When you’re new to real estate investing, you might think you must be rich to start. You do not know what to expect. Chris Seveney sits down for a conversation with Terrence Evans of Terreva Investments, LLC, to discuss flipping houses and succeeding in the real estate industry. Terrence shares how he started through the notice systems program and how his note investing career progressed throughout the years. If you’re just starting on notes or you want to further expand your understanding, then this episode is for you.

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Note Investing Strategies To Scale Your Real Estate Business With Terrence Evans

I am joined by my fellow co-host Chris Seveney. Chris, how are you doing?

Wonderful as always, Jamie. Yourself?

Even wonderful.

How’s the recovery?

It’s coming along. I’m definitely doing better. I can “walk-around” in my boots still. I haven’t driven in a couple of months, but hopefully, driving in a few weeks. I had Achilles surgery, for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’m doing better every week. That may be something I follow up on later, but more important than talking about my Achilles, we are joined by a very special guest, Terrence Evans, of Terreva Investments. Terrence, how are you doing?

I’m great. How are you doing?

Good, not too bad. Terrence, you’re on the West Coast. Is that right?

I’m in Southern California.

Why don’t we dive right in? Why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about your background?

There’s not that much to that, but I’ll quickly say as I don’t like to talk about myself a whole bunch. First and foremost, I am an established Engineer. I’m originally from the Atlanta area. I came out to California to work in it. As an electrical engineer, I went to MIT.

For those that don’t know, electrical and chemical are probably the two most difficult engineering platforms to get. MIT is the most difficult engineering school in the country. He downplayed that a little bit. It’s impressive.

When I came up to California, I initially started working for a few aerospace companies. I bounced around a little bit. I’m no longer working for an aerospace company, even though my current work does. I do work in support of aerospace companies like SpaceX, Boeing, so on and so forth. I was in need of something else to do in my life other than engineering. That’s where I got introduced to real estate investing. I bounced around that for a little bit as well. This was back in 2015. The story there was I started going to my local REIA and I wanted to know more about real estate investing. When you’re new, you think, “Real estate investing is nothing. That’s a rich man’s game. That’s not anything for me. I’m not rich.”

Every note is a little bit different. Every note has its challenges. Share on X

I was interested in fixing and flipping because that’s what you see on HGTV and all those fixing and flipping shows. I was going around town trying to find this mythical property that I was going to fix and flip, but that never happened. I had a property under contract, but there was some shady stuff going on with that. It didn’t work out, long story short. I eventually gravitated towards notes and the person who was doing the notes subgroup within the REIA was the first time I had even heard about notes. I was like, “What the hell is this? This doesn’t make any sense to me. I can go and buy out somebody’s mortgage. I could add a discount. I can foreclose if it’s nonperforming and I can get their property. That’s some crazy stuff right there.”

I know we talked a little bit before and you said you were in need of something in real estate. What was that? Was that for financial reasons? Was that for boredom reasons? What was the reason you went down the road?

All of the above. I had gotten divorced years ago. I was going into a different new job that didn’t pay as well. I was in limbo. I was in hell. I needed something that could stimulate my wallet as well as my mind. I felt that engineering by itself was not it. That’s the reason why I even started going into real estate investing. Just an aside from that, she’s a real estate agent, but she used to work at the same place where I worked at that time. She felt my pain a bit. She wasn’t an engineer, but she was familiar with where I was working. She was like, “Why don’t you become a real estate investor? Why don’t you get into that?” I was like, “Okay. I’ll do that.” That’s what got me started in terms of doing some research online and going to the local REIA.

As an engineer as well, I think when they get into their mid-40s get bored and they’ve been doing things. When you start as an engineer, it’s exciting and you’re working out a lot of new things, but over time, you realize there are so many hurdles, processes and people in your way. The way that things are done, you wish they were done differently. Over time, it does get boring. It’s like you need that stimulus because your brain is always like, “I want something cool and new.” It’s probably, as you said, 20 to -25 years after being an engineer, all of a sudden, it’s like, “I need something new.”

