The Year In Review 2023

Speaker 1 [0:00] I am right now in the middle of trying to finance a duplex in South Carolina for myself, for a rental property, and I am jumping through ridiculous hoops, and I didn't realize Charlotte loaned in South Carolina. So keep coming to these meetings. Keep networking, come early. Starts at 5.30, come early. I bet Rodrigo will buy you a beer.

Zac Ruiz [0:24] All right, so we're gonna quickly go over the agenda. These are our how it should go, and we'll see what happens in real life. But so we're gonna do welcome and housekeeping. It'd be about 10 minutes today, 'cause we're gonna go over some surveys and stuff like that. Then we're gonna go over AVLmeetup in 2023. We're gonna hit REMC.co and the Ruiz Report to kind of talk about the retail market. What did it mean to be a realtor? What are those stats like? What happened in the real sale market? So, for sale on the MLS? Then we're gonna move into what we're calling Rodrigo's Corner. It's news to me. Yeah, it's what happened in Rodrigo's business in 2023. So that's off-market stuff.

And then we have our friends from Alfie Loans coming on. And so they are gonna talk about their world of lending, generally hard money lending, and how that works for all of our investor friends. And then we're gonna move as much time as possible into the audience Q and A's to kind of get to the knee gritty outside of the slides. So outside of that, if this is your first time, if we can get a raise of hands. Who's first time here, by any chance? All right. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being here. Thank you, thank you. So what we like to do is we bring the movers and shakers. And Asheville, under one roof.

So, it behooves you to speak to everyone around you, because everyone is doing the thing. And, uh, my name is Zachary's. My co-host here is Rodrigo Fonador. You'll get to know us a little bit throughout the night. And basically, we are about what we call the net profit philosophy, right? And so the net profit philosophy stands for networking, education, and transactions. We believe that if you network well, learn enough stuff, then the ultimate result is doing transactions. So with that, moving into the networking. Yeah, awesome.

Speaker 3 [1:54] So, as you guys have seen this a little bit before, we always try to focus on how we can put you guys together and Zach's gonna talk a little bit, when we review the transactions about 3 different ways, you can use the networking and that education to put some transactions together. So to get started, how many people are agents in the room? You can look down at your name tag if you're not sure. Okay, that's good. And then investors. I need the main hat you're wearing. I know some of y'all are wearing multiple hats. And then lenders. Cool. Nice. And service providers. We got Kimmy American Eagle over there. Okay, cool. Boom. Good amount of people. Non-real estate, what are we? Yeah, non-reps?

N-rep. Non- real estate professionals? Anybody not in real estate? Not yet. Okay, so we'll change that. Hopefully. All right, so the goal here with a lot of what we do is just to connect with good people in the room. So we always say is if everybody brings one good person, then the group grows, and so does the opportunity to connect with good people. So bring a friend next time. We'd love to have you, or on social media, you can, you can connect with us at AVI'll meet up, share some posts with your friends, et cetera. We'd love to have you here. Thanks for being here tonight. If you want to volunteer and get plugged in a little bit more intentionally.

Ray Ray's not here tonight, but you can email her at volunteer at AVLmeetup, or you can connect with Scott, who's in the back. You probably saw him at check-in, or you can email him at support at AVLmeetup. The other thing, so we have feedback, surveys, QR codes on some tables, not all of them. If you have any feedback, new location. We're doing food. Things are a little bit different this time. Please let us know if we're doing things right, or if we're doing things wrong. We'd love to hear from you. So scan a QR code and let us know, or just email Scott at support at AVLmeetup. All right, so education. We've been doing this this is start of year three, I guess.

And if you look down at the bottom right behind Zach's Shadow, there it is. We've done 3000 hours of this. So the way we calculate this, if you sign up into RSVP and you come in and you check in, then we multiply that number by two hours. So it's been 3,000 plus hours, 64 different panelists, and over a thousand people have checked in, who have attended over the last couple of years. So thank you for putting these numbers up here. This is a big deal.

Zac Ruiz [4:08] We have about a 50% check-in just lunch. Finally, transactions, right? And so basically, this has been kind of the driving force of 2023, honestly, is how do we facilitate more transactions? How do we get people doing the thing? Right? So basically there's three ways, right? The first way is we provide a member directory. Everyone gets their own profile. It's free. I behoove you to fill it out, more data, more better, right? Because then you can know who to reach out to when you're looking for someone based on their interests or their business or whatever it might be. Second is the matchmaker service.

If you signed up tonight and you filled out that survey, Then if you just go at the top right, you'll see it says deal matchmaker. We got a pretty little red box there. And basically, it'll match you with the other side. If you said that you were looking to buy, Well, this is a list of people who are looking to sell. If you're looking to borrow, it'll give you the list of people looking to lend, so on and so forth. So this is data driven matchmaking. Small catch, small catch. It only exists during the meetups. So you gotta come, you gotta be in person to do the thing. And then the third way is we have now, a community have, wants, and needs board, again, totally free.

We will watch this beautiful little JIF that may or may not start. There you go. You just go to the community, have wants and needs, you type like you type on any other website, you hit submit, and there you go, right? So you can format it however you want, add your links, whether it's a have one or need, and you're off to the races. So right now, look at this. We have a wholesale that has a drop dead time by the 14th. Maybe you're interested in this deal. All you gotta do, have once it needs board, right there. Reach out to is Joyce in the room? There you go, Joyce is right there. Maybe do a deal.

Next, we got another wholesale deal going on in five points, right, is a Sam Atkins in the room. Sorry, Sam. That was your chance, man. And then we got a glamping opportunity looking for a GC for about a $1000000 in business. Not too shabby, right? Where is... There we go. Boom, right? So reach out to the right people. Your next deal is only one conversation away. So with that, we're going to give you 5 minutes to meet a couple of people around you and maybe hopefully Brooke or something. We're going to try to flash the lights and you guys are going to come back so quickly and respectfully, it's going to be amazing. Or just watch the timer. That works.

So watch the timer, 5 minutes starting now. Drinks, food, sponsors, by the way. Drink food.

Speaker 4 [6:26] Hi, I'm Sabrina West, your local mortgage expert with guaranteed rate. We provide you and your clients real talk in real time. I am a mentor, investor, and money mortgage expert that provides you with customized consultations with a behavioral finance approach that helps you build wealth through real estate. We believe in clients for life. So reach out today for your customized consultation.

Zac Ruiz [6:48] All right, as we're all quieting down here. Just random, you know, fishing, maybe we'll get lucky. Did anyone put together a deal? Unfortunately, I don't see a hand, but maybe it's 'cause you're in the middle of brokering that deal right now. You never know. All right, so look, guys, you came to a meetup that's titled 2023 in review. So we're gonna talk about a little bit of data. So, buckle up, buckle up. Here we go. So 1st off, we're going to start with a little overview of ADL meetup by the numbers. And so, first, let's talk about the series of questions about where the market is going. So if you checked in today, then you saw that there was a survey.

