. You're building a lot more equity, a lot more wealth that way, but your cash flow is not gonna be awesome. So if you don't have a cash machine, as Jimmy, my buddy Jimmy Vreland talked about on one of the episodes a while back, uh, you're gonna want to be careful with 20-year AMS because your cash flow is gonna be tight, and you need to have a nice little bucket of cash over here in case you got to fix something out of the blue and cover that on a rental property. All right. Or that's why we talk about having that HELOC there. That's a nice little safety net. All right. The uh the other thing, 25 year, obviously you're stretching your payments out a little longer, less principal. And then there are some community banks and credit unions that'll do 30 year. Now, notice earlier I didn't say credit unions are a great option. I know some people out there love credit unions, they work with them all the time. If you have more stabilized properties, meaning like you're buying more of like a turnkey type of thing, it's not a value add, it's not going to need a lot of rehab, that type of thing, credit union, great option. Okay. Um, you've had a property now, let's say it was seller financed. Uh, I actually have a triplex rate like this right now. Got it on seller financing with very little money down. We fixed it up over the year. It's now um fully rented up, stabilized, all that sort of stuff. And I've owned it for over a year. I've been shopping it to some credit unions to try to refinance my seller finance out of because my interest rate isn't as awesome as it was when I first did this. Uh, but anything less than that, they typically are gonna want some kind of seasoning period. Six months is probably the shortest you're gonna see from a credit union. 12 months is more likely. And what that means is they want you to have that property owned in your name or your LLC's name for that length of time to season the title. All right. Why? I don't know. I could ask somebody out of a credit union, I never have. But a lot of them, that's their rule. They're usually a little bit more conservative than your community banks. All right, they're gonna have a little box that their credit union wants it to fit in. But when you have a more stabilized property, those credit unions are typically gonna be able to offer you longer amortization schedules and better interest rates. So that's something to consider. So they're a good tool to have in the tool belt. I keep them in there more for stabilized longer-term stuff. I'm not gonna use them on something short-term typically, but um uh they're a good tool for longer-term cash flow type of situations. Okay. Back to the community banks. Okay. So again, you're gonna want to build some credibility with these guys and gals. You're gonna want to maintain relationships and you're gonna want to have a lot of different options for community banks because they all have a little bit of a different um setup. Okay. Some of them are gonna do, like I said, 80% of the after repair value. That's usually reserved for more experienced investors in this market or people who they have a longer-term relationship with or have deposits with. So this is something else to think about too. If you have some cash sitting around or you have a rental LLC that you're gonna put some of those loans over there with that community bank, you may want to think about opening up a bank account with them or a checking account and have some money flowing in and out of there because that will that will typically bode well for these community banks because they rely on um people bringing. Bringing deposits so that they can continue to service those loans because a lot of times they service these loans in-house. Okay. Um, what else about community banks? Yeah, they they're great partners. That's all I gotta say. Cheaper money. A lot of times you can stretch out those amortizations and um and do some tech some some creative things. Okay. Now we'll get into hard money loans, and this is probably the last one I'll talk about. All right, and then again, there's other options out there we won't get into today, but we're covering the main ones here. So hard money loans, these are typically gonna be more expensive loans, but there's so much convenience with them. And what I mean by that is um there's a couple hard money lenders locally that we recommend. And again, if you fill out that form and get on our list, we'll definitely get you connected to them. But they will lend off of the after repair value as well. Now they're gonna be a little bit lower than some of the community banks we described as far as the percentage. So they'll lend 65% of that after repair value. So that means if you think that house is gonna be worth$100,000 when it's all said and done, it everyone's a little different. But in some cases, you're gonna get them the comparables, you're gonna justify the$100,000 after repair value, and they will say, great, we will lend you up to 65% of that. Okay. Now, the really cool part about this is sometimes speed is what allows you to get some really good deals. If you have these guys set up and you're pre-approved with hard money lenders, and a smoking deal comes up, but it's got to close in two weeks. Let's say you didn't have the cash, you didn't follow my advice, and you didn't get that HELOC set up, all right, you don't have any community banks that can close that quick. So once in a while you'll get one that can in certain circumstances, but it's pretty rare. Uh, usually a community bank is gonna be 30 to 45 days max that they can close that thing. Okay, so they're gonna need a little longer lead time than these hard money lenders. Hard money lenders can close it in like literally hours. I mean, if you have title done on it, or if the title title company can get the title work done quickly, uh it's a pretty clean, there's no mortgage, there's no liens, there's nothing crazy with it. It's just a matter of running their title search and getting their underwriter to approve it, they can literally get it done in like hours. So having that, think of the power that you have, even if you plan to never use hard money, but you have them set up as a relationship that you can tap into if needed. Again, you don't want to pass up a deal just because you didn't have the financing set up. So you go out, you do step one, you find some great deals. Awesome. If you got no money to buy it, it doesn't matter. You can find all the great deals in the world. If you can't actually do anything with it, you got nothing. So for those people out there that are listening to this, they're like, man, I got cash up the wazoo. You know, I don't I don't need any hard money. I'm not paying those expensive fees and all this other stuff. Well, it's a lot more expensive to miss out on a great deal. I'll tell you that right now. So you're gonna want to have that hard money lender set up, even if it's just set up as an emergency backup option. You