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From Distress To Success: Note Investing With Fuquan Bilal

May 26, 2021

chrisseveney

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GDNI 153 | Note Investing

 

Note investing can be a challenging space to invest in. Note space needs a lot of work and intuition if you want to turn a profit. Chris Seveney and Jamie Bateman are joined by the CEO of NNG, Fuquan Bilal. They talk about how Fuquan got his start in the note investing space and what prompted him to get into real estate notes. Fuquan also talks about the challenges and opportunities in note investing today.

Listen to the podcast here:

From Distress To Success: Note Investing With Fuquan Bilal

We have a special guest joining us. We’re happy to introduce Fuquan Bilal from NNG Capital Group. Fuquan, how are you doing?

I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

Fuquan, we wanted to have you on for multiple reasons, but one is that you play more in the second mortgage space. Chris and I dabble a little bit more in the first space. That’s one reason. I know you have your hands in a lot of different things and very experienced as far as real estate, rehabs and note investing. For the audience who’s not familiar with you, do you mind giving a little bit of your background for us?

GDNI 153 | Note Investing

Note Investing: You want to build mastery in it, but once you have those systems and processes and you can have an integrator or somebody run that for you, you can start to investigate other things.

 

First of all, I’m a superhero to my kids. I always start off with that. That’s first and foremost. It didn’t use to be like that a long time ago. I was a slave to money instead of being the master of it. Chasing the dollars is never-ending. When I first got into real estate in ’99, I jumped out the window and grew wings flying down. I left my corporate job. I started doing fix and flips from ‘99 all the way to the bubble burst in 2008. I got my behind handed to me. I got punched in the face. I had to start all over. I went through a divorce. I went through all the stuff that you can think that happens when the well runs dry. I had several different businesses, 54 employees at the time, anywhere from transportation services to a carwash, a variety of different businesses.

After that, I had to do some soul searching. I’ve always been in sales and it kept me alive. When the market transitioned, I had no idea what to do and how to move forward. That made me the better man who I am now because I had to go deeper within and do that self-journey. I started meditating and everything else. I started to attend more real estate events. I was a millionaire when I was 28. At that time, I knew everything that needs help. When a market crash, that taught me a lot in the lessons. I started to go out to real estate events so I can be abreast of what’s happening in the market and have some idea or foreshadowing or be able to navigate by staying in tune with the market. Through our research around about 2011, I discovered the note business and I fell in love with it. In the first presentation that I saw, I had learned about partials, collateral assignments and how you can fabricate the note and borrow against it. It was a paper instrument and you didn’t have to deal with contractors.

I was like, “This is amazing.” I start off in seconds because, at the time, a lot of people didn’t know about notes. People know about seller carrybacks, the old traditional notes that you do when you sell a house. You might hold back a second or a portion of the note or finance the deal for someone. This was a different arena. This was an institutional paper. I had no idea that someone like myself can have access to this. I always thought it was the big hedge funds and I discovered that, at that time, the banks were the bad guys that they were foreclosing. They were selling paper out the back door to get it off their books to clean up the losses that they had to try to trigger some of that money from the TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. They had to do certain things in order to get to that money and look good in the eyes of the people on the hill.

It's important for every investor who have some knowledge of real estate, not to be laser focused on one thing. Click To Tweet

We got access to the paper and we started to experiment with it. I put $100,000 of my own money. I went into seconds because it allowed me to create diversity and get more. Back then it was $0.10 on a dollar, $0.08 on a dollar that you can get stuff for. Especially in Florida and New York. Nobody wanted judicial states. I went out and bought some loans that I made 40% returns in less than two months of four different deals that I did. It was a variety of a discounted payoff at a short sale. I’m getting some arrears on down payment and get it reperforming. There were a lot of different ways that I’ve learned that you can generate income from the note business.