Most people, again, whether it’s coaching kids’ sports and so forth, but people get into real estate. Terrence’s story sounds a little similar to mine. You need that stimulation on things. I used to do a lot of athletics, which my body couldn’t hold up any more, so I used my brain. I think most engineers, as I said before, got on. I’ve got several friends who are engineers who are in the defense sector. They’re all now like learning about notes and like, “I want to get into this,” but also, most people are realizing that whole 40/40/40 Rule, which is you work 40 years, 40 hours a week to get 40% of your retirement income is not going to cut it when you’re 65 years old and you want to retire in some fashion. You have to go out and do it on your own.

I don’t think it’s engineers that experience that.

No, everyone does. It’s funny because I went from all engineers to college and we still converse, and every one of them is at that point in their lives.

I don’t know whether you guys have seen this meme that goes around, but it was one in particular about engineers. It had a quadrant of things like, “What you think engineers do, what engineers actually do.” It was so funny because you’d think that engineers are out there doing some Elon Musk-type stuff, going to space or building electric cars or whatever. In reality, a lot of engineers sit behind their computers and work in Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

I still work part-time for the Federal Government. I’ve got a clearance and everything. On paper, it sounds cool and, to be honest with you, it’s boring. People probably think I say that so I don’t have to talk about my work or something, but it’s mundane.

Here’s my one moment of digressing on this episode. Did you guys see the article about the guy who hadn’t been to work in six years and won an award? It was his 30th year at the company and that’s how they found out he hadn’t been to work in six years. You sent that to me. That’s where it came from.

I said, “This is going to be me because I’ve been out for a couple of months. They’re going to go to give me an award and realize I haven’t been at my desk for a while.” Terrence, back to your note story. I can empathize or sympathize with a lot of what you’re saying. Honestly, I think it’s cool that there was a note person at the REIA or wherever you said you were. A lot of people, even within real estate, have no idea you can invest in notes. How did that go or how did that transition from the fix and flip mindset and how did your note investing career start to blossom?

My first introduction to notes happened through the Note Assistance Program since they’re based out here in Southern California. Originally, they were offering note bootcamps or whatever. I was like, “Should I? should I not do this?” I went ahead and did it because I figured that fixing and flipping stuff wasn’t going anywhere. I was hell-bent on doing the deal. I was committed to that. I ended up going to the note bootcamp, and eventually, it took some time. I got my first deal on that. In typical Terrence fashion, it had its own challenges. We are all in the note space. We all know that every note is a little bit different and has its challenges.

We’re speaking about nonperforming notes, but this one was special because I got into this note and it was on the house in Houston, Texas. I was thinking, “Here we go. Texas, fast foreclosure state. I will be out of this thing. I only paid $3,000 for the note and I’m going to be in and out of this thing in probably under six months.” At least that was the thought.

You went through the Note Assistance Program, which I believe is run by Jasmine Willois. The note, was it the first position? It was a mortgage, not like a land contract or anything. It was traditional due diligence.

It wasn’t a land contract.

Your first note deal does not have to make a bunch of money. Share on X

You paid $3,000 for a $6,000 note in Houston. I just wanted to clarify and make sure it wasn’t a note because people get into our CFDs and stuff a lot of times, some of those low-dollar ones. First position, $3,000 note purchase with a $6,000 UPB. Does it sound right?

Yes.

Let’s hear it.

I’m going to skip a lot of the gory details here but let’s say that it was challenges after challenges. This was back in ’17, not long after I bought the note. I not only found out that the borrowers were all dead, which means that now I have to go through this probate process, but then right after that, they had a hurricane hit Houston. I’m thinking, “This house is going to be washed away. It’s going to be blown away.” It turned out that didn’t happen, but I did have to go through this probate process. The way that it worked out with me, it took forever. It ended up taking the better part of three years.

For those that don’t understand, probate is a process where when people pass away and if they don’t have a living trust, the estate goes through a court system, which then has a personal representative that’s responsible for organizing everything and extinguishing all the property following the will of that individual. Basically, if there are assets, bills, and clearing all that up, it’s going to go through the court. It’s interesting you mentioned the three years because I have an individual in my neighborhood who unfortunately passed away and they’ve wanted to sell the house. It’s been locked up in probate for a year and a half. When we saw them and asked how it was going, they were shaking their head. It can take a very long time, especially if there’s a lot of family members involved.

