Unlocking Real Estate Success: Insights from a Multifaceted Pro

Dylan Silver (00:01.388)

Hey, folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, we have real estate entrepreneur, mortgage broker, hard money lender, investor out of San Diego, California, Trevor Gravink. Trevor, welcome to the show.

Trevor Gravink (00:19.257)

Thanks, Dylan. A pleasure to be here.

Dylan Silver (00:21.57)

I always like to start off at the top of these by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Trevor Gravink (00:28.741)

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been, my father did some investments when I was a child and just always kind of been interested in it. And then I was in the solar business. I started sending some of my clients over to a friend that was in the mortgage business, kind of learned what he was doing, found it a little bit easier than the solar business. At least that’s what I thought at the time. And I decided to pivot from solar because of some hail storms and hurricanes and stuff in Florida and some other places.

Dylan Silver (00:50.52)

Yeah.

Trevor Gravink (00:58.715)

and moved into the mortgage space about seven years ago and then got my real estate license as well about five years ago. So that’s just kind of how I ended up here.

Dylan Silver (01:10.752)

So I don’t know if I’m getting the terms right, but you’re a real estate agent and a RMLO. Is that the terms? Am I getting it right? MLO. Okay. Okay. I am getting, I’m still newly licensed. I’m getting used to all the different terms and I’m thinking, well, I really want to be an investor, right? Do I need all these things? And so one of the things that I found intriguing, which I’m sure you can relate to this is

Trevor Gravink (01:18.122)

MLO, Mortgage Loan Officer, with an NMLS license, yeah.

Trevor Gravink (01:29.109)

Yeah

Dylan Silver (01:38.964)

As an agent, being an agent does hand cap you a little bit when it comes to being an investor. But at the same point in time, I’m still gonna ride out this real estate agent thing because it’s opened so many doors for me.

Trevor Gravink (01:50.758)

Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, have to tell people that you’re an agent and that might make some people believe that maybe you’re taking advantage of them when you’re coming in and offering a lower price or something like that. But at the end of the day, like you said, I believe the connections are worth it. And if you can come in and genuinely talk to people and find out, you know, what their needs and wants are, and just kind of explain what you do, you can still overcome it. But at the end of the day, there’s just some people that, you know, you never will be able to get that business.

which is fine.

Dylan Silver (02:22.166)

Yeah, I mean, when I think about going from, you mentioned solar, I did solar, I don’t know if you were in the same job description, I was just door to door, right? And so I have a lot of respect for anybody who came from that field. What was your job in solar life?

Trevor Gravink (02:38.629)

So I was managing a door-to-door team as well as we had a call center and then we would set appointments for guys to go in the house. So I did the calls, I did the door-to-door and I went inside the house just to be able to kind of see the different moving parts of each and every piece and being able to train people on it. So we had a little small sales organization and then the contractor would actually do the install. So they would just give us like a base price and then we would sell up above that.

Dylan Silver (03:05.582)

There’s nothing like that type of sales environment. There’s nothing like it. mean, I’ve done other type of sales. I was in car sales for about four or five years, and there’s just nothing. I have the utmost respect. I couldn’t cut the mustard in the solar game. And people who do, as you know, Trevor, there’s just some absolute naturals, like just absolute naturals. And those are the people that are getting deals done.

Trevor Gravink (03:30.125)

Yeah, I I had some interesting experiences knocking on people’s doors or being in people’s houses and you know just animals and all sorts of things that you would go and walk into. But definitely learned a lot and all the different aspects of sales so I think it just moved me forward in understanding you know because there’s a lot of financing in that as well and a lot of numbers so it kind of helped with transitioning over to the more deep side.

Dylan Silver (03:34.83)

you

Dylan Silver (03:59.788)

What caught my attention about what you’re doing now is as an investor and a lender and a mortgage broker, there’s a lot there, right? But they’re all interrelated. And honestly, I haven’t had, maybe I’ve had one, but I can’t think of any off the of my head that is involved in these spaces, right? I’ve seen a lot of people who do maybe real estate agent and investor, but agent, lender.

and investor and active in all three this is a very unique niche. How do you really decide and how did you decide where to divvy your time and where to focus your energy?

