In this episode, we dive deep into a fresh topic on this podcast – note investing. Learning from an expert, we have the Founder and CEO of Debt Cleanse Group Legal Services, Jorge Newbery. Jorge guides us to understand note investing deeper by talking about buying at a discount, making a return on the note, and creating a good deal flow in this market. Recognizing the challenge of finding good notes, Jorge talks about the importance of building relationships with note sellers and shares some things to keep in check between the interaction of the note holder and the property owner. Jorge also talks about the time commitment that is required for passive investing and mastering note investing.

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Note Investing Mastery with Jorge Newbery

We’re going to talk about note investing with a note expert. It’s something we haven’t discussed on the show yet. I haven’t gotten into this to investing myself, but it’s not because it’s not appealing. There’s definitely a lot of appeal to this business. Our guest is Jorge Newbery. He’s a successful note investor. He’s raising a big fund. He does some big deals. He’s invested in apartments in the past. He wrote a great book, Burn Zones. It’s a good book, Burn Zones available on Amazon. Check it out. It’s worth a read. I finished it before I got home. Once again, Jorge Newbery, thank you for joining us on the show.

Taylor, I appreciate you having me on the show.

You’ve got an interesting business model. We haven’t talked about notes on the show yet. For the people out there who don’t know, what about buying notes? How do you invest in notes? Can you give us a 30,000-foot overview of what note investing is?

It sounds like many in your audience are real estate investors so much like you would buy a piece of real estate. Many times people buy a piece of real estate, but they also take a mortgage, a debt in order to help finance that. That debt, that mortgage instrument is what you’re purchasing. Lots of times there’s either a mortgage or a trust deed and it’s secured by a note. People usually say note investing. Those ones can be sold when they’re performing. When the people are paying, they’ll be sold typically at par or some very modest discount or even some premium. The most interesting opportunity, particularly for your audience is when those mortgages go into default.

When people are unable to pay, if they lose a job, a medical emergency, unexpected medical expense, death in the family or divorce. Any of those reasons and more can trigger someone to fall delinquent on their mortgage. Many times institutional holders and banks at some point, if that loan gets old enough, they’ll consider selling that loan. Usually they’ll sell them in some big pools of loans. They’ll sell them to some Wall Street funds or whatnot. Over time they trickle down to groups like AHP, American Homeowner Preservation, which I run. After that, they’ll leave and trickle down to individual investors.

You can sometimes simply buy one note at a time. There’s an advantage when you are the local investor, especially if that mortgage is secured by a property that you can drive to. It gives that investor a big advantage even AHP who’s based in Chicago, we try to network with people across the country, but we don’t have insight into what’s going on in that property in Denver or Kansas City or St. Louis. Wall Street has even more ill-equipped and big banks even more ill-equipped in that. The pricing probably for an individual investor, they may pay a little bit more because they’re only buying one loan. They have the optimum tools that they buy right to use being local to their advantage.

You talk about the banks selling it at a discount. That means if there’s $100,000 balance on the note, that’s the outstanding debt that they’ll sell it at a valuation less than $100,000. What’s a typical discount that would be appealing to a note investor?

It depends on the problem with the loan, but there are two big factors that you’re going to bid off of. One is how much is owing. People will say, “What’s the unpaid principal balance?” How much is due on the principal, not including legal fees, delinquent payments and whatnot? How much is the property worth? If you have $100,000 due and the property is worth $50,000 and they’re a year delinquent. That’s common. Maybe parts of the country have recovered, but others haven’t. You’ll see that loan trading for $0.35, $0.40, $0.50, $0.60, not at the UPB, but at the value. People will pay anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 maybe more lately. If the property is in particularly good shape and it’s occupied, somebody may pay more for that, hoping they’ll do a modification.

That’s ideally up until a few years ago, we would always pay $0.50 of the current property value or less for about everything that AHP bought. We bought thousands and thousands of loans. Lately, the real estate market has become more robust. There are a lot of dollars competing for whatever deals there are. It has pushed pricing up. The same things happened in notes. It’s become tougher to buy and yield. We would hit returns in the 30s and 40s. I’m shooting for the high teens or low twenties. That’s challenging in this market. It’s definitely changed. Once a downturn hits, it’s the same thing every time. We’d expect that the supply will vastly out outstrip the demand and all the prices will sink. Now, it’s the opposite.

For somebody getting into this business or thinking about it from the outside, “Buying a note at a discount and ostensibly buying a property at a pretty steep discount, but I still have a borrower involved. Wells Fargo on time, why are they going to pay me on time?” How do we change that and get them to start paying or what are our options? How do we end up making a return on the note?

