A hard money loan is a loan that is backed by a hard asset. Hard money lenders give people financing so they can acquire more properties. The Streamline Funding Group is a Texan private lending institution specializing in originating Private Money loans on real estate investments. They manage about $200 million in investor capital across a number of different loans throughout the state of Texas. Join Lauren Wells and Chris Seveney as they talk to the CEO of Streamline Funding, Romney Navarro. Learn what a hard money loan or private loan is. Find out why residential is the best market right now in today’s economy. And discover how Romney was able to grow and scale Streamline Funding even further. Start private lending today!

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Building People’s Wealth By Being A Hard Money Lender With Romney Navarro

I have been absent from quite a few episodes traveling around to different conferences but I am here back again with my co-host Chris Seveney. We have the pleasure of having Romney Navarro, CEO of Streamline Funding, with us to talk about persevering when scaling your business and in relation to where we are in nowaday’s economic climate. Welcome, Romney. We are happy to have you. Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience? Thanks for having me, Lauren, and Chris. It’s really cool to be on the show. I hope the millions and millions of readers worldwide get some value out of this thing but even if it’s the few, I want to always make a connection. We met and established a great relationship. I loved your guys’ vibe and energy. It’s an honor to be here because I love to feed off of energy. With that said, who am I? what do I do? A little bit of that, my name is, as she mentioned, Romney Navarro. I’m the CEO of Streamline Funding, a private lending institution based out of Austin, Texas. We have been at it for many years. In December 2022, we are going to be twenty years old. That’s pretty wild. I can’t believe we have been doing it this long. We rode our first loan out of the back of a Toyota Corolla. Now, we manage about $200 million in investor capital, which is placed across a number of different loans throughout the state of Texas and the South in very select markets throughout the country. Not necessarily only the South. The net is this. For the last couple of years, we have been building a business to help home builders grow. We continue to do that now. When we say builder to be more than a home builder, now we are talking about the portfolio builder, the legacy builder, and the wealth builder. This show plays into what we are doing. We are looking to give people the fuel to grow their nest egg or retirement. You name it. As a hard money lender or private lender is what we are referred to, it’s hard to see how that works but when you are giving people financing to acquire more assets, it’s exactly how that works. I’m a hard money lender. I have been doing it forever. As we navigate through some more unique waters, it’s going to be interesting to see how things grow. First thing, I’m assuming, since you said your first deal was written out of Toyota Corolla, that you have been with the company all twenty years? I have not, believe it or not. My business partner founded the company. His name is Jadon Newman. He founded the company in 2002. It was December 20-something, 2002 when we wrote our first loan. As I said, we will be turning twenty in the next couple of months. I got here right to smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession. What landed you here? How did that come about? Let me give you a time period in case the people that are reading could relate. I’m talking about September 2008. I’m familiar with it. Right in the middle, where the biggest pain point was happening. I had been a commercial lender for a number of years leading up to that. I was a pretty young dude at the time, certainly younger than I am now. I was doing small-balance commercial loans. I was financing retail centers, office buildings, and multifamilies for entrepreneurs. It was going great in my early to mid-twenties, making a little bit of money, and things are going well. I got married, had a kid, started a family, and bought a house. In the midstream, everything was rocking and rolling. At some point in 2008, the company I worked for called Bayview Financial, a big firm. You guys would be very familiar with that group. In addition to servicing notes, Bayview had an origination ARM called Silver Hill Financial. I was working there, and life was good. At one point in 2008, they said, “This whole loan origination thing, we are pumping the brakes. We are going to stop originating loans because it’s getting weird out there.” I felt it but I wouldn’t call myself a kid. I was a kid. I wasn’t paying attention to it. I was trying to close deals. Long story short, I’m unemployed. I realized, “I’ve got this giant pipeline of deals that I can’t monetize or make money off of but need to make money because I’ve got a young family.” By the way, my wife is X number of months pregnant with our second kid. That pressure was building up. I was like, “Let me go to Google.” Imagine 2008 Google. It was a little bit different. I googled, “How do I fund the loan and get paid?” Google says, “Have you heard of this thing called hard money?” I was like, “What the hell is hard money?” That’s the next question I ask. I was like, “Tell me what that is. Who are the hard money lenders in town?” I found four different hard money lenders and called them. Every single one of them is my friend to this