The thing about that one was it was a home equity line, so I couldn’t go through the normal, quick Texas process. I had to go through the courts. That combined with this probate and, as you mentioned, this particular family had lots of far-flung relatives of the deceased. Once I thought I was close, then they would find another one. They kept going on. That’s why it took three years, then we finally closed on that and scheduled a foreclosure auction date. It happened right before the COVID shut down.

I don’t mean to laugh, but I already know where this is going.

I was lucky in that sense because imagine if I would have been so pissed if this had happened right after the cutoff and I wouldn’t be able to foreclose or have that option. I can’t speak to all the numbers but the house sold at auction for $42,000. I wanted to remind people that I had a lot of legal fees with this. I ended up getting a JV partner because I didn’t anticipate this being so costly or taking so long. We still made money. No doubt, but you have to think with all the costs involved, with all the time that’s been spent on this, it was a good learning experience. That’s one of the things I will say for people who are starting on notes for the very first time or whatever. Your first note deal does not have to make a bunch of money.

In fact, in some weird way, this was my first note deal. It teaches you things. If it’s something that’s going by and it’s very quick like I hadn’t originally intended, I wouldn’t have learned anything, but I did. I was able to learn some stuff along the way and I was also able to make money. I think that’s much better than paying individuals or companies $20,000 and more for their note education classes and you don’t learn or find anything. I will say that that was a positive. That was a good thing. Even though it took a long time, I wasn’t discouraged from doing other deals. During the time when I was in this three-year period, I did have note deals. I got in and out of those deals during that time. It was a good thing that I had people around me that could encourage me to do more. I didn’t stay depressed over this one little note deal. That was that deal in a nutshell.

At that time, were you looking for strictly first-lien non-performers and doing Joint Ventures? What were you looking for at that time?

I wasn’t looking for Joint Ventures necessarily, but I was looking for first position nonperforming notes in particular. At that time, when I first got into this, I was still stuck on, “You can go in and get a note for $0.50 on the dollar, no matter where it was.” As it turned out, as the years have come by and often right point of mine on Clubhouse, but that’s no longer the case unless it’s a piece of crap Contract for Deed or something like that. You can’t do that anymore. That’s what I was pretty much looking for. I was looking for nonperforming mortgages, $0.50 and $0.60 on the dollar. Depending on the deal, I might have a JV. The JV part wasn’t necessarily what I was looking for.

What’s it looks like now for you as far as your note investing?

I have not bought a note and that’s because of precedence, aspiration of where I should use it for. Pricing is ridiculous right now. I haven’t stepped into the realm of buying in bulk, so I’m still one-to-twosy and because of that, I don’t have that advantage of buying. If I’m going to go into any of the note portals, I won’t mention any by name, any of those types of portals or even some of the hedge funds that reach out to me, I’m good. They want $0.80 to $0.90 on the dollar and I don’t have time for that, to be honest.

I looked at a pool of performing CFDs from a company that I won’t name, but they’ve been sued in numerous states because of the actions. I’m not going to details, but I’ll go into details. It was alleged. They were buying properties from the government cheap, turning around, seller financing at a higher amount and not disclosing certain things to borrowers as a whole. You can Google any Contract for Deed of a major player from 2006 on. Most of them had been sued by attorney generals. They wanted $0.90 on the dollar.

Years ago, that same pool would have sold for, in that bulk size, probably $0.50 to $0.60 on the dollar. Now they wanted $0.90 and they offered them $0.70 to $0.75 and they laughed at me. I’m like, “If the rate you’re looking at, this is an 8% return on a Contract for Deed.” That’s a lot more in Ohio, which are notes that I’m like, “No, I’m not touching these for that price. Good luck trying to find someone.”

They put them on certain portals and now somebody is probably going to go in and buy them. You’re going to hear people say how horrible notes spaces are because people go out by certain assets not knowing what they expect from them and go from there. Somebody asked me about a trailer. It was literally a trailer, not the land. It’s on a lot lease. I’m like, “I’m buying this note on this trailer.” I’m like, “Is it the trailer or the land?” “It’s a trail.” I’m like, “It’s like leasing a car. Why are you paying $0.90 on a dollar for something like that? You’re nuts.”