Every month, we have the same 10 questions, and that's so we can plot it month over month. And these are the colors I picked. It was hard. There's a lot of options, right? So this is called a stacked chart graph. How does it work, right? So we see that green, 6 to 7%. We see that it took about 25% of the votes. And that's how it works, right? So of all of the votes, proportionally, what did people think? And so, I highlighted in green, the one that was most often selected, and as you can see from March, all the way to December there, we only started counting this data in March. You can see that most people thought rates would be around 6 and 7%, right? Turns out they were right.

Now, this slide is the same slide, but it has the market laughing at you if you thought that rates were going to go down to 5 or 4%. So exact same slide there. But as you see here in November, we added in, some people thought, there were some bears on the market that thought we'd get to 8, 9, 10%. Looks like it's coming down, we'll see what happens. Sorry, I didn't explain. At the top there, you see the question, right? So where do you see home prices going in the next six months? Predominantly, everyone thought that there would be a one to 10% price reduction.

Now, if you remember the pattern from the last slide, This is the same slide, but the market laughing at you for thinking that the prices would come down in such a manner. So finally, do you think we'll get inflation under control in the next six months? We have the yeses in green, the nose, the nose one, the day, but as you can see, the tide is changing, right? It looks like we're at about parody in December that we think inflation is kind of getting under control. Next, do you think it's a good time to in real estate? Well, the cards are kind of stacked with the room, right? Everyone thinks it's a great time to invest throughout the past year. I like this room.

And then when it comes to the meetups, who comes to the meetups, right? What is the breakdown of people? We say we bring the movers and shakers. How true is that? So of the people who answered honestly about their holdings. It looks like most of the crowd has between one and 10 doors. So everyone's earlier on in their career, or flipping enough that they only keep an inventory of one to tend doors. Have you purchased any real estate in the last 30 days, predominantly, no, every month? Have you sold any real estate in the last 30 days, predominantly again, no, but of the people that did, you can see it's personal, investment, or both at the bottom.

So there are a lot of people coming here doing the thing on both sides. Are you looking to buy anything, and that's where that survey question comes in predominantly? no? Are you looking to sell? Predominantly, no, right? So that makes sense. Overall in the market, we're gonna talk about that. So this kind of gives us that sentiment that we're gonna go in. Borrow or lend. Look, despite not buying or selling something, everyone's looking to get some money to maybe buy someone, so, or something. excuse me. So the fact that when they're not pulling the trigger, probably because the deal didn't add up. And are the meetups worth it? Well, this is a fun question that we've added.

Have you done a deal with someone in the room, right? And so the bottom is yes, and you can see that we're getting a nice trend that more people are able to do deals with someone from AVLmeetup as they continue to come. So if you're curious about these polls, all you gotta do is go to the events at the website, you can see the poll results for each individual event, and then at the top, right now, while you're at the event, you can view the poll results of the people in the room, live and direct. All right? So let's see how we did. Next, we're going to talk about canopy MLS. So if you have a house listed in Western North Carolina, in this blue area, this is Canopy MLS.

This is what we're gonna talk about. This is what the Ruiz Report and REMC.co is plugged into. Every county that basically involves what we're doing over here in Western North Carolina. So this date is broken down by REMC.co. That's the other company that I run, along with the Ruiz Report, for the data in analytics. So we're gonna talk about core tiles. What is the core tile? This is an evenly distributed graph, as we all remember from math. All this is saying is that the core tiles are one quarter of the data. This is a pretty graph. That's what it looks like when it's evenly distributed, as they say, but our date is not. Our data is skewed, just to let you know ahead of times, right?

Which means that they're concentrated around the haves and the have nots. Let's just say that, right? The lower end of the market has a huge chunk, and then the higher end has a huge chunk, we're going to talk about that. So 2023 production cortiles. Or what did it take to get into the top 25%, the top 25% in 2023. So we're actually going to talk about 2 things. The median is the yellow number in every little chart there, right? And what the median tell us is that 50% did less or more, depending on you want to be half full or half empty, than that number. So let's go with transactions in total. So this is of realtors who had at least one closing.

We had to hit the boards to get onto the thing. In 2022, right? 50% had 5 or less. Right? So what's telling us is the 1st core tile, so 25% of all realtors more or less did one transaction, if they did any. The next 25% between 2 and 5, 6 and 12, and then the top 25% did 13 closings. So if you close 13 or more deals, you are a top 25% realtor for all of canopy MLS, that's 26 counties, 2 states. 2023, what happened? Well, it looks like it went down. So I'm standing in the wrong area. I'll get over here. It looks like we went down. The 1st quartile was the same, so you hit the boards, basically, and you stopped at the 20, the bottom 25%. And we're going to go faster for the next one.

I just kind of explaining. Then you've got the second, so then anything below this five, so that's 50% of realtors, basically, did 5 deals or less, right? And then to make it into the top 25, you did 12. So as you can see, we're down year over year for transactions overall. Did buy list side make a difference? People specializing if you're a buyer's agent or a list agent. Right? So again, we've got one, two, and three for the first three core tiles. So for listings in 2022, excuse me, 50% did about three, and no change there. So that breakdown didn't really change.

For the buy side, if you're, you know, air quotes buyer's agent, basically one, two, and three again, and then seven or more buyer closings made you a top 25% agent. We'll see no change again. Now it gets fun, right? So it seems like the specialization breakdown remains somewhat constant. Now we're going to talk about listings taken, and this one changes a little bit. So the bottom core tile is one to two listings, right? So people are trying to be a list agent. That's what that's telling us. The 60% did six, that's the median, right? And then the top 25% is if you took 13 or more listings. That's pretty awesome. But that was the bar, cross canopy MLS to get top 25%.

For 23, we can see that it went down across the board. The next little segment we're going to talk about is that retail market, and that makes sense. We're at historic low volume overall. There's a lot less going around, so it makes sense that these numbers are down. Volume. In 2022, we're just going to talk about two numbers, 50% of realtors did two million and change or less in volume across everything, right? And to be a top 25% realtor is 4.8 million. In 2023, those numbers are down, right? So the median did 1700000 basically, and then the top 25, just a little over 4 million, too much math, it's down overall is the point. Right?

So let's talk about the recap of what I meant to be a realtor in 2023. So 50% of realtors close less than 5 transactions overall. If everyone knows what's going on with the lawsuit and everything, talking about representation that you get from your realtor. Choose wisely. There's a good chance that that realtor either didn't do a deal or is, you know, doing one of their first deals. Definitely look into who you're working with. 50% of realtors took less than 3 listings? 50% of realtors close, less than 16 million. And glass half full, right? The top 25% close more than 12. awesome. The top 25% took more than 12 listings, coincidentally. And the top 25% close more than $4 million.

We're going to talk about the average price of a house in Buckham County coming up, but it reached a record high of around 700,000, so that's about five homes in this area, to be the top 25% realtors. So get out there. You can do it, right? So this is only for realtors who hit the boards, many, many more did 0 transactions in total, right? So if you're surprised by that, the numbers are even more surprising if we only include the zero. All right, so that's RMC. If you want to look into realtor data, you can go to RMC.co and look up any realtor in the MLS for free right now. Quick timeout, because that's a lot of data. Let's look at some puppies, right?