very day. Some are my competitors now, but my friend. I walked into this one company that showed interest in one of the deals that I was trying to place. I was trying to place the deal because I realized if I close it, I make this big commission, and everything is back to normal, and these things happen, a very broker mentality. I go and put this deal in front of this group, and 30 to 45 minutes of getting fillet with a million questions. They are like, “Do you have a minute?” I was like, “Let me look,” of course, I have a minute. I was unemployed. They asked me the question, and I was like, “Yes.” I wait for 2 to 3 minutes, and in comes this dude, 6’5”, 300-pounder, comes in and he’s like, “I like your deal.” “Cool.” He was like, “Do you want a job?” I was like, “Yes, I want a job.” That company was Streamline Funding. I presented a deal to then the CEO and Founder, Jadon, and they offered me a job. Some years later as we powered through the recession because that’s what it took powering through. It wasn’t business as usual. I became a partner in the firm. I took on more responsibility, equity, and all of these great things. We are a unique bird in that we are more than private lenders. Part of our broader universe is private equity, wealth management, real estate, and all these things we also do. Jadon, myself, and two other partners each handled one of those legs, for lack of a better term. I have always been on the private lending side, and then it dawned on us about a year ago that it was time to scale it again.   We’ve scaled it a few times, and it was at that point that I took on the title and the responsibility of CEO. I have always been, by definition, that role but now it’s by title. I started as a lowly loan officer. All these guys out here are making calls for me. I was one of them several years ago. Fast forward to now, I’m running this place and trying to grow it into a billion-dollar shop. I love that you give perspective on the timeframe because a lot of people who are getting into real estate, whether actively or passively, think of it, and social media does not help this over the past few years of it being this overnight success. I love when we speak with people who talk about how they have been in this for years. Look where you are now, but that’s not where it started. I was cold-calling and doing deals. That’s super awesome. The power of the internet and you, googling, “What is a hard money lender? What is hard money? How do I do this? How do I make money?” It also speaks to something even more powerful now that there is so much information out there, being able to watch free content, not necessarily pay someone to mentor, coach you or whatever they want to call it these days. It’s even better than it was several years ago. It was backing up a little bit. Our audience is pretty broad for people who are seasoned investors starting. Can you explain and break down what a hard money loan is? What private lending is? Can you talk about the players like, “This is A goes to B goes to C, this is what we do at a higher level?” I will try to break it down into a couple of components. I’ve got a couple of books back here. I’m an avid reader and try to crush a book weekly. I’m not always that good. Sometimes I’m reading one, and sometimes I listen to one. Oftentimes, I’m doing both at the same time. Several years ago, I read one, and I wouldn’t call it life-changing but it restructured my way of thinking. The book was called the Blue Ocean Strategy. I love that book. That’s a good one. I told Chris to read it. I haven’t read it in a long time but I remember it was eye-opening. I’m going to butcher it because I’ve interpreted it as my own version. For the people that are reading this, the Blue Ocean Strategy is very simple as I explain it to people that I am around. I read this several years ago and in other years again but I always land on a red ocean where everybody is fighting for the same thing. A red ocean being, shark-infested waters. There’s one piece of meat, and all the sharks are attacking. A blue ocean is when one of those sharks swims away and creates its own little paradise of whatever they want. I have always been a blue ocean thinker. I’ve always wanted to be a little different than the competition. If they are going that way, I always want to go this way. It’s hard to do that when times are so great. We have been on a monumental run for several years. A red ocean is where everybody is fighting for the same thing. A blue ocean is where you can create your own little paradise. Click To Tweet Some sage advice I got years ago was, “When times are going good, it’s okay to do the same stuff but when times are not going good, you have to do something different.” I came up at a time when times were not going good, so I always had to do something different. It has always been my strategy, and it worked. When I talk about hard money, I could talk about it at the private money level or the way that I’ve done it. Both are important. Institutionally speaking, in October 2022, there are large-scale institutions that provide lending criteria to brokers across the country, and these lending criteria are nothing any conventional loan has ever seen before. They are ratio driven but are not income-driven, credit driven, and so on. If somebody wants to buy a piece of real estate and doesn’t want to go the traditional route, hard money is the place to do that. As a result of the ease of transacting, hard money is going to charge you more. In the last year, hard money rates have been plummeting. Rates were as low as 7% for a