If they owe $100,000 on a house that’s worth $50,000 and you buy it for $25,000, you have a lot of flexibility to drop the payment. Maybe settle in delinquency for a discount or capitalize it or whatever you want to do with it. You’ve bought it for $25,000. They were paying $800 on that $100,000 loan. You drop the payment to $400. It may be pretty exciting for you and dropping the payment in half would be transformative for the family. When this is done right, it can be a win absolutely for the investor and the homeowner. The alternative is to say that, “I’m not going to modify so I’m going to foreclose. You see investors come in. I’m going to buy a bunch of loans. I’m going to foreclose, kick the people out, get the REO and settle this for a big profit.”

A lot of homeowners are going to say, “I’m not going anywhere.” You file a foreclosure. They’ll get an attorney. They’ll fight the foreclosure. Now, you’re paying legal fees to your attorney, the investor and the homeowner. The homeowner who could be paying your payments is now paying legal fees. That can go on for a while. Some of those things, two or three years, now they’re not paying taxes. They’re not paying insurance. The investor is advancing that all of a sudden at $25,000 you paid for the loan. Now $5,000 legal fees, $5,000 taxes, insurance, they’re not taking care of the property. Property value drops to $35,000, “I’m losing money now.” What we found is the best way to do this is to buy loans and be prepared for whatever outcome the homeowner wants.

They want to stay and do a mod, be prepared to do a mod. If they don’t want to stay and they want cash for deed in lieu. They’re thinking, “I owe $100,000. This house is only worth $50,000. They’re giving me $1,000 or $2,000 to sign a deed in lieu. I haven’t paid in a couple of years. That’s a great deal.” Take that deal if they don’t want to stay in the house. Better yet is they’ve already gone, if the home is already vacant, then it really makes sense if you can track them down and give them $1,000 and you avoid the time and expensive foreclosure. It’s a huge win. The ones where we do best are the ones where we buy them. We get in contact with the homeowner right away and make a deal, whatever deal they want.

They stay, they pay us, they go and we pay them. Sometimes there are three alternatives, a modification, a deed in lieu and the third one is sometimes the homeowner will give you a lump sum settlement. If they owe $100,000 and it’s worth $50,000. You bought it for $25,000 and they can say, “We’ll settle it for $45,000 or $50,000 in a lump sum settlement.” If a homeowner is strongly behind on their payments, they may not be able to do that. If they have a friend or family member who can get a new mortgage and you accept a short pay off, that happens. I remember one where we had a grandmother who was struggling in foreclosure. We bought the loan, five grandkids all kicked in $5,000 or $6,000.

They paid off for her loan at the discounted amount. We still made money on it. They were thrilled. Everyone was happy. That’s the approach that works. The big banks and the big Wall Street funds, they’re not granular enough. They’re not focused on each loan enough to customize solutions. That’s how you can make money in this business and be open to resolutions that make sense. As you pointed out, the big thing is that a homeowner in the middle is not straightforward. You have to find a way to work with them or you’re going to end up in same legal fees to foreclose and potential litigation.

We have business model and principle that sounds great, but whenever there’s a business model that sounds like it doesn’t have any flaws or there are no problems and everybody runs into that market, that’s how capitalism works. The easy deals go away. The prices rise and that all evaporates. You’re doing this professionally with a significant fund. There is clearly a variety of size of players in this market. What are the keys to creating a good deal flow in this market? You’ve been able to do it. How would Joe Sixpack with some money to invest in notes if he wanted to get into it, do this or could he even do it? How would you get started?

The answer is yes, he could do it. It is challenging. It’s a very opaque business. Real estate, in general, is fairly transparent. You can look in the MLS. You see what’s for sale. There’s going to be some off-market special deals. By and large, things are transparent. You can see records of what homes have sold for previously. Notes are completely different. There’s no MLS. There’s no transparency into what the person you’re buying the loan for, what they paid. There is no reason for them to tell you. A new person getting in the market, there are two questions they always ask. One is, “Where do I buy the loans?” It’s the number one question and it’s tough to give an answer. The number two question is, “I have some money, but can I put a down payment? Can I finance my loans?”

Those are the two questions that almost every new note investor asks. Even though I’ve been asked a thousand times, I don’t know if I’ve ever given a good answer. AHP does sell loans upon occasion. Not so much now because it’s tough to buy loans. We’re simply working out what we have. Some other funds that do, the group called Candor in California that will sell some loans individually. The Big Wall Street funds, they won’t do individual loan sales. They will say it’s too much work. They know they can sell for a little bit more, but it’s too much hustle. They’re not going to do it. They’ll sell it to some groups like Candor and AHP, which will occasionally some individually, but there isn’t a robust transparent platform for the market for these.