Because I'm about to show you even more graphs. And I know you're thrilled, right? But we're getting insight of what's happening year over year. So, my name's Zachary. I run the Ruiz Report. I didn't change the slide properly. It should be December. It our 461, but we're gonna roll with it. So, uh, the mission of the Ruiz Report is twofold. One is to equip realtors and market participants with these data driven market insights from a 10 slide report that anybody can read. The second one is to provide that industry leading training so that they can be the local economists of choice. We're gonna go through a little bit of that tonight. Starting with volume and activity.

So, this is a lot, this is a lot. But all we're looking at, as I like to say, is the pretty shapes and colors, right? So you see these lines here. March of 2020 is when I started the Ruiz Report. So 2020, 21, 22, and 23. So what do we see of all activity? What this tells us is the red bars, the total active listings. It's how many homes were for sale at any given time during the month. The green bars, those homes that went under contract, and the ones that sold. And if you add all that up, it's how much real estate happened in that month, right? So what we're seeing here is the activity shapes. They're very similar, right? They're very similar.

They follow this pattern seasonally from basically winter into summer and spring and all of this, right? But the volume is much lower, much lower in 2023. So going back really quickly, you'll see that. The red bars, the active, so people are still doing it, but as you see, the volume overall, significantly lower than the past couple years. Right? Listings and pendings. My favorite slide in the whole thing. Basically, what we're talking about here is supply and demand. The red bar is new listings. That's stuff that we've added to the market. That fresh supply. The green line is what went under contract. Otherwise known as demand. It's what we're taking off the market in that month, right?

So, looking at the activity shapes being similar once again, but being lower, but we've added way more inventory proportionally than we have in prior years. What does that mean? The red bar is above the green line more months than not. If we were to zoom back here, you'll see that it's barely replenishing inventory. So, for the past 3 years, basically demand has far exceeded supply. Everything that got put on the market was gobbled up like the 1st couple days. We're going to talk about that in a second. But here you'll see that that's changing. We're actually adding inventory somewhat consistently to the local market. All this is for Buncomb County, right? And so that affects prices, right?

Supply and demand. More supply, you know, prices will go down, right? I guess not. So it turns out in 2023, 701,000 was the record high for the average price of a home. That's across all price ranges. How many sold, divided by the sum of all their list prices, and you get the average. The median is in the middle. Throw a dart at the map, 50% chance, basically, it's going to be $453,000 in December, but it also reached a record high of $502. So prices have gone, and then the yellow line is the trend line, right? Prices have gone up into the right. Month over month fluctuations, not where you want to focus for pricing. You want to zoom out and get a wider lens to see what's happening.

And the trend line for prices is up into the right. Now, it's not a hockey stick like it was over here. We are seeing some leveling out, as you can see on the tail end of the right there. But it's still an appreciation year over year consistently for the path 3 years. Right? So homes are significantly more expensive in the area. Days on market. That is another indicator, right? You've got supply and demand, and then how long does it take for people to agree to a price? That's another super important thing. What we're seeing here is that it's taking longer overall, rates have gone up and served prices, right? What point will this change?

Well, look, we had a similar days on market run up this time last year. So I boxed it up. When the median, the average hit, right? When they're agreeing with one another, then that would suggest that would suggest that there'd be a price reduction or something happening, right? Everyone's like, hey, it's taking a long time to sell these homes. We have one real lever, we should probably reduce the price. But last year, instead, followed by an increase in prices. So a lot of like the theory, like economic theory of what you might think happens, supply and demand, all that stuff, is just kind of being overridden by to say it against supply and demand. People want to be here.

It costs what it costs. And to date, they've been willing to pay the price. And that's, we, we're, you know, blessed in this market to be insulated that way. People want to come with their remote jobs and everything, but that has been the tale of the tape, right? So homes seem to be selling faster, overall, believe it or not, slash, that daily market volatility isn't as volatile as it might feel. How can we say that with confidence? Well, let's look at the trends again. The trend of the average, right? That includes builder homes that sit there forever. That includes the people who price horribly wrong, and that's everybody.

But the median, the median is 50% or homes sold this quickly or less or faster. Right? So over here, you'll see our four. This was all 5 in 2021, basically, so 5 days. That means 50% of all homes in all price ranges sold in 4 days or less. But if we look at the height of this bar, it's like 10 days, right? For the past 3 years, basically, less than 10 days, 50% of the homes gone. But look, despite all of the fluctuations that we're feeling in your specific price range or your house or a week over week, that is a very consistent trend line, and as far as the average is concerned, overall, it looks like homes are selling faster.

Another way to look at that is the metric that we call contract to cash. From the moment you put the sign in your yard, so it's listed for sale to the moment you're cashing the check with your attorneys in your closings, at your closing, excuse me, that's how long it takes to sell in total. So our average time across all price ranges in all the unique situations is 86 as of last month. It was a record 134 when real estate wasn't an essential service. But basically what ended up happening, I think, right? is my read, is that the service industry was limited. It was hard to get your appraises out there. was hard to get your surveyors out there. It was hard to do the thing.

So even though it was taking, if we go back to this slide, really, really, really, really fast to get it off the market, once it was under contract, it was taking a little bit longer. And so we'll see that again, that's flattened out, despite, despite the fact that homes are taking a little bit longer to close, those lines are pretty straight, and they're actually going down a little bit. On average, it looks like homes are selling faster overall, and costing more as a sticker price, and costing more as a monthly basis with your debt to income ratio. Wild, right? Who would have thought?

If that was a lot, if you're not into graph interpretations, I offer all these training videos that break down every single slide, totally for free. You just go to reseport.com, all the training videos are on us. Right? So let's recap what happened in Buckham. A historic high average price of $701,000, right? I think that's insane, because from like, not only, not only by itself, from when I started in March, it was like 400 and change, that's wild, right? So historic high median price, so 50% of the homes are $502,000 or more back a couple months ago. Now it's in the 40s, right? We added more inventory than the past 3 years. And I remember, that's not more listings.

We did a lot more listing volume, but people were taking them off immediately. So we weren't actually adding inventory. We have been consistently adding inventory in 2023. And then despite a few hiccups, right? Homes seemed to be selling faster overall, which is kind of, I thought, pretty interesting once I zoomed out and saw all of this. So with that, we'll have Rodrigo come onto this stage, but really quickly, do we have any questions about the onslaught of data that you just got from the market? We're going to have a Q and A period after so you can hold it to the end. But if we're good, we're going to pass it off to Mr. Fondor here.

Speaker 3 [23:22] All right. So, usually, when I've gotten up here to talk over the last year, there's only been one logo for me up here, which has been Asheville Cash Buyers. And one of the things I'm going to talk a little bit about is why there's 3 now, as you can tell. 2023 is a year of a lot of changes for me. Anybody else can relate? Yeah? It's a little different. Maybe make you think about things in a different way. Before we get into that, just wanted to recap a little bit of what I talked about last month or last year and some of the predictions I made. We'll do that, do a quick map. I was curious to see kind of where the deals that I was involved in over the last few years, how they mapped out.

So we do that. And then we'll talk about what the numbers tell, like, what's the story? And then what are the changes or what are my expectations going into 2024. So, 1st one. This is, I know the screen's really hard to read if you're in the back. bear with me. All the little red dots are deals that we had under contract and we ended up not closing on in the last 3 years. So you can see, it goes pretty far south, South Anderson County out to Waynesville, and then a couple of plots up in Marshall area. And then here's the ones that we did that were wholesale deals that were successfully completed. Similar range. We went a little bit further east to Marion.