When I discovered that, I had case studies and I was able to go to many people who invested alongside me in real estate. I show them these case studies that I’ve done with my own money. I got a few partners and started to do more deals. Fast forward to 2013, I opened up my first note fund. I stayed laser-focused on that for the first two years. The note business was new. It was exciting. It still is exciting to me. I’ve learned so much. I wasn’t doing much real estate then. I was doing 1 or 2 a year projects because I already knew how to do it. I already had contractors, resources, so I didn’t want to stop at 100%. I did that a little bit to build a more personal portfolio while I focused on the fund with the notes.

Fast forward now, I have a hybrid model where I invest in notes in real estate. It’s important for every investor who has some knowledge of real estate not to just be laser-focused on one thing. You want to build mastery in it, but once you have those systems and processes and you can have an integrator or somebody run that for you, you can start to investigate other things. You got to learn how to pivot. In 2015, I saw the writing on the wall. Everyone was getting into the second mortgage space. Guys from the first were going into second because they couldn’t find and build other things that they used to find. Pricing was going up and they heard a lot of great things about seconds and started to explore it.

There were people who were raising cheaper capital coming into the space so pricing started to go up. I started focusing more on real estate in 2015 than notes. I still did smaller trades than what I was used to. I still kept it going and getting a pipeline going and filtering notes. I stopped selling those and started to work them out because we started to see more profit exiting through the borrower. That’s been our biggest opportunity. It is helping a borrower stay in the house and also as it becomes more profitable because you can create payment streams that you can do partials and collateral assignments.

In 2015, I started doing way more real estate. The banks that were selling me the paper, I started to reach out to the REO division and finding out what they have in my backyard first, things that I was used to and areas that I knew. I started to be able to buy REOs from them and started rehab mania all the way into now. In December 2019, I knew something was coming. I didn’t know COVID or the Black Swan event or whatever they call it was going to happen. I’ve been in the business long enough. I was a part of different mastermind networks that were saying, “Something is going to come. The market is going to reset. It has been good for too long. We have to pivot.”

I created a fund. It’s a hybrid model where I’m able to buy real estate from the capital I raise. We do some fix and flip stuff and rentals. I’m able to buy notes from the capital I raise, also performing and nonperforming firsts and seconds. I’m able to buy a tax lien. I can deploy capital where every opportunity is at and I’m not just stuck in one market. When COVID came, a lot of the guys that I know who ran multi-family syndication had to stop paying investors and build up the reserves. They didn’t know what was going to happen. The investors didn’t like that.

People who lend private money couldn’t lend money at the time. People who borrow for them were getting deferred payments. It was a mess. We were able to continue to go because 85% of our rental portfolio is Section 8, battered women and children. These are areas that I come from. I try to buy properties that are in these areas where I can make an impact on the community, putting them back on the tax roll. In turn, I have a Section 8 tenant that’s almost a guaranteed payment every month. Having that diversity in one pool helps us with a lot of things as well.

GDNI 153 | Note Investing

Note Investing: Most people want to capture the highest yield possible.

 

It’s generous of you and your model as well about working in other communities and so forth. One of the things I think about with note space is what most people don’t realize when they get in this space, keeping the borrower in their home is going to be the most profitable for you as well. You want to work with them. At the end of the day, you’re going to do much better off in 99.9% of the case when you try and keep them in that property and you do keep them in that property. Do you also get involved in opportunity zones or any of those programs?

I looked into that. I have brought it up to my SEC attorney. He’s doing something in certain areas of the country. These areas where I’m investing in areas that were the hardest hit and needed the most help to revitalize. I think this is a great opportunity. We did some research. He did some certifications and got himself up to it. There were unchartered orders and a lot of people didn’t know. We looked into it. To answer the question, I don’t have anything opportunity zone fund. I’ve looked to do that. It was so complicated. In the beginning, it was complicated but as time went by and more people talked about it, I got more familiar with it.