I would say that that’s been one of the things that the group of us that run our Clubhouse group. That’s what we’ve tried to drill into people who or come onto the call and they’re new. Don’t pay more. It’s not that deep. Find something else or do stocks. If you need money like that, do something else. Don’t pay $0.90 on the dollar. As long as you guys keep buying at that level, they’re going to keep selling it to us like that. This is what I keep saying about on our Facebook page. There needs to be some type of change. I hope COVID was going to be it, but it turned out not to be it. It’s far from it. Where it was going to change the whole expectation in terms of pricing and all that, it’s followed the real estate market in general. Prices remained high in the real estate realm. It’s a note to follow, then that’s unfortunate.

We’ve had a couple of people like Kyle Zimpleman and Bob Malecki on the show, who’s not saying they’re entirely getting out of notes, but at least for the time being, have gotten out and it almost sounds like that’s similar. Is that similar to what you’re doing?

I wouldn’t say I’m out. The traditional way of me going to a seller and buying, let’s say, nonperforming notes from them, I don’t know if I can do that now. Now, in terms of money-making, I believe notes are still it. I think what you have to do is change it up a little bit. You’re going to have to go out and find seller-financed notes and possibly resell them to people. You might have to create your own notes and buy a property, either fixing and flipping it or doing seller finance on that. You’re going to have to do it a little bit differently than how many of us were taught how to do this some years ago. I wouldn’t say that I’m out. I know that I’m not going to buy $0.90 on the dollar note.

Surely, experience is the best teacher because your first note deal will teach you a lot of things. Share on X

It is interesting because you touched upon a topic back in 2017. It was easy because there were 5 or 6 sellers out there putting lists out every week or every other week. It was like, “This is easy. I can bid on these and they come to me type of thing.” It’s almost now similar to the business of buying property off the market in the sense that you got to go work it and find people to do this. One of the things that I found and I had somebody reach out to me who had done seller financing. They did it on two properties to one borrower and the borrower passed away. It’s nonperforming, but the problem was they had the property and they were in it.

They sold it to break even essentially and seller-financed it. These are $50,000 properties in a state that has a long legal timeframe. I went to him and I said, “Your note is probably worth it because it’s in an HOA and the taxes are passed, too.” These $50,000 notes are probably worth $15,000 to $20,000 because it’s going to be 2 to 3 years. It also goes through probate. I’m like, “You’re two years away. Your taxes are $4,000 or $5,000 and that’s going to be $6,000 to $7,000 a foreclose. In HOAs, there’s $15,000 right there. Tack on if it’s $50,000, the fees and everything to sell it and so forth. It’s probably not going to be worth $50,000. It’s probably worth less. There is not a lot of meat on that bone and stuff.” He’s like, “I was thinking, I could maybe get like $0.95 or $0.90 on the dollar for it.” I’m like, “It’s unfortunately not going to happen.”

Have you only stuck to nonperformance, Terrance or have you bought any performers over the last few years?

I have not bought any performers, mostly because my concept before that got changed. I like a chunk change. I like getting a check. I should clarify that. If I have a reperforming note, I’ll take that all day long, but I’m saying that since I wasn’t in need of I want to build capital quickly that $100,000 a month is not going to hit it.

I want to be clear about that. I have a full-time job. Whenever I’m talking about this, I mean money on top of that. I want it to build capital so I can go off and do X, Y, Z. Due to that reason, I hadn’t touched performing notes. I was thinking, “I got to go buy a nonperforming note, then I got to go and go through that process, then I can get that check at the end of the process.” I’ve been educated on you can do the same thing with the seller finance performing note. It blew my mind. Thanks, Saprina.

You mean because you can buy them at a bigger discount than an institutional-performing note. You buy a seller-financed note at a decent discount, maybe not as good of a price as a non-performer, but still a pretty good discount. Is that what you’re saying?

You can do that. If you were to go off and buy a performing seller-financed note, I can then turn around and sell that to the fanatics of the world, being a broker. I had no concept prior to that because, of course, when I’m taught, I’m taught strictly the nonperforming note education. I had no idea you could do it in that fashion as well. If you’re getting into this, you don’t necessarily have to do nonperforming notes in order to make money or even chunk money. There are many ways to skin that cat.