There’s Loan MLS. NoteSchool has a small platform where they sell a modest number of loans. It used to be FCI Exchange, now it’s called The Exchange. Those are places to look. I don’t know if you’re going to get great deals because there isn’t enough product in any of those platforms to create a robust market. There’s a modest number of notes. There’s a pretty good number of investors. Anything that’s a good deal is gobbled up right away. It’s not like the MLS where you can see a lot of not great deals. I’m like, “That’s a great deal.” Someone just listed it on the MLS. You won’t find that so much on the note sale sites yet. Hopefully that’ll change. There have been some attempts of people to create a loan market and stuff like that. None of them have gained traction yet. Hopefully, that’ll change in time.

We’ve got BB&T here in Richmond. I can’t pick up the phone and call BB&T and say, “Mike, send me your list of notes you’re trying to sell or something like that.” There’s an advantage to having a relationship with a potential notes seller or a note originator that’s selling these things off.

It’s a problem that I keep struggling into. AHP at this point has a lot of relationships so it makes it easier for us to buy. There is an opportunity and that a lot of local investors will be willing to pay a premium over what we would pay a modest premium. They could still make good money at that. We need to find a way to do that. For a while, Auction.com started offering notes that didn’t work out for whatever reason. I don’t think they do it anymore. There needs to be an Auction.com for notes. I’ve talked to people about it. At some point hopefully, that’ll happen.

There are a lot of notes, but there’s not enough excess supply to make sense for anyone to focus on marketing to the smaller note buyer. When the next downturn hits, they could play a vital role. If there was a transparent marketplace where they could go and find deals in their area that are priced attractively, maybe on an auction format. They’re big institutions that need to sell these portfolios, at some point that’s going to happen. It just hasn’t happened yet. That will be an exciting time because these smaller local investors can probably have the biggest impact in their own communities by buying loans and places they can drive to.

If I was a note buyer, I’ll pay more for a note on a property. I could drive by anytime I want essentially and see what’s going on or even before I buy. I will go check it out and see those pictures, real pictures. What does it look like right now? When you’re in this business, there’s some protection. You can’t call up the borrower, “I bought your note, when are you going to start paying me?” What are the rules there? We’re not giving any specific investment advice here. We’re going at a high level over the rules around interacting between the note holder, the property owner and the middle man. What does that all have to play?

I’ll make a confession. AHP first started buying loans in 2011. We were completely ignorant. We would buy loans from some big banks. We simply said, “Their phone number is this and we’d dial them.” We’d say, “We bought your loan. What do you guys want to do?” Do you want to do a modification? Do you want to do a deed in lieu? The people were responsive, “I’d love to do a modification. Here’s the payment we could do. That’s great. Do it or I want your cash.” We quickly realized that you can’t do that. You can’t do what I said. We did it, but we quickly realized that you have to use a third-party servicer that’s licensed to be a servicer to contact homeowners.

They have to do mini-Mirandas. Basically, “This is an attempt to collect a debt and any information that you provide will be used to collect the debt.” Things like that have to be done as you scale. You want to start in a compliant manner and use a licensed servicer. Coincidentally, AHP Servicing is a servicer. I’d highly recommend them. If you didn’t, there are others like FCI, BSI and SN. Most of the ones I mentioned are open to taking somebody who has one loan, five loans or ten loans. As you get to bigger servicers like Carrington, if you go and say, “I have ten loans,” they’re like, “Call AHP or somebody else because it doesn’t make sense to us.”

The servicer will charge anywhere from typically $30 to $95 to service the loan. For that, they’re the ones calling the homeowner. They’re trying to work out resolutions. They report back to you each month on, “This is the status of your loans. This is who’s paid. This is the status of this foreclosure,” or whatever’s going on. You want to be active. People who entered this business will buy the loans and then, “Servicer, make a lot of money for me.” That won’t work that well in general. You want to be like, “Servicer, here are the loans. We’re going to work in partnership or I’m going to quarterback to you.” Whatever insight you have, you probably have more because you bought the loan.

Here’s what I understand about this loan. It’s occupied but it’s occupied by squatters or it’s vacant. We want to have someone go out and board it up right away or it’s vacant subject to vandalism, contact the homeowner to try to get a deed in lieu. They’re not at the home. The services will be the party that we’ll do a skip trace, try and find out, “Where is this homeowner right now? What phone numbers are out there?” If you can reach that homeowner on a vacant home and offer them cash for deed in lieu, it works extremely well as opposed to give it to an attorney and wait four, six months or sometimes years in order to get title to the property. It can shortcut.