Trevor Gravink (04:38.009)

Yeah, so most of my energy is in the mortgage business and then I got my real estate agent license because I wanted my broker license for myself to be able to broker loans out as well. So on the agent side with my license, know, mostly friends, family, or people that just come to me from referral basis. I’m not truly trying to go out and show homes or list homes. If they come my way, I do, but most of it is the mortgage side of the business. And then, you

on the investment side, it’s just a matter of, I see deals all over the country, because I’m licensed in many different states. So I start to see trends of, you know, there’s four unit properties in Pennsylvania that are paying this much in rents, and they’re picking them up for, you know, 250, 300,000. So I do a little bit more.

research figure out who their agent is, are they bringing them the property? And I talk to that person and then see, you know, hey, can you bring some properties in front of me that I can potentially invest into? So it really opens the doors of being able to see deals and where people are making them on the short-term side and long-term side.

Dylan Silver (05:46.604)

Now how much of your business is working with investors?

Trevor Gravink (05:50.726)

So now probably about 80%. I had to pivot obviously after rates went up and so I heavily invested my time into learning products for investors. I learned very quickly that they’re not rate sensitive, they’re cash flow sensitive. So immediately once I kind of just started talking to some and realizing that I’m not teaching people all the different steps of buying a home and all the different costs and so

points and all these things that I was not having business conversations versus like emotional conversations about people falling in love and falling out of love with homes. It was more just does this property cash flow? What rents will it bring in? Trevor? How many points are you charging you? What’s my rate? So those are the conversations. I was just like, this is just so much in my opinion easier. Sometimes the deals are tougher just because they’re structured a lot differently. But the borrowers themselves a lot of times.

Dylan Silver (06:29.784)

Yeah.

Trevor Gravink (06:50.689)

are a little bit, you know, they understand the loan process. So when I ask them for something, they just hand it over. They’re not asking like, why do you need this document and that document? So that’s really when I decided to go pretty much all in on investors.

Dylan Silver (07:05.366)

I think folks that are in your position, mortgage brokers and then people who are real estate agents, oftentimes it’s very rare. would say can’t speak in every scenario in every state, but certainly in my limited experience, most people who go into being a broker, a real estate agent, into this space in general, are not going in immediately with the idea to work with investors. I felt like I was one of the

rare few who was really I’m more passionate about real estate investing than I am about selling homes. And if I sell a few homes along the way, then then great. But I think it is a super niche space for the most part. And I also think that the more people that are educated on the investment side of things, the better it is for everybody. Because like everyone when you buy a home, in my mind, you’re a real estate investor, like this is a massive investment. So if you’ve made that purchase,

you’ve got to figure out a way to maximize it because at some point in time you’re going to sell too.

Trevor Gravink (08:08.836)

Yeah, I mean…

I think with the investor side, like somebody that’s new or newer like yourself or maybe you haven’t worked with investors, you’re almost scared that they know more than you, so you feel like you’re not going to be able to answer their questions. So I think a lot of people are just nervous and talking to investors because they maybe think that they know more than what they actually have the knowledge of. And then on the other side of it, I think some agents or loan officers get annoyed of the lowball offers or what they call lowball offers. So keep submitting things and

and it’s work that you’re doing and not getting paid for because we’re not hourly people, right? We work on commission. So I think that’s another reason why some people don’t like working with investors. But for me, you know, the average homeowner is going to buy a home and then they might refinance every three to five years. With an investor, some of these guys are doing, you know, three to five deals in a year. So it’s just worth the time to be able to do that. And then if somebody is, you know, potentially truly wasting my time,

Dylan Silver (08:45.944)

Yeah.

Trevor Gravink (09:09.691)

You know, at some point maybe you have to fire them as a client or say, hey, your offers are just not realistic. Unless you kind of increase them, I can’t work with you.

Dylan Silver (09:17.932)

Yeah, I mean, that’s 100 % everyone’s prerogative. And you know, I’m the one that’s making the low offers. you know, as a as a agent investor, I’m out here making the low offers. And of course, you know, this being an agent, you know, unless the receiving realtor, the listing agent has it in writing from their client, that they don’t want to receive any law offers below a certain amount, they are basically bound to present that offer to their client. So

Trevor Gravink (09:23.308)

Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:45.774)

My perspective is like, look, there’s a bunch of properties that are on market that are sitting. I’m going to make an offer. I don’t know if they’re getting offers, but I’m going to make an offer on it. And before I was an agent, the mentor that I had, who I got this strategy from, I saw him making, you know, 80 offers, 60 offers a month and getting, one or maybe one every other month, which occurred to me like it really just is a numbers game. And I think there’s a lot of investors that that look at it like that.