I looked at it being successful as a single project. For example, I went into a community and took an old school and turned it into a hotel. This did something where it was one project where it would take seven years and then we can exit 7 and 10 years or whatever that we can exit. The problem I had is I wanted to buy multiple properties in the opportunity zone fund, but then I’ll be selling, trading and doing a whole bunch of different things. That’s where it got complicated. When I exited, how would that be treated from a tax perspective? These were things that you had to hold on to for a long time. I’m not going to board a pool of properties that I held onto for seven years.

The deal is that in our space, the funds that I’ve always run have been 2 to 3-year terms. I’ve never run a fund where it was five-year terms. Most people that I meet want to be in and out in the shortest time possible and they want to capture the highest yield possible. Usually, if you’re doing five years and you have a multifamily deal, we have a five-year plan. In this space where I was doing flips and notes and everything else, the max time was three years. It was hard for me to wrap my head around creating a model that will last for seven years or have people wait for seven years. When I looked at the avatar of the people that I network with, a lot of the people had invested in multifamily of different things to get that depreciation. It didn’t fit my model. I wish I would have had the opportunity to jump into it because I believe I would have raised a lot more money because there are a lot of people who are looking to defer those taxes or ticket a tax break.

Seconds has a low barrier to entry, and more diversity. There's risk as well. If you don't have equity, you can get stripped. Click To Tweet

There are so many things that come to mind for me here. One thing that stands out is you now know how to do a ton of different things within real estate and notes and all the niches within the niches. It’s easy for somebody brand new to think, “I’ll just do everything.” We had Dave Van Horn on the show. He’s been in real estate, construction, notes, seconds, firsts and everything over the years. The takeaway for me is that you were focused on one thing at a time. You were focused and you got good at that asset class. You were doing flips for a while and rentals, then seconds. Now you have the ability to pivot so you’re in a much stronger position when market conditions change or legislation changes things. Whatever happens, you’re able to pivot because of that focus that you applied over a long period of time. I don’t want to miss the point that it was a long period of time that you’ve been doing this. What does it look like now as far as your business? I know you mentioned your fund. Was it a one-man show? How do you run your business operation?

We have a team. We are about eleven people including our virtual assistants. I have about maybe four virtual assistants that we leverage from the Philippines. That has been a good pivot for us also to be able to have people on our team that is a day ahead of us. When we wake up, things are already getting done for the next day. While everybody else is trying to figure out what’s happening tomorrow, we got people already working ahead of us. I love that part of it. It’s a team effort. It’s tough to do it all by yourself. There have been many days where I’ve said, “I wish I didn’t have a team. I wish it just was me.” You go through frustration because the biggest problem in this business is people.

I’ve come to realize that I expect everybody to be like me and do things like me. That’s where we go wrong. That’s where the frustration comes. What I’ve learned over time, you can hire somebody smarter than you, first of all. That’s what I started doing is to hire people who are smarter than me operationally because I’m not an operations guy. I go find deals and raise capital. That’s what I’m good at. I’ve got people on a team who can help me operationally, people that help me build systems and processes. Even with onboarding and training, that’s important. In the very beginning, I went wrong putting the wrong people in the wrong seats and not having a system and process. It was just going with that mentality that I had when I first started.

Over the years, you learn that time is valuable and how to put systems and things together. My biggest trade to date was 1,015 loans that are purchased from Banco Popular in 2016. It was a nightmare logistically. It took me two years to get through that portfolio. I started funding in 2013. I started to buy right before that. I did small deals here and there in my own apartment with a few people. When we first started the fund, it was a small fund. It was $2 million. At that time, you were able to get a couple of hundred loans at the most. I never deployed all my capital. I would deploy a percentage of it. I would sell off the creme de la creme, the stuff that had most equity that was current on the first. People will overpay for that stuff. I’ll recapitalize on a percentage of my spend and then I will go and repeat the same thing over and over again.