hard money loan. Fast forward to when the market has changed, and we are back in the ‘12s and ‘13s. That’s the world that we live in. I grew up in that world. Instead of necessarily focusing on what the large-scale institutions were saying, “Give me this type of property or asset,” we went out and raised our own capital. Last year, hard money rates plummeted as low as 7%. Today, they are back in the 12 to 13% range. Click To Tweet If this is my universe and I have a private lending firm, a private equity firm, a real estate firm down here, I have this wealth management firm. We raised a lot of money to finance all of these projects that we are talking about by way of our wealth management firm. Some people call me a balanced sheet lender. I’ve shown you guys a few deals on my balance sheet. We basically originate loans based on the money that we have available inside of our funds. What that does is a couple of things. It gives us the ability to cut a nonsense deal like, “If it makes sense, we do the deal.” That’s what, ultimately, hard money is. “What is it that we are looking for in a deal?” We make a decision based on this common-sense approach. I always narrow it down to what we call the five Cs. Five Cs are important in my world because it’s frankly how we make a decision. Everybody has their version of this. This is my proprietary blend but it’s the way that I make a decision. Sometimes the Cs get reweighted or the weight distribution gets changed. Now, it’s absolutely changing. Those five Cs are Collateral. What is the real estate that we are lending on? Credentials, what is the experience of the sponsor? Have they done this before, and how many times and so on? Cash, what is the liquidity of the sponsor? Are deals with a lot of liquidity or stronger than deals with a little liquidity? Credit, what is the credit of the sponsorship? Typically, a 500-credit score does not pay, and an 800-credit score does. Character, what is the character of this person that we are going to lend $100,000, $1 million or $10 million if there’s a white-collar financial crimes background that it’s highly likely that we are going to get screwed out of a deal? We are looking at those five Cs. All five Cs are never going to be lit up. That’s a bankable deal. We exist for the scratch and dent stuff. 3 of those 5 Cs in place, we are going to figure something out. 4 of those 5 Cs, all day long. That’s what hard money is. A little bit of common sense, non-institutional, non-agency underwriting, if you will. Hard money is a little bit of common sense, non-institutional, non-agency underwriting. Click To Tweet A few things, one is, Lauren, back to what he said, he tells you how to accept a job. If somebody asks you if you want a job by saying, “Yes, I want a job,” not a, “It’s not a no response.” Apparently, I’m a good negotiator slightly. What’s interesting is that you mentioned about the five Cs because I was speaking to another person at a conference, and they mentioned they enjoy lending the people who don’t need the money. People can use the money but it’s not the people who are desperate for the money as the type of people you want to lend to base on that experience. One question I was going to ask is, so you are doing this lending, are you doing it through a regulation D 506(c) or how is it structured with the lending and investors? You mentioned different companies. I was curious about what your overall high-level structure looks like. I have a reg D fund, and then that fund splits into two. I have a qualified fund and a non-qualified fund. The difference between the two is retirement funds and cash or non-retirement funds. We have a couple of those. The big funds are what we call our income funds and are split into a qualified and a non-qualified fund. We then have a couple of secondary funds, which are more equity funds. These large ones that I speak of are the ones that we lend off of. These small ones that I speak of are the ones that we invest in real estate. As I mentioned, we had a real estate investing ARM called Emerge Investment Group. They are making investments in real estate, whether passively or actively. It’s still pseudo-active even on the passive side, and what they are is basically the equity partners to some of our premier clients who are scaling their business from 1 house a quarter to 10 houses a quarter. We have a pretty unique fund structure in that we have a number of them. In addition, that’s not where we came from. This is something that we learned back in about 2015 and 2016. The industry started getting a little bit more sophisticated and pushed us toward the fund structure. Prior to that, I was 100% direct investments. You and Lauren might each have $100,000, and I have a $200,000 deal. I call you and say, “I need $100,000,” and you ask me a million questions, and then you wire it, not to me and not to a fund but to the title company. That was my business model from 2008 to 2014-ish. We transitioned to the fund model. It created a lot of efficiency for us. I no longer had to do the same thing 1,000 times. I literally did it once. It created some security for the investors too. There are a lot of benefits to that. Honestly, to this day, I still use the same two things that are true as they were a couple of years ago. The first one is if you do a single deal or a single trust deed loan, you have the chance of success or failure. If the deal goes upside down, bust or belly up, all of that risk is on you. If the deal goes great, all of that upside is for you too. Whereas a fund makes it a little bit more uniform when you are sitting on 200 assets inside of one fund. Diversity is one of the key things that’s good for a fund. Secondly, you guys talk about this probably now more than ever but the investors, I’m talking about the people who are making cash investments. I’m not talking about the operators that are out there, the blood, sweat, and tears guys that are trying to create lift on a property. I’m talking about the check writers. The safe money now is trending towards debt stuff like what we do. Debt is a lot safer than equity. It’s always the case but equity is all over the place at the moment.   