And then, know, to your point, Trevor, there’s also just and this is me just being completely honest. There’s also a lot of investors just with a big ego, right? They think there’s not too many people doing what I’m doing. You know, my time is super valuable and also I’m not going to, you know, burden myself by having to explain what I’m doing to other people. But really, I think, you know, if someone comes across someone like that and they’re just hard to deal with, like, like you said, like you can fire your your your investor client and, you know, they can find someone else.

Trevor Gravink (10:44.997)

I mean, it’s kind of just like sales, right? Some of it is luck and timing. And then some of it is because you’re consistently doing things. So you’re putting in all these offers. Maybe this person’s gotten a lot of offers, but finally they’re at the point where they’re just so tired of having their house on the market that you put it in at the right time. And now because you have that offer and they’re willing to go there or some life of that happened. And now they, you know, they were thinking about selling and they were 80 % there. And then all of a sudden now they’re

Dylan Silver (11:02.253)

Yeah.

Trevor Gravink (11:14.951)

100 % because of a medical issue or something else that they have to be able to deal with. So it’s just a matter of like you said, consistently doing things and you will run into deals because one, sometimes people will just be already at that place and sometimes I believe it’s just a little bit of luck, but you can only get lucky if you’re actually putting it in offers.

Dylan Silver (11:38.638)

That’s exactly right. You’re not going to get lucky if you’re not trying, if you’re not shooting the ball. Before we hopped on here, you mentioned DSCR loans. And I’ve heard this before and we’ve talked about it before, but folks who may not know, what’s a DSCR loan?

Trevor Gravink (11:54.352)

So it’s debt service coverage ratio and this can be for properties one to four units, single family residential side. There is commercial loans like this, which would be anything five plus. But for the typical investor that’s doing one to four, this is a loan where the lender does not care about your personal income or personal debt to income ratio. What they actually just care about is the rents that that property will most likely produce or are producing on the current lease.

equal to or greater than the housing payment which would be principal interest property taxes insurance and any association dues they will loan on that property. Typical down payments would be about 20 % and then it just kind of depends from there on your credit score what you’d actually qualify for and some lenders will go below one meaning that the actual rents coming in could be less than the housing payment but typically that would be like on a short-term rental where the investor believes hey I’m going to run this property

than what they think this is actually going to run for. So the investors willing to potentially take a loss monthly and make up that payment or they feel like they can just manage it better than what they’re projecting.

Dylan Silver (13:08.566)

Now I’ve seen now a lot of lenders with the DSCR loans and I think it’s great because it’s almost like something in my mind that an investor came up with, you someone who is able to write off all their income so on their tax return they show either no money or very little money, right? And then how do you get loans in that situation if you’ve already got several houses out, right? Well, you get a DSCR loan. Do you know how long these…

Trevor Gravink (13:12.901)

Hmm.

Dylan Silver (13:34.21)

loans have been around for, have they recently been popular? I’ve been seeing them now with lot of lenders.

Trevor Gravink (13:40.262)

So they’ve been out for multiple years now, but there’s more and more lenders that are jumping in as they see a lot of business picking up in that category. I feel like then they say, okay, well, how do we, you know, find the backend investors that’s going to buy this paper? Because at the end of the day, that’s what you have to have as the underwriting guidelines. And then when you package these mortgages up and resell them to Wall Street, do you have those backend investors? So there’s more and more banks that have gotten into it for sure. My recommendation is

you know to do your research and figure out how they’ve been doing DSCR loans just recently or for years because the ones that are newer they usually tend to be less risk-aversive meaning that their underwriting guidelines are going to be a lot

strict than somebody that’s been doing a lot of DSCR loans. The unique thing is that these types of loans, they can have exceptions. Like with an FHA loan, it’s black and white. DTI, all these things are black and white. With non-QM or DSCR loans, there can be exceptions made if you can make a case of why the lender should still loan on this property and they may overlook a certain factor with the loan that typically would get denied. But you’re only going to get that if you’re

working with lenders that have been doing DSDR loans for a while.