I worked the hairy loans, which made me a better note investor because I had to fight with my back against the wall to figure out a solution for these loans. Nobody wants it. Those became the best loans to me because I was able to price them at zero on my tree, put the cost with the other notes and sell those, recapitalize and then make crazy returns on the stuff that I priced low. I used that model for a long time, but when we made the thousand note tree, it broke us because we didn’t have the right systems, tools and the right people in the right seats. That started to teach me things about set up the business with a franchise and having systems and things in place. Fast forward, even when onboarding people, we use a CRM that automates, “This is the next step. Watch this little video.”

We use a system called Loom where you can record those short and small five-minute videos. We use Lucidchart where we have process mapping and everything done visually. Everything is pretty much automated. It’s something we continue to work on. We implemented EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System. That’s a good book that you want to read. It puts all your team on the same page on the same things. Learning things like that to keep structure will allow you to scale. You mentioned Dave. One thing I learned from him is you need three things in the note business. You need the source to buy notes, you need the money to buy the notes and scalability. That’s important. You need to have all three at the same time to be successful. I think that’s in any endeavor.

That’s one of the things people getting into space missed the mark on a little bit. To try and scale is not simple and it’s not just, “I’ve got money and scale.” It’s money and systems. To make it in this business, you got to have that scalability. If you’ve got $100,000 to invest in this business, you can make 25%, but $25,000, when you look at all the effort and work that you’re putting in and then take off your overhead costs, you realize you’re probably paying yourself the same as a low-level employee in some companies in some aspect of it. I want to ask a question focused a little bit on seconds. I’m curious where you see that space because a lot of people like to try and get in the seconds because it has a lower acquisition cost. I don’t see a lot of seconds being written at this point in time. You do see lines of credits. We talked to Dave. He had his opinion on where things are going. From your perspective where you think you see the second space headed in the next few years if you had a crystal ball.

I still love this space. It’s like an option. I buy seconds on properties that the first is $250,000 and more. That’s the model that we have. We may have some where the value is maybe $180,000 or something like that, but typically we target $250,000 or more. Nowadays, everything has equity because the market is crazy. Back then, you bought all types of stuff. When you buy a pool, you got to take the good, the bad and the ugly. I still like seconds because it gives you an option on a property where you can foreclose subject to first and you can still control the property. You could still rent it. The insurance is being paid by the first mortgage.

There are a variety of things that I can go through why I still like seconds. It’s a low barrier to entry and more diversity. There is a risk as well. If you don’t have equity, you can get stripped and crammed down. There is a list of bad things I can mention as well. First versus second depends on how much capital you have to deploy. If you are one of the big funds like PPR that raise $100 million-plus, it’s better to buy first in REOS than to buy seconds because you’re going to have 10,000 seconds. It becomes work. Second mortgage is a business. You have to have a team and systems.

You look at it and you say, “I’m going to pay $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 for legal. Why would I pay that for ten loans when I can pay the same amount for three loans and I get a better result? I may get the property and it turns into REO and I can sell it.” It all depends on the capital stack in which you deploy that capital and the velocity that you need to do it and know which investment you want to go over first versus second. We have some first as well. Having a blend is still right for me. I’ll learn something, create mastery in it, build systems for it and hand it off to someone else, but still play in that space.

To piggyback on that as far as the due diligence, for a newer note investor who maybe has 1 to 5 first lien notes, what’s the primary difference? Traditionally you hear seconds. You want to look at the borrower a little bit more than the property. The first is a little bit closer to the property. Maybe that’s changed given the unemployment issues due to COVID. What would you say is the primary difference between running due diligence on a second note that you’re going to purchase versus a first, for the newer note investor out there?

GDNI 153 | Note Investing

Note Investing: There are still big funds that own these things that’s able to buy them higher up. There’s still HELOC being done. People were still doing second mortgages.