And then this is ones where properties that we either held or we flipped. So these are either rentals or fix and flips. Um, and, you know, ended up going east and west a little bit, um, not too far as uh, north-south. I don't know if anybody's ever done that. I had a very interesting experience just like looking at it. was surprised by a few things. Google Maps is pretty interesting. So marketing by the numbers. When I stood up here last year, I was talking about how direct mail was our best performing asset or best performing marketing lead source. I think you guys can see better if I'm on this side. And historically had been.

And so I just want to point out the ROI there is 286% and our conversion rate was one.62%. So conversion rate is just how many deals we got off of the leads. So I didn't do the math, but our total lead volume was around 12 or 1300 leads that we had in 2022. And so that's kind of what we're working with. And then the direct mail numbers, you'll see, you can't see it, but if you're in the back, but at the bottom, it was off of 83,300 pieces of mail scent. And so that's kind of how we backed into our total conversion rate for mail, which is one.03%.

Conversion is just somebody who calls us off the mail pieces, even whether it's to set an appointment or to tell us to take us off their mailing list. So it's any response. 2023, we had a pretty big change. You'll see it went from 280 down to 218% for the ROI. And our cost for deal went up by about $500 per deal. Our conversion rate went up, but everything else got more expensive and we got less deals on average as far as the ROI, right? So we did do a better conversion rate on the deals, but each deal on average ended up being a smaller deal amount per closing on the back end. And our response rate went down as well.

So we went from a one point, I forget what I said it was, one.3 or one point one.03 2.6% response rate. And so a lot of the decision making that kind of prompted the three logos here came from seeing our ROI drop and our conversion rate drop and just feeling that mail wasn't what we wanted to do as our main marketing method moving forward. And then the other thing that that meant is, we have to change a little bit of the way we were set up. So we had hired a lead manager at the end of 2021, uh, going, or sorry, end of 2022, going into 2023. And well, it's on the next slide. So one of our goals from 2023 was to have a new lead manager.

We really wanted to focus on having follow-up being done in-house to build these relationships and try to increase our overall conversion rate while being able to increase our lead volume. And so that was something that was like a little bit of a hypothesis that we talked about last year. And we also changed to a mailing house to lean into the direct mail because we thought having more variable data in each mail piece would help us get more leads or better lead conversions.

The variable data on the mail pieces was just like, the way we were getting lists, we would have kind of like a little bit of an insight onto why they might be interested in giving us a call about why they wanted to sell their house, whether it was like, say, a foreclosure or they maybe had a lot of equity or something of those lines. So we could say, hey, do you have a lot of equity in your house? Are you interested in selling versus, are you afraid or worried about foreclosure? Do you need to have a conversation about selling? So we were trying to make the mail piece more specific? And, you know, we were hoping that 2023 would be a wild success. So this is how things went.

We had a very bad experience with the male house. We ended up firing our lead manager and not sending out any more direct mail about halfway through the year. And overall, 23 was still a success despite those changes, which, if you would have asked me at the beginning of the year, if the 1st 2 things would have flopped, whether 23 was a success, I would have said no. So that was definitely a pleasant surprise to round out the year. The other thing we talked about is was focusing is on smaller multifamily. We were successfully able to do that. We were able to pick up a more smaller multifamily units.

We had one of the other things we're talking about was doing a more even split between fix and flips and assignments, and that ended up being totally inaccurate. I think we did about 80% of our deals that we focused on were either rentals or rehabs, and we only did a small volume of wholesale deals overall through the year. And then the other thing we did is focusing on building better and deeper relationships with people who've done deals with us from a private lending perspective. I think that that went well, just a lot of good conversations, and people are still willing to work with us. So that's a good sign for sure. So what happens moving forward on my end.

So in it was end of July, kind of feeling that things were not going the way we were expecting them to do. We were looking at our numbers and not feeling that, it was worth the time with spending money on sending out direct mail and hiring somebody as a full-time position for the lead manager. So we decide to do no more direct mail for the rest of the year. We fired the person doing direct mail. And we changed our CRMs to go to something that was much more automated. And so that gives us the opportunity to basically decrease our costs on our acquisition sides by like roughly 80% as far as our marketing spend and then how we're doing our resources. And also bringing down our lead volume.

So our lead volume on average is somewhere between 50 to 70 leads a month when we were doing mail. sometimes it would go above that. And with this change, we saw it decrease from in August, we had, I think it was 75, 78 leads. And in December, we had eight. And so we'll find out in a year from now. But my guess is that instead of ending with about 12 or 1,300 leads that we generated in 2023, 2024, we're going to probably be looking at somewhere in the low hundreds as far as total lead volume that we have. Unless you guys have a lot of good referrals, which would be a great thing, but that would not be something that we're expecting.

So right now, we think we're going to get between 8 to 10 leads a month, and that's just going to be from focusing on either doing PPC or just a strong online presence through SEO. Or again, any circle of influence type of deals that might fall into our laps. So, at that point, when we restructured, I definitely had 2 people on my team that we wanted to keep and keep working with, so that's when we decided to lean into the property management. And that was the 1st logo at the top. That's Vesta property management. I'm sure you've heard us talk about it a little bit, talk about it in a 2nd as well.

And then the other thing that we decide to do, got the opportunity to buy into a small landscaping business. And so decided to do that and kind of funnel the focus and attention we had on acquisitions and doing flips and rentals and kind of split that between the property management and the landscaping business. So, why is the big pivot? The on what we were doing as far as doing flips and stuff, there was a lot of resistance and friction in setting appointments and encouraging people to consider us as an option when they were going to sell.

It was a lot of follow-ups, chasing people down, not necessarily forcing myself into their house, but, you know, being very persistent where maybe it would have been easier for them to say, sure, come on out then to take a hike. And I was just tired of that, honestly. And talking to this landscaping business, they're like, oh, yeah, we charge people $150 before we go on an appointment. was like, well, that sounds really interesting. So you're saying people are paying you to come to their house to give you business. They're like, yes. I was like, okay, I'm very much listening. You have my attention. And that was like the biggest thing as far as also with the property management.

There's not a lot of excitement to talk to somebody about selling your house off market at a deep discount, right? Like, you're probably not going out and telling your friends and your families like, guys, guess what? I just sold my house $50 on the dollar. You should really consider doing the same thing. Maybe, if it's a really good experience, which we deliver really good experiences, but still, like, that's not a conversation that's going to land well when you're talking about life decisions that you're making typically, right? And so with the landscaping and the property management, it's the complete opposite, right?

You're helping people either in the property management, find freedom, and financial, you know, independence and freedom from time. And then on the landscaping, people are crafting their own little backyard oasis. And so you're working with a client base that's a lot more excited about doing things and doing things over and over, which, again, not a lot of people have houses just kind of sitting around that they want to sell over and over at 50 cents on the dollar. It's a hard place to find repeat business. So we wanted to do that. And the last thing is, why don't you do something that was a little bit more team oriented.