Dylan Silver (15:00.812)

You mentioned before hopping on here Trevor that you also do construction loans or hard money loans. You know it’s not your main business but you’ve done them in the past. I think it’s great. I think we need more people like that because ideally someone who is an investor would be able to go to one person or one source and say hey look this property is rental grade. It’s going to qualify. I need a traditional or this is a heavy rehab and I’m going to need a hard money loan and I want to be able to go to the same

group of people instead having multiple people. Was that kind of the idea going into it or just happened to be the case where you fell into it?

Trevor Gravink (15:37.867)

so, you know, I started.

When I started working with investors, one day they need a DSCR loan, the next day they’re doing a fix and flip, right? And so then just learning about that, calling up, essentially there’s account executives at every lender, so you just call them up. Hopefully you get somebody that’s super knowledgeable that can point you in the right direction. And then also just partnering up with other mortgage brokers that have done fix and flip loans and saying, hey, I have this deal, how can we share in on this and teach each other how to be able to, maybe I can help you out with your next

DSDR loan or whatever it is and just you know swallowing my ego making sure that I’m asking the right questions maybe doing a three-way call with somebody that is an expert on a commercial loan or a ground-up construction or whatever it is and then I’m just learning it from beginning to end so I think that’s really just what it comes down to is being willing to learn about new products and then taking the time to be able to do them and look at the guidelines and

It’s a struggle at the beginning sometimes, but then like you said, the person just comes to you for everything, right? Because if one day they leave me for a fix and flip loan, person’s like, I do DSCR loans too, I do ground up, and now I’m competing with some other broker.

Dylan Silver (16:45.218)

Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:53.634)

Yeah, very few. mean, truthfully, there may be one other I just can’t think of anybody that does the things that you’re doing, you talking about traditional talking about hard money, you’re also involved as an investor yourself. I think we need more people like that. I think we need more investor agents. just think we need more people involved in investing in general because if not, you have a lot of people in

a populace that is relatively in the dark just like I was. You when I first got into real estate, I had no idea about anything. I didn’t have family in the business. I was working for Nissan and I just felt like, how am ever gonna own a house? I felt like I needed a blood sample to get a car loan, let alone a note for my home, right? So, and I was working in the car business. So was like, if this is hard for me, how hard is it gonna be for everyone else? So I think about all these things and you know,

I’m curious to get your perspective on this Trevor. If someone is a first time investor and they’re looking at the different ways that they could get involved in investing and you’re putting yourself in their shoes and they’re thinking, do I go short term rental like Airbnb? Do I go midterm, maybe corporate housing? Do I buy a duplex, multifamily? Do I go long term, annual leases? Do I do real estate wholesale? What would be?

Your first move if you were a new real estate investor.

Trevor Gravink (18:15.491)

My first move before deciding what type of property that I would get into is to find a mentor that’s already investing and say, hey, this is what I want to be able to do. And maybe if you do want to get into multifamily, then you find an investor that’s done a lot of multifamily and you say, hey, how can I help you find your next property? And when I bring this to you, how do you look at this property? How are you analyzing it before you purchase it? And I would just put in some sweat equity with them and maybe say I have, if you have,

money I have 50, 100, 200 thousand in my retirement that I want to invest can we buy the next property together or if I do find one would you review it with me so that would be my strategy is yeah maybe figure out if you want to do short-term long-term multifamily I think they can all

Profitable if done correctly and I think the only way that you can do it correctly is by you know finding somebody that’s already doing what you want to be doing and doing it successfully Just because there’s so many different pitfalls that can come along the way that no matter how many books you read How much time you put into chat GBT podcast you listen to or other things? There’s going to be different things that happen with your property or your love

that might be unique. I’ve done so many loans and they look straightforward and there almost always something unique about them. So you want somebody there that has maybe already been there, done that. That would be my suggestion.

Dylan Silver (19:47.047)

Trevor we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Trevor Gravink (19:52.453)

Yes, so you can go to my website which is RE for real estate and then brokerbuddy.com so REbrokerbuddy.com and then it’s the same thing I have a YouTube channel as well that gets into DSDR loans explaining them both for the long-term and short-term side and some other stuff about mortgage and the channel name is also REbrokerbuddy and they can go there as well and on my website is my phone number and email address

you can reach out to me at any time.

Dylan Silver (20:25.09)

Trevor, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Trevor Gravink (20:28.176)

Thanks Dylan, I appreciate it.