I could show people how you could make more money on a performing note than a nonperforming note. I’ve proven that. With partials, you can arbitrage it and make a better return, better yield on a performing note than a nonperforming note. I’ve done the numbers.

I say this all the time, but one of the reasons I love this space is there are so many ways you can go with it, depending on your own personal situation. Do you have a full-time job? Can you wait for that big check when you exit the non-performer or do you need that cashflow or institutional versus seller-financed? I love that you can make it what you want and you’re open to, “The market conditions tell me that I need to pivot and start learning more about seller-financed notes and that thing.” There’s always a way to make it profitable. You have to be willing to pivot, I think. What were you going to say, Chris?

I was going to ask Terrence. He went through a lot of what everyone does. You go take some training and stuff, and then you throw the training wheels away and hop on the bike. On your first deal or few deals, what were some of the areas of note investing that were easier than you thought? What were some that were like, “I didn’t understand this was going to be this complex.”

As I alluded to when I told the story about the first note and the legal stuff, getting the right legal representation that can communicate with you is, for me, continuing to be a challenge. They make $300 an hour or more, so it’s whatever. I would say that the legal aspect was probably one of the more challenging to understand within the note space, I would say. I know I’m lumping everything together with that legal cloud.

Quick question for you, though. Would you agree if I made the statement that most vendors in general, in this space, were probably surprised by the level of service or quality you were getting when you initially started? Servicer, attorney, collateral company, the people you were using when you got into this space. Did you think they were like, “I’m dealing with like eight attorneys who make a lot of money, so things are going to be smooth?” Did you come into the space thinking that?

I don’t know if I had an expectation. One of the advantages of going through the Note Assistance Program is that at least I didn’t have to do a lot of finding the vendors by myself initially. As you go along and you try to find, I’m no longer in a Note Assistance Program. As you try to do things yourself, that can be a little bit challenging. That’s why I say to people, “When you are coming up in the note space, you have to have note education no matter where that comes from, but you also need to have a note mentor or somebody who can be in your corner.”

Whether we’re talking about Jasmine or we’re talking about Saprina, there are resources in this space, at least, they’ve been by my resources in this space, so I can ask them, “Who’s a good lawyer in XYZ State? Who’s a good real estate agent in a certain city?” I can go to them or go to whoever that resource is to help make that process a little bit easier to go through. I would say that, equivocally, that you got to have that. You have to have that big person behind you that knows more about this space than you do.

I agree with that. For no other reason, as you said, the point to other resources, vendors and experts in the field that you’re not plugged in on your own at that point in your career. That’s valuable.

Especially with the lawyer stuff because some people will be like, “I’ll go and look in the Yahoo or whatever online resource.” They can find their lawyer that way. I’m like, “No. This is the specialty.”  Definitely, you got to have that resource.

We like to always ask, Terrence, people who come on the show, what’s one thing you’ve felt you’ve done. It doesn’t have to necessarily be note-related. It can be anything related, but what’s something that you think you’ve done a good deed, gone out of your way, or to help somebody in a situation?

I consider this to be a good thing. This was a note deal that was. I guess they all start out with a little bit of uncertainty, but this was presented to me as a potential home run. The note was on the house in New Hampshire and the story behind this was the borrower was a real shyster. He did not believe in paying his bills. If you did research, he hadn’t paid his taxes and his federal taxes. He had filed for bankruptcy and he was like a CPA. He had a pretty reputable profession. He had this long-standing note that he hadn’t been paying on. At first, it was the second, but it was the first. The UPB was $50,000, but he owed towards $100,000 on it.

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The seller wanted $25,000. I was like, “I’m not going to take it on myself, but I was unsure as to whether or not I wanted to accept the risk because I thought they were going to file BK, bankruptcy, or drag it out.” The only thing I had in my favor was at least outward-looking in. New Hampshire was a relatively fast foreclosure state. I thought that if I were to come and play ball, he would take notice very quickly.

You’ll be forced to either pay me or probably do something sheisty, like file bankruptcy or something like that, but because of that, I wanted to bring in a JV partner. I had a discussion with them and told them what the situation was. They agreed to be a JV partner. However, the way things turned out, I ended up funding the deal myself without any money from them. The way this crazy note worked itself out to the point where I got everything resolved within a week. They paid me off $90,000.