If anybody's bought houses or sold them, you realize that it's really hard to think about how you would outsource the sales process, I'm not, I'm sure it's probably similar as an agent. If you're a really good closer, and you know you can close 9 out of 10 people on the listing. It's hard to think about how you're gonna outsource that. And so it's the same thing here. So I wanted to move away from something that was so heavily dependent on me being on the sales side to something that could be a little bit more team oriented. I think we're pretty close on time. So I'll just skip through this. But surveyed a bunch of people who have rental property here in the actual area.

We had 10 responses from different property managers and owners. I think we're at about 400 doors represented. So if you're interested in just getting what that feedback was, it's like average rents, how long is your vacancy rate go? Um, what uh, do you think rents are going to go up? Have you had any evictions, et cetera? If you email us at info at Vesta PM and just put rental index in the subject line? We'll share the that survey results with you if you're interested for your own rental properties. And yeah, we'll just let's jump to Alfie since we're running I'm running over a little bit on time. Natural escapes. I'll just say the last things.

If you're interested, naturalscapes, natural.com, and that'll be the end then.

Speaker 4 [35:08] Hi, everybody. My name's Kimmy with American Eagle home inspection. We are your local one stop stop for all your home inspection needs in Western North Carolina. Do me a favor, pull out your phone. Find us American Eagle Home Inspection on Instagram, give us a follow, you know what? There's only so much I can tell you about us in 30 seconds, but I promise you, you will not be disappointed if you check out our content. It's very entertaining. It's going to tell you all you want to know about us. So check us out on Instagram, and we'd love to be your one-stop shop resource for your home inspection needs in Western North Carolina. Check us out. All right.

Unknown [35:41] Come on up, y'all.

Speaker 1 [35:52] I'd like to thank Rodrigo and Zach for having us here. I'm Craig Peters. I'm with Alfie Loans, Alfie Investors, out of Asheville. This is John Sarver, one of the founding members of Alfie. We are a private debt fund, primarily, well, not primarily, solely loaning money to real estate investors such as yourself. I also want to thank Zach and Rodrigo for pulling a very old picture that has very dark hair on my mimoji. So if we could get that updated, that'd be awesome. Has anyone in the room borrowed from Alfie before? There's Kate. Hi, Kate. See you there. Excellent. Well, if you've had a good experience with Alfie, I'd encourage you to tell your friends. We have been in business since 2015.

and there we go. This is us. Alternative lending for inspired entrepreneurs. didn't call it Alfie just to get at the top of the yellow pages. There was a theme behind it. We started in 2015. We didn't. John did with his business partner, Todd Fowler, started with $3 million, and John can tell you the story of how it started, but in the, in the, we're going into our ninth year of business. We've now got $90 million, roughly in funds under management, and 9 employees, 6 of which are full time. We have that $90 million is comprised of funds from 254 investors, 65%, I think that's slightly accurate number, of which are local investors. They entrust us to lend money to folks like you.

Real estate investors that find deals, go out, whether it's a fix and flip loan, or a spec home construction loan. We do some commercial. We do some land development stuff. But we are, we fall into the hard money category of lending, but we can give you some insight as to why we're different from some of the bigger lenders that are hard money lenders. Since inception, we have written 14, over 1400 loans and just about $4000000 in loans to real estate investors. As of right now, we have 230 active loans. Again, we loan in North and South Carolina only. We like to be able to drive to the projects that we loan money on.

And in all of the loans that we've done, those 1400 plus loans, we've only had 10 foreclosures. And the reason for that is we are looking for success stories. We help people, it's not to say we've only had 10 loans that weren't in trouble, but the ones that did get in trouble, we like to work through it with them. It's the personalized service that kind of keeps us going in the direction that we have been going. Um, Zach and uh, feel free to step in. I don't like public speaking. So if it sounds like I'm rambling on, it's because I really dislike what I'm doing right now.

Speaker 5 [39:14] Hey, thanks, Craig. First of all, I want to also thank Zach and Rodrigo, and I really particularly want to commend Rodrigo for the pivot and like the bravery and just the entrepreneurship. I think that's amazing that you did that. It takes a lot of courage and also a lot of energy. So, well done. And we really appreciate both of you and the invitations and just being present at these meetings. So thank you. Can you go back to that last slide? Just wanted to say a few more things about Alfie by the numbers.

getting back to what Craig said about the 10 foreclosures, that reflects really more of an attitude about us helping people succeed and work through problems than just underwriting perfect loans because there's a lot of problems that come up and we are really interested in most of our borrowers are repeat regular borrowers. There's a handful of you in the room, including some very high volume borrowers, that we've really grown our businesses together. And it's, uh, we consider ourselves a very community focused company. So the 10 foreclosures, it's a small percentage rate, but the working through people's problems is just part of the business. So go ahead.

Speaker 1 [40:36] Zach and, well, Rodrigo most recently was talking about pivots they've made, and we have made some considerable changes in this last year in 2023 for various reasons, but some of the big ones are the economic uncertainty. Everybody's concerned about what's happening with the economy, interest rates rising, fear of a repeat of 2008, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We started out almost solely as a fix and flip lender for people in Asheville. And when John and Todd started the business, banks were not lending to investors for anything. They weren't going to touch any kind of renovation loans or anything like that. And that's how Alfie got started.

And now, you know, as a kind of just how fate would have it, we have had an onslaught of new construction financing requests. So spec home loans is kind of where we have turned our focus, not to say we're not doing fix and flip loans, because we certainly are. But there's a much higher demand. I can't read from this side either, so I'm gonna come back. So a much higher demand for new construction loans, because simply because of lack of new construction inventory on the market. The interest rates that have risen don't seem to have had a big effect on that, and it's because people, they're still buying homes, as we've seen with Zach's Ruiz Report. Um, fixing flips.

We are a little more conservative because as all of you well know, you run into problems with fix and flips. Surprises. With spec home construction loans, you know what you're getting into from the ground up. But again, it's just a pivot we may just kind of, because of the demand that we've seen. We are expanding into new markets because of that demand. We're reaching out into the Columbia area, some Charlotte stuff happening. Marion, where else? The triad. Triad area triangle as well.

Speaker 5 [43:00] Yeah, and another thing I would like to say about the philosophy behind Alfie is really the problem that we're trying to solve is that there's a that's really difficult to get capital. And there's a lot of people in this room, people like you guys that are really good at what you do in real estate, and it's way more challenging than it should be to get like a common sense solution for your projects. So that's, you know, we're real estate people. We've never been bankers. No offense to any bankers. But really, like, it's it seems like it's such common sense. Everyone, like so many of you in this room are really great at making money doing real estate projects. Why is it so hard to get capital?

And so that's really what we based it on. It's not about your balance sheet or your credit or your tax returns. And that's why we've seen so many repeat borrowers. Um, getting back to the fix and flip. Yeah, we still do those because those are kind of our, like, our deep roots, but we find, um, that new construction. Again, it's selling more and it oftentimes has simpler problems to fix. We've had, I think, embarrassingly, I'll say, 3 or 4 fix and flips where we drove by and the houses weren't there. And we're like, hold on. Has the borrower called us yet? Don't say that because one of those people is in the room right now.

Well, everything turned out fine, but it's a little it's a little freaky when you drive by your collateral and you have to stop and then like put it in reverse and stop again. And there was a house there, like 4 days ago.

