How I Got Started

My journey is a wild one. I got my first job at 17, working at a water park in South Florida. I’d get off the bus after school and dip some fries. Between the ages of 17 and 26, I worked a total of 26 jobs. Of the 26, I quit 24 and was let go from 2. It’s not that I was lazy, I simply couldn’t stay motivated to stay. As time went on I realized it was simply because I wasn’t meant to work for someone else.

In 2017, shortly after moving to Richmond, VA, I became a realtor. My mother and stepfather were in the construction side of the real estate world so I was introduced to the game at the age of 12. I figured I’d try my hand in selling properties. Wow, that was a failure. After 17 months of being a licensed realtor, I gave up my license with zero sales, and not a single listing. To be fair, I knew very few people in the area, had no money for marketing, and didn’t know much about the area.

I came across being a DSCR mortgage broker by accident on Google in 2019. I’ve always been good with numbers, knew how real estate worked, could do business in 45 states, and I could do it all online. It seemed too good to be true. But, considering I was living in a strangers basement while feeding my kids on food stamps with a 394 credit score, I figured I’d give it a try. I was working 45 hours per week, so learning the ins and outs as well as networking with investors was very time consuming. At one point, I was messaging 300-500 investors per day, 7 days per week. After a month of eating, sleeping, and breathing the DSCR stuff, I put two deals in the pipeline (same day!).

Both deals would go on to close about 3 weeks later (before COVID, this was common). I remember sweeping the warehouse at my job when I checked my banks app and saw the wires come in on the closing date. I clocked out an hour later and never returned back to work, which was wild, because the two loans were very small, only making me a combined $2,400. But, in my eyes, I made 6 weeks salary in 3 weeks by assisting investors with a mortgage.

I saw the potential and immediately reinvested half the commission checks into a professional website and email. I then upped my marketing since I had no W2 to take up my time. I’d go on to put about 20 deals in the pipeline just a few months later, totaling $2.1 million, then COVID happened and the DSCR sector was put on pause for 6 months. Just like this, I’m back to feeding my kids on government assistance. This time, it was unemployment, not food stamps.

Towards the end of 2020, the market started clearing up, but not enough for me to put up impressive numbers with closings. Rates were high and investors were weary. I’d finish 2020 with only 6 closings all year. I vowed to make 2021 my breakout year. For the most part, considering it was my first full year in the business and I had to learn everything on my own and do my own marketing, I’d consider 2021 to be a solid year. I’d go off to close $12M in mortgages, followed by $18.3M in 2022. However, 2022 was no easy journey. Inflation put a huge dent in my pipeline as I lost $11M in deals in just a 3 month period. It’s hard to not look back and count how much I would have closed in 2022 if inflation didn’t impact anything (cough cough, $29M), but I knew I had to keep pushing.

I now have a full time assistant to help me grow my empire. I’ve been written about by several journalist and I’ve appeared on multiple podcasts over the short two years. It’s been a hectic journey between COVID and inflation, but through obsessive marketing, knowledge of the industry, and my referral program, I’ve continued to build in empire, in hopes of one day reaching $100M per year in closings.