 

I like the fact that I started off in seconds because the due diligence is heavier in seconds. With the first, it’s like, “What’s the property worth if I had to foreclose? This is my cost. If I could save the borrower, great, but more than likely I’m going to end up with the property so let me put more of my focus on that.” In seconds, it’s both. You have to look at the property and the borrower. There’s more due diligence that goes into a second than the first. Oddly enough, it’s cheaper to do due diligence on a second than the first. With first, you’re going to run title and you’re going to do a whole gamut of things to make sure that the property is intact and everything is good. Whereas with second, you’re right under the umbrella of first as long as it’s current.

There’s more due diligence that goes into seconds than first. If you learn that, doing due diligence in first is easy. The challenge most people have coming from seconds to first is the title, understanding title and understanding forced place insurance and those other things that you need to have in place immediately as soon as you foreclose. The taxes, making sure there are no tax sale certificates because that can wipe you out. Understanding that part, which most second investors don’t focus on. As long as it’s current, they say, “Let me focus on the borrower, a little bit on the property and then I’m going to make sure they have the ability to pay.” It’s more due diligence in seconds.

The crystal ball question that Chris asked, there will always be seconds available. There are collapsed bonds. There are still bonds that are still collapsing. You have a $30 million UPB trade out. That can be a couple of hundred loans that will take years to go through. There are still big funds that own these things that are able to buy them higher up. There’s still HELOC being done. People are still doing second mortgages. That was before it originated in firsts and seconds. Now people are doing home equity line of credits, which are collapsing. There’s still opportunity out there. It depends on how high up on a scale you are if you want to buy it because if you are raising $100 million, it doesn’t make sense.

One thing that I see a lot of people get too nervous or worried about it is if you’re playing with a few million bucks in an $11 trillion mortgage industry, it’s like a tree on the Earth. It’s such a small component to it. You’ll pretty much never be going to have issues with the product. In the first space, which is where I deal mostly, people say, “It’s tougher to find firsts.” I’ve never had problems finding it because I’m not trying to buy $50 million at a time. If I had that capital, maybe it’d be a little more struggle. One of the things that I’ve heard about the difference between firsts and seconds which also fits my personality. People say that with seconds, you are more a therapist. You have to have patience. In firsts, it’s more systems and analytics of the property. I have zero patience. Even my attorney says he’s like, “Please don’t ever get in seconds because you do not have the patience on this.” What are your thoughts about this?

Try not to look for the city of Chicago with a map of Detroit. Click To Tweet

It’s a long-term investment strategy. Here’s what I liked about seconds. A buddy of mine said, “Try this strategy out, Fuquan.” We had a quadrant. In the quadrant, we had a different type of seconds. Current on first with equity. Current on first with no equity. Not current on first with equity. Not current on first with no equity. I said, “Why would somebody buy something that is not current on first with no equity?” He said, “Let’s look at these loans. The UPB is $25,000. There’s no equity in it. The first is foreclosing. The person may be trying to work out a loan. You don’t know. I’m going to buy these loans for $0.06 on a dollar.” We bought the loan for $0.06 on a dollar with $25,000 on UPB. We did a mail campaign to these people and said, “For $5,000, we will eliminate your $25,000 loan.”

Sixty percent of people respond to that campaign and paid the $5,000 on a loan that we pay $1,200 for. It’s the strategy. I said, “Let me focus on these loans where everyone is running away from these.” We buy a boatload of these. I started to then learn unsecured. When people would say, “When you get wiped out in foreclosure, do you get this and that?” I’m going, “As long as they didn’t file bankruptcy, they still owe that money.” I started piling those up and gave them to a collection company to start a collection process and gave them a prejudgment of 20% and post-judgment of 25%. They got a percentage of it. We were able to work on even stuff that we got wiped out and the first foreclosing us. We thought it was the person that had filed bankruptcy. We thought it was over. We were able to collect on a lot of that stuff. In that thousand pool loan I purchased, I got more loans for free. It gave me a whole portfolio. That portfolio was auto loans and credit cards. People who opened up checking accounts and bounced checks and they owe money. I got some of that stuff.