Speaker 1 [44:33] Those were not the foreclosures, by the way. They worked out. They built a new house. worked out just fine. It was fun. moving on. Before I go into this next one, I want to, because of something John said about having difficulty with banks and stuff like that, for new construction, fix and flips, it's not that difficult. I right now, I was just talking to Charlotte a couple minutes ago, and I didn't realize she loaned in South Carolina, but I am right now in the middle of trying to finance a duplex in South Carolina for myself for a rental property. And I am jumping through ridiculous hoops, and I didn't realize Charlotte loaned in South Carolina.

So keep coming to these meetings, keep networking, come early. Starts at 5:30, come early. I bet Rodrigo will buy you beer, come early, and talk to people. Just get out and meet the people that are in the room. I've been coming to these meet ups since they started. I've been on a panel one time in the past. And it's relationships that I've formed in atmospheres like this that are invaluable. So I encourage, there's a great crowd tonight, which is awesome. This is a fantastic new venue. Tip your bartender. Keep coming to these meetings and keep meeting people and networking, 'cause that's how Alfie has grown over the years.

I know that's how Rodrigo and Zach have grown their businesses over the years. I didn't realize that Scott is an engineer until 2 meetings ago, and I've hooked him up with a builder friend of mine, and hopefully they're going to start doing a lot of business together. So you never know who you're going to run into and who you're going to meet and what both parties will gain by that by that introduction.

Speaker 5 [46:17] I'd also like to say. see, Jason Chambers and the audience here too. And feel free, please, to contact us because we really do want to act as like a resource and we talk people out of using Alfie all the time. We've got, you know, experience in some things and we're really happy to like look at a deal and send you to Jason or someone else. probably send him 3 people a week for various reasons. So, you know, we are a tool, but we're not the only tool and we're happy to, you know, pass you on to other people that we trust in our network.

Speaker 1 [46:54] So what does it cost to use Alfie? So we, like, again, we fall into that hard money lending category, and when I tell you that we're at 12%, a lot of people go 12%, get out of here, and then 3 months later, they call me back and say, hey, 12% doesn't sound too bad right now. We have a conversation? But we're a one-year loan. We're a 12 month loan, and this scenario that we've got on the screen here is based on a spec home loan. Say someone's building a house for $300,000, we have an origination fee of 2%. There's a legal fee involved for our attorney to prepare the loan documents. There's draw fees of $150 per draw inspection.

That's a third party inspection company that comes out and will tell us how far along you've come in the process. The next day, we will direct deposit those funds into your account. The total interest paid. This is based on a nine month construction period. with 6 equal draws and a 2 month hold period. This is just kind of an average of what we've seen over the last 7 years. Total interest paid of $16,500. $23,300 is what you can expect to pay, generally speaking. And the cost of capital is 8.07%. So when people hear that 12%, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard, it's not 12%. You're only in it for a year. Most, our average loan length is, what, 9 8.6 months. 8.6 months right now.

Speaker 5 [48:32] We have this live spreadsheet, if you guys, as little widget that we use. If you want to just mess around with it. We're happy to send it to you.

Speaker 1 [48:39] Yes, and we've got cards and feel free to give us a call. We love to meet for coffee and sit down with folks that have projects coming up and see, you know, talk about what it might cost you to borrow money from us, or if it doesn't fit with us, we also have a whole bunch of people that we can refer you to. Some people are in the room. I know I've seen people, Nancy's in the room here. She lends money. I know Linda lends money, and of course, we've got Charlotte back there that's waving her hand at me. I'm not going to leave you out, Charlotte. Again, going with the pivot that we talked about. Um, 9 is the new seven. So for this is the investor side of things.

Again, we've got 250 some investors in Alfie who have experienced anywhere between 6 and 8% return on their investment over the last 9 years. And now we are shooting for a 9% return. Why are we doing that? Treasury bonds are, you know, very low risk, but, um, it's safe, but, and they're making money. Why would you want to invest in Alfie? Well, we're aiming towards that higher return. We've changed our fee structure in favor of the investors. So some of that origination goes now to the investors making it more attractive for people to put money in the fund.

The reason that we are, well, I don't know if we're currently, uh, accepting investors, but we may be soon because we are currently demand, we're seeing a whole lot of demand after the holidays, which is crazy. It's starting to boost again. Anyway, that attractive return for our investors makes it easier for us to lend money to folks that are involved in projects. touch on that for a sec.

Speaker 5 [50:42] So when we started Alfie, if you don't mind going back for a sec. It was in an era, you know, this February is our ninth birthday. So it was an era of unprecedented low interest rates. We were, we had our investors, we had very little competition because people were getting like a, you know, quarter point in their money markets, half a point, something like that. So as the world has changed, Alfie had to change to make sure that we could stay competitive and still attract investors and new investor capital. So we raised our rates really just a little bit about one to one. 5% of the last 3 years. So relative to what the bankers, the banking industry had to do is very low.

And that's where like 9 is the new 7 because our target returns were 6 to 8. And now they're really 8 to 9.5 . And we are, we are accepting new investor capital. We pretty much have always accepted new investor capital. We have a $50,000 minimum. We have probably about 20 to 25 investors that have, you know, that heavy hitting folks that have a 1000000 to 40000 in the fund, but most investors are somewhere between 50,000 and 400,000. Patrick Okane, who's here is one of our associates, and he helps onboard investors, and answers questions, and has some slightly outdated prospectuses, because we're waiting on 4th quarter 23 to push out the new prospectus.

But we'd be happy to talk to anyone who's looking for a passive return with liquidity.

Speaker 1 [52:17] And again, getting back to, um, the investor community attending meetings like this. These are some of the things that have helped Alfie build our business over the years, we're members of several organizations, we attend these meetings, and it's these invaluable relationships that we build. Um, and, uh, one of the things that we're most happy about, and we'd love to get some, uh, um, some participation, and we can certainly hand out. We're not we're not asking for money tonight, but we were involved in a veteran's home giveaway. One of our borrowers builds affordable houses for veterans up in Mars Hill and how many homes have they built so far, John?

Speaker 5 [53:04] It's actually, it's really just affordable housing in Mars Hill. His name is Brandon Quinn. I don't know if you guys know him. He's really kind of a local hero. We started 5 years ago. He was really looking for a construction lender, couldn't find one, and he's done over, I think, close to 45 loans, but he decided with his son this year to give away one of their homes to a veteran, which was really amazing.

Speaker 1 [53:30] They gave away a house. And here is John and I went to the ceremony where they presented this gentleman with the house. He was injured in Patrick, what's his name? Kevin Rumley. Kevin Rumley. He was injured in combat and had no idea that this was happening. He showed up because he thought he was there to see somebody get a house, and he ended up getting the house, and he was completely floored. We love to take part in endeavors like this. It's about community, and it's what Alfie kind of was started originally, was to help people get funding when they couldn't. And then were able to, you know, nine years later to help Alfie actually purchase the window package for this home.

And Brandon was able to get donations from suppliers and stuff to build that house and then give it away to somebody.

Speaker 5 [54:34] So, um, they're planning to do that every year too. Once a year.