To be clear, do you have a JV agreement in place?

It was verbal. We hadn’t even had time to sign papers or assigned responsibilities and things like that. The borrower ended up paying me off $92,000. Remember, I got in at $25,000. Even though the JV partner did not contribute, I ended up giving them their share as well.

That’s a tricky one.

I had enough trust in this person. Let me be clear about something. It wasn’t like they weren’t going to give me. I don’t remember the details at this point. I think they were going out of town or on a perfect vacation. There were some things that I hadn’t cleared up with the seller on buying the note, but the point is that they hadn’t given me any money by the time I had agreed with the seller, but I felt like I needed to honor the deal, even though it wasn’t in stone or anything. I felt like I needed to do that, and I did.

That’s honorable. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars, right?

Don’t remind me.

Let’s break this down. I’ll use an example. If I had somebody who says, “I want to fund this deal. I’m going on vacation. I’ll fund it when I get back or something,” during that time, that person gets to pay off. That’s a hairy one for me. I believe in karma, so that’s where I would have worked something out with them. I probably would call them and say, “I want to give you something. What do you think is fair?” Let’s see what they come back with, and then whatever they said, I’d give them a little bit more.

Would I give them the full 50% or whatever the JV said? I don’t know. I probably lean a little bit towards no, but you can’t go wrong by giving them what’s due. It also depends on the situation where this person could be somebody who had another million dollars sitting in the bank account and all of a sudden, it’s like, “Terrence needed more money. You know you could go back to this person as well.” Jamie, what would you do?

I would like to say I would do what Terrence did. That’s the easy thing to say sitting on a show, but I didn’t cut the check. Again, one week is different than six months.

Everything was settled within a week, but I didn’t get a check or a month or something like that.

I’m saying like if you had a JV agreement, even verbal and they didn’t pay you, the JV partner didn’t put in money for six months, that’s okay. One week, they were going to honor it.

It’s no different. I’ve had deals that go wrong and I end up giving either all the profit to the JV partner or I lost money on deals where I made them whole. I didn’t have to do that and so forth. Jamie, on the deal we did, I think you got every penny of that profit. Do you want to buy me Starbucks? Joking aside. It’s similar. It’s one of those things. It’s a business decision. There’s no right or wrong answer, but if you do, there’s doing the right thing and doing the question. Both the thing that could be questioned. If you do the right thing, then you can’t be questioned. What he did is the thing that would get questioned. By saying that, the integrity that shows for somebody to do that is a person. If I was that partner and I had some money sitting around, I go right back to Terrence and say, “What do you get for your next deal?”

What was their reaction?

I think they were understandably happy. I don’t quite remember, but they are obviously appreciative of what I did. I felt like if you do this, if they have more where that came from, that could be a good money partner or JV partner that you can have on future deals. I don’t believe I was going to do the opposite. It felt weird to even have a verbal JV agreement and not honor it. I felt like it’s easier if I do it this way and it gets murkier if I can do the other way.

You still made money on the deal yourself. It sounds like a good one. The other thing we typically ask Terrence is somebody provides a Note and Bolt, which is a little educational component whether it’s a party episode. I’ll start with Jamie, put him on the spot with his to give you a little time to think about it. Go ahead, Jamie.

My Note and Bolt is that this business requires patients. I know Chris, you said you don’t have a lot of patients. I don’t want to harp on my Achilles injury. I haven’t driven in two months. It’s changed a lot of things temporarily for us at home. The reason I bring that up is even with that. It’s like day-to-day. I have to be patient with the progress I’m making. People have much worse. I’m not looking for sympathy. People say, “How are you doing with your recovery?” I say, “I’m doing it better every day, but the reality is that’s not true.” It’s more week to week. We had a deal with the note business where I bought this one from you, Chris, for $100. It’s not done yet, but the borrower’s next due date was in 2014. It’s 2021 now.

I paid $100 for this plus now, almost $1,800 in legal fees into it. She reached out and wants to do a loan mob for $500 a month. I think she signed it. It should be a good deal on paper, but my point is it took almost a year to get this done. Don’t log into your portal every day and check that note and think it’s going to pay big dividends every day. Go back and work the rest of your business and maintain patients. This Achilles injury has reminded me of that where every day I’m not necessarily making notable or visible progress, but I’ll go to the doctors every other week and I’ll realize I was a lot worse off than I am now. Be patient and take the time with your note business to look back and compare where you are now to where you were a month ago or six months ago. You realize you are making progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it every day.