know, I keep my relationships with my hard money lender set up. I maybe we'll do one or two a year on a hard money loan. Um, but it's awesome to have it there, you know. Like we've had some situations as wholesalers where we have the relationship with the seller. We have a responsibility to make sure that if we give that seller the green light, that we're good to go, that we're good to go. We're gonna close that thing. And we've unfortunately had a few situations over the years where the buyer backed out of the deal. Now we got their earnest money, great, but it still doesn't cover some of these costs that would incur with hard money, but we have that relationship with the seller. We're not gonna let them, we're not gonna let the seller down if we give them the green light. So we've tapped into the hard money in those cases. Two days to close, boom, done, right? Um, so that is something to definitely make sure you guys have as an option. I know a ton of investors out there that even though they know they could get cheaper money working with a community bank, they would they refuse and they will strictly work with their hard money lender because it is so easy and so convenient. Okay, so again, they're gonna be very relationship-based in a lot of cases. Um, depends on the hard money lender. Now, there's some national hard money lenders out there. Those folks, I would say, use with caution. Okay, and the reason I say that is um there is a uh hard national, I don't I don't think they consider them a hard money lender, but they consider themselves a national lender. And what I mean by that is they're not like a local company, okay? They're bigger company, they're owned by a board of directors, and they've got probably tons of investors all over the place that are putting money in into their company, and then their responsibility is to lend that out. All right. They will make claims like, hey, we can close anything up in two weeks, no problem, right? What actually ends up happening though, we've noticed when we have a borrower or a buyer who comes in and that is their preferred source of funding. We we no longer even allow it unless you have one of our preferred lenders as a backup option, at least. Uh, but they will come in, they will say, Yep, this person, this bank said this, this, or this. And as we get into the process with them and our transaction coordinators are working with them, it's just tough. Like we've had a couple, they were, they were, oh, we can close in two weeks. Yep, this borrower's good to go. We get into it, it's two weeks, and all of a sudden they're like, oh, yeah, no, we haven't even started working on this one yet. It's like, we were supposed to close this thing in two weeks, and now you guys haven't even started. So we've had to push closing back. And then again, we look bad to the seller because now we're having to go back on our word and move closings back and that sort of thing. So just be cautious. My my thing is cautious with who you're working with on the hard money lending thing. And again, guys, they are going to be expensive comparatively speaking to a commercial lender, but they are worth their weight in gold if you have a good one. Because again, you do not want to miss out on a good deal just because you didn't have any financing set up. So those are our lenders we talked about today, guys. We've got HELOCs. If you don't have a HELOC set up right now, go get it set up today. It takes literally like I think three weeks to get it set up, maybe max. Um, you're gonna want to get your hard money lender set up as your backup option. Okay, get that set up right away. Community banks, as many community banks that you can have conversations with as possible. Last thing on the community banks, I'll say as well. If you don't think you're bankable or you don't think a community bank would lend to you at this point, that's okay. Just start the relationship and find out. If they tell you, hey man, we can't we can't borrow to you right now, great. Well, what could I do to be more bankable for you or make you feel more comfortable? And then maybe it's something you got to work on for six months. Come back to them in six months and and have that conversation again, keeping that relationship. Okay, so community banks and then those private money lenders. All right, those are our four main buckets. Again, we talk about some other buckets in the course, but I don't want to I don't want to drag it down too much with some of the other nuanced ones. These are the main ones I see day in and day out and the deals that we're doing uh with borrowers. We'll do over 200 deals this year. The majority of the people that are buying the deals from us, they're either using cash, hard money, commercial lending, or private money. That's it. That's the majority of the people that we're working with. Okay, so go out there, go find some cash. All right. If we can be of any help here at Wisconsin Discount Properties and the Wisconsin Investor Podcast, please let us know. And again, contact me. You can email me, corey at iby.com, or you can hit me up on Facebook and um message me. I don't really go on my actual Facebook page very much, uh, but if you message me, I still will get that in my messenger app. So hit me up there if I can answer any questions for you or help you. And then just a reminder, guys, as I wrap this up, if there is something you would want me or our team to bring to you guys to discuss on the uh Zooms, and if that would be of interest to you, please message us. Let us know if there's anything you want us to break down, anything in specific that's hanging you up that we can try to get on and educate you and anybody else that's if because chances are if you're running into it, somebody else is as well. But we would want to make those, if we're gonna do them, I'm gonna take some time out of my schedule and away from the family. I want to make sure it's the most impactful thing I can possibly do for you guys out there listening. So I really do want your feedback. Please send that over. And again, if you guys got some value out of this episode or any other episode, guys, we really want to get those reviews up. We're at episode 60. I think I saw on Apple we've only got like 15 maybe reviews on there. So I would love to get that to 60. So if you can help us out with that, you're you would that would mean the world to me. You just go scroll down and go to the show, scroll all the way down, I believe. And then there's a spot that says rate and write a review. Just do that on there. And then if you're checking this out on YouTube, subscribers means a lot to us. So if you can just hit the old subscribe notification button there and then comment on any of these videos. Again, that those that interaction really helps us as well. So, with that, guys, I will wrap it here. I hope you guys are all having an awesome week. I hope this has been helpful, and we will see you guys on the next episode.