Speaker 1 [54:39] So getting back to what I started that, we would love, and we'll be putting stuff out. Hopefully Rodrigo and Zach will be able to help us spread the word about getting some involvement with that kind of stuff. We have time for Q and A, are you kicking us off?

Unknown [54:55] All right.

Zac Ruiz [54:57] All right. So if you've got questions about how to get hard money lending. What's going on in the markets? Why would you stop doing wholesaling and move into landscaping? anything at all. Let us know and we'll see what we can do. Anyone want to be brave and start it off? in the back here.

Speaker 3 [55:13] All right, sorry, I'm gonna just repeat the question real quick. So do you all do loans for just, sorry, was it for people who are wanting to build the house? Okay, so loans for people who are building their own primary residence.

Speaker 5 [55:28] That's a great question. Yeah, we are prevented because of the safe act, which is a federal law, so we can only loan to, for investment purposes, to entities, not human beings, for purposes, for investment only. So answer is no, but Jason Chambers is great at that.

Speaker 3 [55:47] All right. Another question?

Unknown [55:50] Yeah.

Zac Ruiz [55:53] All right. The question is, I guess, open to the floor, basically, what's your perspective of the market for the next 12 to 18 months? I guess we can put you in the hot seat and come this way.

Speaker 5 [56:01] Yeah, thanks, Mike. We didn't really talk too much in our presentation about what we saw last year, but what we really saw was kind of just a post-COVID reality because everything was so everything was an anomaly during COVID, right? The appreciation, the profits, the acceleration, the days on market, everything was just unusual. So what we're seeing now, what we're what we've really seen in 23 is kind of a push back to that you would say if COVID hadn't happened, what would have happened after 2019. So kind of people are normalizing, they're still making really great money, the days on market are becoming more regular. And so we see more of that.

And then, you know, we, the trend with the, we're seeing a very high loan demand right now, and we're seeing a lot of payoffs. So that shows us that our borrowers are still interested in building and their products are selling. So.

Unknown [57:02] Mr. Peters?

Speaker 1 [57:04] I was gonna, my answer would have been very similar. John's, except shorter because I don't like to ramble on. But yeah, it's the it's the low inventory of new construction is what we're seeing for the most part, which I work a lot in the upstate of South Carolina. And we're seeing, I'm seeing just super high loan demand for that, for that reason. Wow. that was my fault.

Speaker 5 [57:31] And Mike, what Amarx is building, I think, is a great segment for what the people who are coming here.

Speaker 3 [57:42] Yeah, so personally, I'm feeling still pretty positive, but not going to be getting into projects that I think are going to sell after, say, August or September. Um, as of right now, I foresee kind of take, see myself taking a little bit of a pause on buying anything short term, uh, and, you know, that would sell, say, be, after September and just kind of wait and see what happens on the back end of the year. If something cash flows well, though, I would still be really comfortable to buy it anytime.

Zac Ruiz [58:16] All right, so close it out. We'll talk a little bit about market nerd data side, right? So in 2008, people were self-reporting income, getting these ultra leverage loans, and then those loans that were really not that great, were being packaged together and sold as, you know, being better than they were, and everything blew up. And in 2024, we can all look back and be like, well, that was obvious. How did they not see the writing on the wall, right? So it wasn't in the moment, or at least not to everybody. So I think it's interesting that most people have some version of a lockstep opinion about what's happening now. And what do I think is happening now?

So basically, last month we did a meetup where we went over the state of our economy. And something like 80% of outstanding loans right now are under 5% with a huge chunk of them being around like the 3s and the 4s percent, right? So since that time, the cost of capital has gone up. So think of your debt to income, like how much does this loan cost every month? It's gone up considerably, like 30-ish percent, depending on where you're at, sometimes more than that. So you might have equity locked in your house, but to buy the exact same house. We did the math, like just doing all of the averages from the nation everything.

And you would need to have the house be basically 28% less than the value of your home now, given where rates are at, to have the same monthly payment. So what does all this mean? I think that supply is going to be low for some time, unless you are forced to move, I don't know that people are going to be too incentivized to sell their home. And then on top of that, with the market being what it is, and people being more sophisticated than they've ever been with options, anything from short-term rentals to furnish finders to long-term rentals, I think a lot of people are going to hold homes that they would have sold otherwise, maybe get a HELOC or something and then jump into that next home.

So, so, what, wow. Well, my take is, is I'm very bullish on new construction, a new construction home has to sell. Someone's got to live there, right? And even infant that they're building it for rental income, I think the biggest chunk of like good inventory that's going to is hopefully from new construction, because I don't know where it's coming from, people sitting in their homes, especially depending on where you are in life. You think of your investment horizon and your risk tolerance and all this good stuff, there's a chunk of some several thousand, $100,000 sometimes, excuse me, several $100,000 that you can access with a loan at a different rate.

And so long story short, I think supply is going to be very low. I think demand is going to continue to increase. And so supply and demand means I don't think prices are going to come down, really. I think people are going to be priced out and we're going to move to a renter nation. So that's what I think.

Speaker 3 [1:00:48] All right. We'll go Jack 1st and we'll come back to the front here.

Unknown [1:00:54] Nice haircut.

Speaker 5 [1:01:02] Thanks, guys. It's exciting project.

Speaker 3 [1:01:09] All right, so to recap basically is at what point, what are the conditions to go from working with Alfie to working with maybe a little bit more of a traditional lender? Yep.

Unknown [1:01:20] Cool.

Speaker 5 [1:01:21] That's a great question. And I would say it's completely subjective, because we truly only want people to use Alfie when Alfie's the right fit, and that, and there can be a ton of variables about that situation. The reality is that construction financing is very difficult to get, and it's way more difficult than it really should be. And that's, you know, why we have pivoted in, especially new construction. But, you know, only use us if it makes sense, is the short answer.

Speaker 4 [1:01:53] Coach Stephen McCown here, McCown performance trading. Head performance coach and co-founder. Just wanted to reach out to everyone, let you know, if you're looking for somewhere to train in the off season, get ready for the next season, the next adventure, or if your next weekend endeavor, we're here for your strength and performance needs. You can find us at Macomb Performance Training.com, or on Instagram at Macomb Performance Training, or on Facebook, either at Stephen Macon, or at Macon Performance Training, and hope you look us up, we'll get some of our content, and hope we can help you with your outdoor fitness, and getting out for your next adventure.

Speaker 3 [1:02:29] All right, right here, sir. So, do you have an opinion on where people are moving to, geographically speaking, here in the actual area? Do you guys have an opinion? I don't have an opinion. Other than Canton? I'm high in Canton, but...

Speaker 5 [1:02:47] I mean, I really think that, you know, McDowell County to Morganton is the place where people are going to have to move that are working to afford being in this region, and I'm, you know, I love old Ford. I'm a mountain biker, and there's a lot going on down there. And a lot of some people in this room are building down there. I'm building down there. So, and I think as you go closer to, you just find more affordability that direction. And who knows what's going to happen with Canton, that's a big question mark.

Speaker 1 [1:03:18] And I work a lot in the upstate of South Carolina. So I'm seeing, like, I was in Woodruff this morning. It was raining. I don't know if any of you noticed. I drove down in the deluge, and Woodruff, you know, BMW is putting a battery plant in down there, and what's happening is people are looking to move there because those jobs are solid. Um, and I'm seeing a huge uptick in both development, um, development looks and new construction stuff, um, and I think the whole upstate of South Carolina, um, is, is just going to continue to grow.