When we look at us with our notes and stuff, you are doing the same thing. You are originating notes for lenders and so forth. Again, you are at the top of the food chain from that. We are seeing a lot of people shift from markets and conventional real estate, especially as people get worried about prices, and that’s one of the first questions they ask us is if the price goes down. You mentioned we are buying the loans at a discount that is non-performing. The value isn’t as important in our business model. As an alternative investment strategy, it opens up more opportunities for us. Lauren can talk a lot more about that because she’s the one who’s on the phone 23 hours a day talking to investors. I could talk about that all day but I won’t be on this show. Looking throughout your career, you entered at a down market, and here we are going back into one. What are some things people who are looking to start now as you started back in 2008 in whatever avenue of real estate? What are some tips for them that you would have? Here’s something that I’m saying a lot now. That is deep because the gurus are saying, “All in,” because they are trying to get the dollars. They are trying to get memberships and so on. Good on them. The vast majority of people are like, “I’m not touching it now.” That’s a very common theme. I’m going to use Austin, Texas, as my backyard as an example. Every market across the country is different but we are not insulated to rate hikes and cooling off inflation. We are all experiencing some value adjustments. Austin, Texas, several months ago, the average home was upwards of $500,000. That was the sale price. Now, the average home is selling for about $420,000. That doesn’t mean the world is falling. That means that real estate is on sale. When you go to a store and look at a shirt, and you are like, it’s $120, put it back on the shelf, and then you go back a couple of weeks later, and it’s on sale for $65. You are like, “I’m going to buy it.” Maybe I should have said the shirt was on sale for $20. The average home was a fraction of its cost back then. That doesn't mean the world is falling. That just means that real estate is on sale. Click To Tweet If you go to the store and your thing is X, and then you go back to it a few months later, and it’s a fraction of X, you are more than likely to buy it. Now, even with the increased interest rate environment that we are in and we all know what it is. We went from 2.7% to the low, and we are sitting somewhere in that 7.2%, 7.3% now. Buying power is limited. People who have cash don’t have the same problem. They can buy real estate now at a discount, so where do you enter the space? I don’t know exactly where to point people’s guns at but if you are sitting on some cash, it’s 1 of 2 things. It’s the safe investment, which is the stuff that we do, notes. I’m a note guide too. Not a discounted note guy but a note guy. Notes are safe or opportunistic, and that’s real estate. Buy the actual hard asset because it’s worth 20% less than it was worth several months ago. It always bounces back higher than it was before. It’s like a clearance sale going on now. I was talking to someone else about this in relation to job hunting as well because we are seeing all these layoffs and talking about how long can you stay in the market. As you said, if you buy an actual property, you are buying it at a discount, and it’s going to go back up. You can’t expect it to go back up like the COVID fashion of 200% a year or whatever being able to sit and hold and be in whatever you are in, and then, as you said, everything is on sale. I feel like there’s going to be a lot of opportunity to be had for people who are willing to take a little bit of risk if they have the cash. In the office next door to me, I’ve got one of my colleagues. I’ve worked with him for a couple of years, and he manages our construction portfolio. When you put the word construction in front of anything, it seems a little blue-collary but this guy is a borderline genius. I hate that he’s so much smarter than me. I hate those people. He challenges me almost to an academic level. He asks me, “If we are in a bear market, how does somebody know if they are buying right?” I was like, “That’s hitting me right in the guts because, at the end of the day, I’m not only financing it but trying to explain to my audience that it is the right time to buy.” I can’t say that I know the answer to the question. I can’t take it all the way to the end but if it was worth $500,000 then and it’s worth $420,000 now, there’s a discount on the table. It doesn’t mean the current value is $500,000. It means that once we get out of it, it’s worth more than $500,000. It’s better to buy at $420,000 than it is to buy at $500,000. That’s one thing that’s true. I also think there’s something to be said about the long-term hold. As it relates to a general investment strategy, notes are long-term plays sometimes. In my world, they are short-term plays but some hard assets are long-term plays like rental property in particular. Now is a great time to get into that. With everything being rainbows and sunshine, that I’m telling you guys, at the end of the day, people aren’t buying houses but people still need a place to live, so people are renting houses.   