My Note and Bolt then is even if you have a person go buy a property, take photos and so forth of the property and the borrower comes out with a shotgun threatening the people, that note could be successful. As in, that is the note. When I was doing due diligence on this, it was part of a pool that I bought. There were a lot of assets. I knew this asset had value because Jamie didn’t mention this, but the borrower had been paying taxes.

You will realize you are making progress, even if it doesn't feel like it every day. Share on X

It was one of those things and it was with a servicer who wasn’t collecting on it and doing anything because that’s servicing notes and we said, “Leave on collectible and don’t do anything.” They weren’t reaching out. It was in New York, which I got out of New York for certain reasons. Jamie bought ten New York assets from me. I’m like, “$100 for this one. Only pay for the transfer costs.” I said, “It could have value and stuff.” I told him the story. I’m like when I sent somebody by the property. They take photos and stuff. They like, go two photos and stuff that weren’t even clear because they said when they stopped in front of the house, a person came running at him with a shotgun.

She reached out of the blue and now it’s looking good.

Terrence, do you got one?

I think I’ve already said it. I believe wholeheartedly if you’re going to be in this business, you have to have mentors. You can have education mentors, actual day-to-day mentors, but you need to have those types of people in your note circle because they form the backbone of how you progress through this business every day. If you have that person, it makes things a whole hell of a lot smoother than if you don’t. That’s the only thing I would say about that.

That is great advice. Jamie, as we look to wrap up this episode, any final thoughts?

Let’s going to make sure we ask Terrence how people can reach out to him. I know you have your homepage, social media stuff, and Clubhouse. You have a course, so feel free to mention all the above.

You can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I have two profiles on LinkedIn. I have my engineering as well as my note investor profiles on LinkedIn under the same name, @TerrenceEvans. My website is Terreva-Investments.com. You can find out the basics about me and even get a link to the course that I offer. Let’s talk briefly about the course. I used to have a course that I had done along with Saprina Allen when we had done Mortgage Notes Summer School. I don’t offer that anymore because I felt that given this era of COVID and the changing regulations within the note space. I didn’t feel comfortable with continuing to offer that with all these changes that are happening. If you ask nicely, I can open it up for you, but I don’t offer that wholesale anymore.

I do offer a Financial Calculator class. It’s on the teachable platform. I am offering it for $50. If you are interested in knowing more about how to calculate yields and on performing notes, partials, as Chris mentioned before, take the course. It’s informative in terms of how to do all those different calculations. When I learned how to do it from the person who taught it, I was like, “I had no idea.” I’m trying to pass that knowledge onto you guys.

For $49 to learn from an Engineer from MIT? I think that sounds like a good deal.

I’m trying to think how long that course is. It’s maybe a couple of hours tops. When I went to the course in person and it was all day for four weekends. I think I drilled down and this took some of the concepts that I learned and created a two-hour class from that.

Thank you all for this episode. As always, make sure to check us out on your favorite listening station. As always, go out and do some good deeds.

 

Important links:

• Terreva Investments
• SpaceX
• Boeing
• Note Assistance Program
• Kyle Zimpleman – Past episode
• Bob Malecki – Past episode
• LinkedIn – Terreva Investments
• @TerrenceEvans – LinkedIn

About Terrence Evans

I currently want to connect with:
* Distressed asset managers and 1st lien NP note sources
* Accredited and sophisticated investors that would like to earn double digit returns on their post-tax and retirement accounts.
* Fellow investors / noters in the LA Area
* Realtors who understand the needs and desires of investors, particularly those of noters

I also run the Monthly Brunches of Notes, which is a monthly meetup discussion group about notes. We meet on one Saturday a month at a restaurant in Los Angeles County. [http://terreva-investments.com/mbon-meetup/]

I was born and raised in Atlanta. Prior and concurrent to my real estate activities, I have been a practicing electrical engineer in the Los Angeles area for almost 20 yrs, mostly working for aerospace companies.