Speaker 5 [1:03:57] It's pretty amazing. Craig has borrowers down there that pay 12 or $15,000 for a lot, build a house for 140 and sell it for 2.5 quarter and make a profit. I mean, is it really... are going to be mad that you just said that. You're your borrower. That's your problem. So really, it's a different economy down there and it's a much more like normal economy. The West North Carolina economy is mysterious. You know, we all have multiple jobs and we're trying to figure out how to be here. and it's super expensive and the rates are making it even more expensive. Cool.

Speaker 3 [1:04:33] All right, who's next? Other question?

Zac Ruiz [1:04:36] The young man Alder's question was, I'm hungry. Is there food? and there is. There's gumbo in the corner. Just make sure everyone knows after the shows up. Jorge, go for it.

Speaker 3 [1:04:46] Well, 1st of all, lots of nice words from Jorge. But for audio purposes, what's the largest loan that Alfie has done here in the area?

Speaker 1 [1:04:56] I'd like to go back to what he said that was nice about us first, if you don't mind. You can touch on it. Thank you, Jorge. We love doing business with you. You were one of the early borrowers with Alfie. So, and we've come a long way together, and we appreciate you.

Speaker 5 [1:05:12] I'd say you're a local legend, and really, some of our first borrowers were people who have been in the business for a long time, and you're on that list, so we appreciate it, for sure. And the largest loan that we, um, we really have leaned away from large complex projects because they have large complex problems. But our largest loan to date is $8 million, and it was super well collateralized, great, like super bankable people. We knew the real estate. We knew the people, and we closed an $8000000 loan in 45 days, it would have taken the folks about 9 months to do it through traditional financing. It just made sense, right? So that's why we did it.

And it was a great loan with no regrets, but if someone brought us an $8000000 loan now and we didn't know them and the dirt and all the things, we would probably not do it.

Speaker 3 [1:06:06] So I had a follow-up question is, how long ago was that?

Speaker 5 [1:06:09] That was right before the, I mean, that just wound down less than a year ago.

Speaker 3 [1:06:16] But when did it start?

Speaker 5 [1:06:17] Started 2020?

Zac Ruiz [1:06:20] And follow-up question just for everyone. How long is the average off you loan closing time check? 8.6 months is the average. So that's the life of the loan, right? But from application to I got money. How long?

Speaker 5 [1:06:33] Oh, so a lot of that depends on the borrowers attorney? But typically we can process a completed application. and be ready to fund in 2 to 3 weeks.

Zac Ruiz [1:06:43] And do you know how long it takes for a bank more or less, for a similar loan?

Speaker 5 [1:06:47] Longer?

Speaker 3 [1:06:49] Longer slower. All right. Another question?

Unknown [1:06:54] Yep, sir.

Speaker 5 [1:06:57] That's a great question.

Speaker 3 [1:06:59] Let me repeat it real quick. Yeah, just what's the LTV that you fund off the purchase price and LTV off of the ARV? Oh, do you fund 100% of the rehab?

Speaker 5 [1:07:11] Right. So going back to the 10 foreclosures and the repeat business is we really try to make sure that we don't help people get in trouble. And so on our new construction, you own a lot free and clear in almost all cases, we fund 100% of your construction plus your soft costs and your origination fees. On a rehab, we will typically, um, for 1st time borrowers between 25 and 30% cash in based on the acquisition and the rehab budget, and we want that in at the front, and then we finish the purchase acquisition, and then we fund 100% of the rehab. So we're happy to look at one and then after you get an established track record with us. It goes down to 20% cash in. Great question.

Unknown [1:08:00] Misala. Do you Yes.

Speaker 3 [1:08:06] Do you own in Charlotte, yes. Yeah.

Zac Ruiz [1:08:09] And in case everyone's wondering. So we have this on a podcast in YouTube. You can watch the other ones that happen. And so they can't hear the audience. So part of what we do is repeating so that the question gets to the audience at home.

Speaker 5 [1:08:19] We really like the greater, like, metropolitan area, typically in areas that are super expensive. Like the downtown Charlotte area, we would not be the great choice, but like the bedroom communities. We have a maximum loan of $600,000, loan amount for any single family home. So we're not in the luxury spec financing business.

Speaker 3 [1:08:43] All right. Got one, maybe 2 questions that they're quick. Any takers? Going once.

Zac Ruiz [1:08:50] Going twice. Cool. The full bar wins. All right. So if we can get a quick round of applause for our Alfie speakers. Whoa. I'm sitting right in the white. So it turns out that next month we're doing real estate development. That's building buildings, people. Two of our speakers are here, we have, Mike Romero and Mr. Jay Z at the front, and the third is Amanda Williams.

Speaker 3 [1:09:18] There you go. He's doing some development, actually, and old for it, as John mentioned.

Zac Ruiz [1:09:21] So, following up on getting money to do it. How do you build from the ground up? What are the tricks of the trades? How do you scale up? That'll be next month's meet up. Thanks for coming. As we said, there's food in the corner. There's sponsors over there, and a full bar. Thank you all so much for being here. See you guys next month.

Speaker 5 [1:09:36] Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 [1:09:40] Hey, guys, Rodrigo here wanted to say thank you for taking the time to listen into this month's panel conversation. We hope that you join us in person at next month's meeting. You can find out more at AVLmeetup.com. We primarily meet on the 1st Tuesday of every month, but be sure to check out our website, AVLmeetup.com. You can also watch this conversation on YouTube at AVLmeetup. Also, I have a quick announcement. We started a property management company called Vesta Property Management. So if you're looking for 3rd party management for long-term rental. We'd love the opportunity to talk to. Our goal at Vesta is to turn houses into homes and investments into returns.

If you're looking to work with a third-party management company that will allow you to have peace of mind and experience freedom around rentals. Uh, reach out to us. We can help make that happen for you. That's the PM.com.

Zac Ruiz [1:10:35] What's going on, everyone? Zach here to close it out before you sign off for the day. If you liked the data-driven portion of today's meetup, then I'd love to take a moment to tell you about the Ruiz Report and REMC.co. If you're a real estate professional, then you know that you should become the local economist of choice but you're probably unsure of how to learn the skills required. That's where the Ruiz Report comes in. We offer customized marker reports to promote your business, training videos so you'll learn how to interpret the market data, and monthly quizzes to keep you sharp. Learn more at resreport.com and sign up for a free account to watch all of our training videos at no cost.

If you're more interested in the live data and some data and analytics dashboards, then I highly suggest you check out ramc.co. REMC.co is the 1st of its kind, data and analytics dashboards for the real estate industry. Now you have to be an active participating member of the MLS in order to sign up, but it is unparalleled data on every market participant, whether that's an office, a listing, or one of the realtors. Again, you can find out more about REMC.co at REMC.co. As always, thanks for listening and we hope to see you at one of our next meetups.

If you can't make it and you still want to be part of the Movers and Shakers, then sign up for a free account at AVLmeetup.com and get yourself into our member directory. Thanks again. See you next month.