I learned collections by navigating through that pool and the different things that I learned from one of my mentors early on, the type of debt. That’s why I like seconds because there are a variety of ways that you can collect on them. When you say you have to be a therapist and everything else, a psychologist or whatever. I’m working with people to create a solution. That’s what I liked about it. When we foreclosed, we failed. That was not our model. For me, it was important to work something out, keep that person in a home and collect the payment. It was a win-win because I didn’t want to fly to Arizona, Texas to rehab a property. Even when we did foreclose on something, we turned it back into a note. We found local boots on the ground. We marketed the area, we hit Facebook, LinkedIn and the Meetups. We found someone who we can owner finance it to. We turn it back into a note. The interest is only for five years. It gave us the ability to do that.

One of the things that caught my attention through what you said is having an open mind and being creative in this business can lead to significant returns on things. You pick the unsecured stuff. People look at that and be like, “It’s unsecured, forget it. People don’t look at, “It’s unsecured but this person has seven other rentals that they own.” This was a strategic one they let go of. They got six other properties that you all of a sudden, go pull credit on them. There are little mortgages on those. It’s like, “This guy has got some meat behind them.” You’re picking some of that stuff up for a few pennies on the dollar. Once they realize that or they know you know that, they come to the table pretty quick. It’s what I found on some of that stuff.

You can swing in the judgment and put liens on other properties. A lot of people don’t even know about this on a note aspect. I was doing that.

Was that your presentation at the Cash Flow Expo?

I’ve been doing that for years. A lot of people these days still go the foreclosure route and I’m like, “Why would you spend all that money to go to foreclosure?” Even now, I have a few tenants that are not paying that’s not Section 8. Even though the courts have a moratorium, I’m suing to get money judgments before we go to court and get an eviction date. I’m getting money judgments in order to negotiate Cash for Keys to get it out. I’ve been using that pseudo strategy for a long time because you can put judgments against everything that they own. It’s faster to get in a lawsuit than a foreclosure. In my state it is. There are different states I’ve found as well that I do that faster.

If the property’s got little equity on it, you’re spending all that money on foreclosure and you’re not getting any benefit from it. At least you got that money judgment. There’s that other aspect of it.

Fuquan, you mentioned states. Do you avoid certain states? Newer note investors generally head toward non-judicial states. You reside in a much a judicial state. How do you determine which states you’re going to target? Has that changed over time?

Turning Distress into Success: Building Wealth and Passive Income by Investing in Mortgage Notes

We have the biggest footprint. What I learned a long time ago is you want to focus on where you have the biggest footprint and you own the most assets because you’re going to be dealing with the legal counsel a lot in that state. What we did early on was we looked at our portfolio and we said, “We own a lot of loans in Florida. Let’s focus on selling a lot of this stuff that we had maybe 2 or 3 in this state and focusing on this stuff that we had at least ten or more loans in that state.” As time went by, we upped that number, “Let’s sell those ten loans. Let’s focus on states that we have 25 or more loans in and get rid of the rest of those.” That’s how I came down to maybe 4 or 5 good states that we focus on, but we still buy in all states and try to see if it goes through our funnel.

We send a letter out, this PR or whatever the process that we have. We stopped selling loans a long time ago. That used to be part of our process. We will bring it in, clean it up, onboard it with a servicer and put it out for sale, the lowest hanging fruit because they have more equity. If it didn’t sell for the price we wanted, then we would bring in the house and we’ll work it. We’ll send out a demand letter. We’ll send in a private investigator. We went through a process to try to see if we can create communication. If we couldn’t, then we would probably put it off for sale again or continue to work it while it was out for sale.

That helped us get to a few states that we have a good legal footprint where we have 3 or 4 different attorneys. We’re learning stuff organically and continue to do that. That’s where we are trying to go. We still buy nationwide because the banks won’t let you cherry-pick. You got to buy it all. We know the buyers and which states they like. I’m taking out a tree and it’s a lot in Texas or a lot in Arizona. Everybody wants California. I’ll call my California people where I know they have paid $1.50 on a dollar and they go, “I got some California loans.”