A rental strategy is a strong one, especially if you are buying at a discount. Lauren, you started the conversation with persevering and scale. I think of the word innovation. I will never forget that in 2008, as I said, I was making a little bit of money but I’m the dude doing a job. I then lost my job and found a job, and I’m financing all these properties but am not in a position to buy. I remember seeing some deals that were insane for the next 3 or 4 years. It was like, “You are telling me I could buy 100 acres for pennies? Let’s do that.” The term that came into focus in those days or the post-recessionary period was dry powder. Everybody knows the term. It’s buzzy. I’m thinking, “If my clients only had dry powder, they would be buying the entire city, the state or the country,” but who has dry powder is the big guys the Blackstone, Greystone, and all these big firms are buying up a lot of real estates because they have dry powder. Through innovation, I’m trying to work on a dry powder line of credit to allow my clients who have some liquidity, $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 or $400,000 to leverage that into $600,000, $700,000, $800,000, $900,000 to $1 million of buying power so that they could take advantage of this discount market. Instead of buying it last year for $500,000, they could buy it now for $420,000. Maybe they could buy it next year for $380,000 but they are taking advantage of the discount. I’m trying to work through a dry powder line of credit to give people who are interested in the long-term strategy a real chance because there are not that many offers being made on these properties nowadays. No, there’s not. As you mentioned, the store example of the shirt is $60, unfortunately, that person’s credit card interest rate went from 12% up to 28% all of a sudden. It’s like, “Wait for a second here,” and that’s what we are starting to see a lot with housing and, as you mentioned, the dry powder deals. I was speaking with a multifamily investor, and he basically said the same thing. Now interest rates are above the cap rates. There are not a lot of multifamily deals getting done at this point in time unless it’s a firm that’s got a lot of cash and it’s a real good value add for them that they can pick it up at heavy discount cash, get the value to add, then turn around, get the thing reappraised refinance, and enhance some of that returns. As you mentioned, now is going to be a time, in my personal opinion but I’m always wrong anyways. Over the next 12 to 18 months, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity in real estate. For us in the note space, the lag is a little longer because it’s going to take a little longer for people to go delinquent, and then for those loans from BlackRock, huge private equity firms, and REITs that hold a lot of these assets to make its way down here as well. I’m curious, though, with the hard money stuff that you are doing, on the construction, is a lot of it single-family type stuff, commercial or what’s your portfolio mix? My portfolio consists of entirely residential property with an asterisk. The asterisk is that there is some multi-family, so long as you could rest your head on the property, it’s something that I would do. We decided to do that also back in 2010. I was doing commercial deals left, right, and center. As I mentioned, I was a commercial lender prior to coming to Streamline. That was part of the match made in heaven. “This dude’s got a pipeline. We’ve got some dollars. Let’s make it all happen.” Commercial real estate is interesting but generally speaking, the volatility is not one that we were very excited about. When you are talking about recessionary times, one of the things that happen is that people don’t spend as much money. If times are tough, you don’t go to that extra dinner, don’t spend the night at a hotel, don’t take your clothes to the dry cleaner or don’t buy the shirt for $60. You wait for it to be $12. That type of stuff starts happening. We pivoted into residential. This was kind of an elementary thought at the time but everybody always needs a roof over their head. That’s still very much true to this day and plus the fact that how much is it worth and can people buy it. There are all those other factors. We have always been a residential firm and still are to this day. We took a lot of risks, pre-COVID and post-COVID, in some of the larger-scale deals. It wouldn’t hurt me one bit to do a $2 million spec a couple of miles from my office. I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole because that $2 million spec is going to be sitting on the market for many years. You know what’s not is going to be a $300,000 bread and butter home. If times get real tough, you could slap a tenant in there and throw it into a 30-year mortgage, whatever that may mean, interest rate-wise. I still am incredibly bullish on residential but more bullish on the middle market and below. Not the upper markets. Chris, you asked the question, residential or multifamily, and I’m sitting on my whiteboard up here, we approved a $6 million multi, and it’s 48 units. I approved it at 70% loan-to-cost. I’m saying $6 million. Those are very loose numbers. The guy bought the land for X. He bought it for $500,000, and he’s putting $7.5 million into the