Lending $15 Million per Month to Investors with Byron Enriquez
My guest today is Byron Enriquez. Byron has over 15 years of real estate finance experience, handling complex financial transactions, always keeping in mind risk mitigation as well as a profitable outcome for all parties. He is a proven sales and leadership coach who has focused his career on developing salespeople and sales leaders. Byron lends over $15M a month for private real estate investors to invest in buy and holds, flips, and commercial real estate. His accolades include being featured in Yahoo Finance, many popular podcasts, and having completed over 1500 real estate transactions.
We begin the episode with Byron sharing his background story and how he ended up in real estate. He shares that he has been in the business for almost 20 years and in that time, he has done pretty much every aspect of real estate; lending, property management, flipping. Prior to getting into mortgage, Byron’s passion was finance. He was a foreign exchange trader in securities trading for a few years. He caught the “banking bug” at 18 years old and worked his way through college. He shares that he got his passion for real estate from his dad who owned properties and used to ask Byron for help translating loan documents when he was 12-13 years old. Looking back, he now realizes that actually triggered something in him and made him make a career out of it.
We then talk about Byron’s transition from the corporate world into entrepreneurship and the lessons he learned along the way. He shares that there are a lot of similarities between being a leader in the corporate world, managing a team, and being an entrepreneur. Back when he was managing hundreds of people in the banking sector, there was never a roadmap on how to achieve what they needed from him. His job was to come in and analyze the situation, and create the path. For Byron, it’s the same when it comes to entrepreneurship which is why he believes that self-motivation and self-drive are crucial in building your own path as an entrepreneur.
Next, we talk about Byron’s company, JSS Financials. Byron and his partner started JSS Financials five years ago. Their goal was to help self-employed individuals and freelancers in California to get financed for properties. They started carving out a niche for themselves to be able to help these individuals. In the beginning, it was more conventional financing, but it soon evolved into what they call private mortgage lending. The funds that they lend out don't come from banks instead, they have private relationships with private family offices, hedge funds, and different investors. Byron brought that corporate mentality of doing things and disclosing everything properly. Their money is coming from private sources, but you can still mortgage it; there's a website where you can make mortgage payments and you get all the reporting that you need to get. Byron also shares that since the beginning of the pandemic, they took some calculated risks and were able to double down and expand into all fifty states.
We then talk about how to be better when it comes to sales. According to Byron, the number one thing you need to look at, if you are trying to be a better salesperson, is your conversion rate. Because in sales it's not all about the activity; it's but it's doing the activity the right amount of times. Once you know your conversation rate, you will be able to determine the number of times you need to do a certain activity to get the desired result. It's all about putting yourself in opportunities to do it and letting your expertise shine when you get there. But you need to do it the right amount of times, to get in front of the right amount of people to be able to get that conversion.
Lastly, we talk about what to expect from the real estate market going forward in this mid to post COVID era. Byron believes that there are still a lot of opportunities in the market. We might not see the huge increases that we saw in the last 18 months, but he believes that the values will continue to increase. As for the lending side of the business, Byron shares that pre-Covid there were some more flexible programs for the qualified mortgage base, but after Covid they completely shrunk down. But, they have been opening up again in the last 6-9 months providing some opportunities for more creative financing. Byron also shares that his company is launching their own fund where investors can invest money into the fund and then JSS creates programs to go out and deploy those e funds into the real estate community.
Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Byron Enriquez and get valuable information on creative ways of financing your projects!
Notable Quotes:
“I reported to the CEO, I was at that level. And then I realized: I'm sitting here building something for somebody else.”
- Byron Enriquez
“It's a lot about self-motivation and self-drive, charting your own path, and being able to set those goals in front of you on your own.”
- Byron Enriquez
“In this super-rush world of Instagram and social media, everyone thinks that stuff happens overnight and with no effort. But the formula hasn't changed a lot - people who work their butts off tend to find a lot of success.”
- Mike Simmons
“On a calculated gamble, we doubled down and decided to increase our marketing and expand into other markets.“
- Byron Enriquez
“We are not the most expensive guys out there, quite the opposite. We usually try to work with people's framework and budget to make the deal work. We know that building that relationship with these investors is gonna be long-term.”
- Byron Enriquez
“Everyone is a salesperson. If you own your own business, you're a salesperson. It doesn't matter if you're out shaking hands or making phone calls or whatever it is you're doing - you're selling yourself, you're selling your business, you're selling your services.”
- Byron Enriquez
Links:
Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months
