One aspect of real estate investing that doesn’t get nearly enough of the attention it deserves is financing. While it is great to be excited starting out, many new real estate investors fail to recognize the unsustainability of their short term mindset. They are so focused on doing what it takes to close a deal now that it actually causes trouble for them later on. This is especially true when trying to finance your first couple of deals.
Nghi Le joins us in this episode to go over how he encountered and overcame this exact roadblock. Nghi is an investor from Seattle and got started in 2015. For much of his life, he’s been in IT and software consulting. At the time, flipping was the “shiny object” so that’s what Nghi did starting out. Slowly but surely, he began to realize the pitfalls of flipping in his area. Profits were so low that he was actually making more money from his regular full time job. Plus, he didn’t have to deal with stresses and headaches of working with contractors—which actually brings us to what he and his company do now.
For Nghi, he’s always enjoyed finding, structuring, and financing deals. And early on, he recognized that conventional financing with lending institutions put him in a major disadvantage against other investors. He needed to cling onto his full time job just so he can even qualify for a loan. And to add insult to injury, many times deals would fall through without lenders having his back. Why? At that point, lenders had already collected their fees and it didn’t matter to them if the deal actually closes.
Nghi joined powers with a startup fintech (“Financial Technology”) company and they set out to provide lending services catered to investors who are facing the same problems they had when they were getting started. With their business, they seek to revolutionize the lending industry and help the next generation of investors large and small.
Update to date, Nghi’s company offers a variety of short and long term loans that don’t have the red tape restrictions that many lending institutions implement, such as quick closings and no seasoning periods. They’ve conducted business in over 10 states and are looking to continue to grow organically. If Nghi could go back and talk to his 16 year old self, he’d tell him, “Spend time learning about real estate, as well as self development… learn how to maximize a crash.”
An unexpected benefit of real estate investing, Nghi said, was having the opportunities that he’s had and being able to do what he wants all the while being one step closer to retirement.