It blows my mind when I see trades for 110% and then I realized that the coupons are at 7%. It’s an insurance company or somebody else. They’re happy with 3% to 4%. As we wrap up, Fuquan, one of the things we like to do is offer people a Note and Bolt, which is a tip or something that you’ve learned, especially for somebody newer in this space. It’s something that they can take away. It’s more of a lesson learned from experience and not something that you get from the proverbial textbook. I was curious if you have anything you could share with the readers.

A mentor is important. I know someone probably said that a bunch of times, but try not to look for a city of Chicago with a map of Detroit. I did that earlier on. You guys mentioned Dave Van Horn, he was my mentor when I got started in the note business. I had a conversation with him. We went out to lunch. I drove to his office in PA. At the time, they have training. I was like, “This guy’s trying to sell me on training. I don’t want to be part of training.” I tried to do it on my own. After a few months, I was like, “I’m going to join the training. I’m going to get back into the mindset where I should be and getting around people who are knowledgeable.”

I had to reinvent the wheel. I learned a lot from being around people in the space, get out and network. The biggest mistake that a lot of people make is not allowing themselves to be vulnerable and show that they need help constantly. I constantly do that. I’m a part of three masterminds. I’m joining another one. It’s not real estate-related. It’s more like a personal vision mastermind. Always look for things that will help you grow, whether that’s a mentor or put yourself in the right circle where you can grow. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my business.

It speaks to the fact that you’re confident in what you do, but you’re humble enough to recognize you don’t know everything. There are people who know what you don’t know and you can learn from them. When people are too hesitant to ask questions, it’s often pride. They’re not willing to be vulnerable. I imagine that’s a big part of the reason you’ve been successful. I met you briefly at Paper Source in 2018. I read your book. It was inspiring. You’ve been an inspiration for me as well as I was getting involved and growing in the note space. I appreciate it.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I have three books out. Turning Distress Into Success was the first book I wrote about notes. I talked about all types of loans, auto loans and boat loans. Back then, I was like, “This is a great business. It’s not just to pay the mortgages. You could put notes on this and cars, this and that as credit card debt.” I wrote that book. That was a good book. My latest book is Passion for Real Estate Investments. We talked about being able to diversify your strategy and learning these definitions with their real estate and executing on them. All those are in Amazon. I have one more book. Matt Kelley calls it a pamphlet. It’s called The Tire Kicker. I was going to a lot of these events and I’m guilty of also not taking action on things. You go to certain conferences and you see people three years later like, “Have you bought your first note yet?” “Not yet. I need to get more information.” The only notes they have are the notes in the book that they are writing. That’s the last one. Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate you guys. You can catch me on social media @FuquanBilal. NNGCapitalFund.com is the website.

Fuquan, thanks for joining us on this episode. Jamie, any final thoughts?

Thanks a lot, Fuquan. This has been great.

I appreciate it guys.

Take care.

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About Fuquan Bilal

GDNI 153 | Note InvestingFuquan Bilal, the company’s CEO, founded NNG in 2012 with the principal mission of capitalizing on the growing supply of mortgage notes in the interbank marketplace. Mr. Bilal utilizes his 21 years of residential and commercial real estate success to identify real estate opportunities and capitalize on them.

To date, he has successfully managed three private mortgage note funds that primarily invest in single-family performing and non-performing mortgage notes. His financial acumen and proprietary set of investment criteria enable him to purchase under-performing real estate assets at a deep discount of face and market values, thereby increasing the value of the assets.

This, coupled with his ability to maximize the use of leverage, enables him to build strong, secured portfolios with solid passive income flows. Fuquan effectively hedges investors’ risk by spreading their investment across a portfolio of alternative assets that diversify and stabilize the fund’s return and valuation.

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