horizontal and vertical. That’s $8 million of cost. I’m lending him 70% of that number. I might be lending him less than $6 million. There was zero chance that the sponsor would’ve taken that loan several months ago because the market was in a place where it was offering him 85%. Now, I’m offering 70%, and I was like, “God, I’m sorry. I wish I could do more,” but the fact of the matter is, there is a lot of risk in the speculative building at the moment. The equity has to absorb more of that risk to allow the debt to frankly finance the project. The same isn’t totally true for that bread-and-butter little house that already exists where a lot of us are willing to take risks on those deals. It’s these speculative plays that are a little bit risky. Chris, do you have any final thoughts? I don’t. He covered a lot of the questions that I was looking for on things. I have a final question because you already answered what’s your advice you would give to someone entering the market, which I usually ask at the end but it fits right there. Since you are a big reader, what is your most recent read, and what is your favorite other than Blue Ocean? That can’t be it. I’m going to give you my favorite first because it rolls right into the question of, “What is the strategy?” I read this as a young man. I have kids. It required reading at the house. There’s this little book, it’s called The Richest Man in Babylon. I get goosebumps thinking about it. “Make those decisions, young people. Don’t make other decisions. Be that guy.” The gist is to invest and invest well, and everything will fall in your favor. We are investment managers in some capacity, and Seveney and Streamlined look at us as potential vehicles for that. The Richest Man in Babylon maybe changed my life in that. I wish my dad and mom would’ve told me about that book when I was a kid but unfortunately, I had to stumble across it later in life. I try to do a lot of reading. I read a lot of weird things. Here’s one and it’s interesting, sharks are starting to enter space. I’m not necessarily saying that this is a sharky book but it’s a reminder of intentions. I read The Prince by Machiavelli, and it’s stuck because I see some of those actions happening now, absolute power moves going on. It’s a reminder, not necessarily what not to be. It’s a strategy. It works but it’s a reminder of ulterior motives. I told you that a few years ago, I took the title of the CEO and remembered talking to my wife, and she’s like, “What are you going to do?” I was like, “I don’t know, babe, but I got to grow this thing.” There was a book that I read that I thought was interesting because it brought things into perspective. The title is so silly but it’s such a bullseye, A CEO Only Does Three Things. It’s people, culture, and numbers. In fact, I have a folder of my three things, my people, culture, and numbers. That was a good one. I could go on and on but The Richest Man in Babylon is my favorite. People, culture, and numbers, if you are trying to do something special, and then Machiavelli, The Prince, if you want to see what the boogieman looks like. In my case, you want to be thrown back into college where I first read that. When you go to engineering school, they don’t give you books like that. I was a Poli Sci major. It was all those books all day. Thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed this episode. Again, it was great to hear the perspective of somebody who’s continuing to grow their business and give some insight about what to look for. Also perseverance, and give people ideas of how to balance their own lives. Also, how to think outside the box. That’s something that you did and continue to do well at Streamline. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on this episode. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a friend, subscribe or leave us a review. Until next time, bye. Thank you.  

Important Links

• Streamline Funding
• Blue Ocean Strategy
• The Richest Man in Babylon
• The Prince
• A CEO Only Does Three Things

 

About Romney Navarro

Romney Navarro is the Chief Executive Officer of Streamline Funding. Having been with the firm in various capacities since 2008, today Romney concentrates on the company’s long-term growth initiatives by focusing on repetition, relationships and recruiting. Romney is also a partner at Noble Capital, Streamline’s parent company where his role has evolved from overseeing the lending company’s loan originations to overseeing the parent company’s marketing initiatives. A proud member of the American Association of Private Lenders, Romney has participated in the origination of over $1 BN in real estate investment loans throughout his career. In 2015, Romney launched the Investment Real Estate RoundTable (a Texas-based investment club with over 5,000 members), and in 2018 was the host of the highly-acclaimed Firestarters Podcast, known among real estate investors and developers as a premier source for those looking to scale their businesses. In his spare time, Romney appreciates an active outdoor lifestyle with his family and friends. In addition, Romney is an avid whiskey collector who one day looks to retire on a beach and finally enjoy the fruits of his collection. Above all else, Romney believes mastery can be achieved through repetition and continuously strives to lead his team to be masters of their respective crafts. This allows all involved to provide the best possible experience for borrowers. In 2019, this philosophy earned him and the firm the prestigious, “Think Realty Honors Private Lender of The Year Award.”