I’ll give you an extreme case. In our early days, we had a property in Florida. It’s a condo. We had bought the loan. We did some online research and we found out that the homeowner had left and they moved to Jamaica. They worked for Schweppes, the beverage company. We worked with a servicer. They called the guy at Schweppes. He worked there. They were able to get ahold of him and they made an arrangement. We hired an attorney in Jamaica. We sent them the deed in lieu. We sent him his fee plus the money to give to the homeowner. The borrower went to the attorney. They together went to the US Embassy, got the deed in lieu notarized. The attorney gave him $1,000 and that was it. The guy was great like, “I got rid of this house that I’d walked away from anyway.” We were able to promptly sell the property.

Those are the solutions that they’re not going to do on their own, but if you’ve done a little online research, “This guy is in Jamaica, can you do this?” They legally can do it and you’d have to probably help facilitate, “Here’s the attorney.” Most servicers won’t go to those extremes, but if you nudge them too and coach them through it, they can do it. You’d think it’s the other way around that the servicer should be coaching the investor, but it needs to be both ways. You both share whatever insight and information you have and you’ve come to solutions. That sounds like a lot of work, but that’s how you make money on this thing. If you give it to the servicer and say foreclosed on everybody or whatever, you’re not going to make money.

You have to have insight into the business.

It’s the insight into the situation. Everybody should be a priority. It’s always this thing where you’re the one that always following up. You’re going to help maximize the likelihood that your servicer was going to spend more time on your deals and help get them resolved.

This being Passive Wealth Strategies for Busy Professionals, we are busy professionals. We’ve got jobs. We’ve got things that are bringing us our income. We’re growing our wealth as passively as we can. I find with most asset classes, there’s some hierarchy of passivity as far as getting involved and investing. I hear from what you’re talking about. The spectrum seems to go from, “Go do it yourself and start buying up notes,” to investing in funds and somewhere in between there. If somebody wants to go buy notes on their own and run this business themselves, how many hours a week does that usually look like? We’re comparing this to buying a single-family house and running it yourself, where you’re getting calls in the middle of a workday. You’re going to go find a guy to fix a toilet or something like that. All the way to a fund, which is probably passive. Let’s talk about the spectrum of time commitment here.

The good news is that almost all note investing can be done from behind a desktop, behind your computer. You may want to drive by a property if it’s nearby, but it’s not something where you have to be traveling or out there working on the note. Your work would be calls with your servicer, doing due diligence if you’re buying it. Even though it’s passive income, you want to take an active approach in terms of maximizing your outcome. That’s on the far spectrum of the most active-passive strategy. If I go less active, there are other strategies that probably have smaller yields but still attractively yields, which would be buying re-performing loans.

Loans where they were behind, but somebody has purchased that loan and done some payment plan. Maybe they paid on time for six months or twelve months. At that point, those loans are available. In this market, they may be in the high single digits, maybe in the low teens if you’re doing well or it’s a lower value or less desirable neighborhood, but people are still paying. Those can be reasonably attractive returns. The most passive would be investing in a fund. AHP Servicing would be an example. We’ll pay the first 10% to investors annually. They get a 10% return. That’s like simply, “Here’s my IRA money or here’s my regular money.” You can put in $100 or $100,000, whatever it is. That will simply earn a distribution every month on the 10th. That’s the most passive.

There’s a good spectrum there and it makes sense a bit more effort to put in yourself, the more opportunity there is to get paid. The tradeoff is we only have so many hours in the day and everybody understands that. When it comes to investing in a fund, I personally like to use my retirement accounts to invest. Is that something you can use as a self-directed IRA for?

Yeah. AHP Servicing and there are some other funds as well. They will often accept self-directed IRAs and particularly work with most of the usual custodians and trusts. There’s a whole bunch of them, IRA services and most of them will work together and get those retirement funds invested.

One of the big concerns that a lot of people have that I talked to about self-directed IRA investing, this isn’t a self-directed IRA type of conversation, but we’re on the topic, is UBTI tax, one of the few taxes that your IRA might need to pay if you’re investing in a levered asset. We’re not giving out specific tax advice at all. In these funds, is that a factor when you’re considering investing with a self-directed IRA or no or does it depend?

It’s something you want to be aware of. Some funds are unlevered, others are levered. Our current fund is not levered, but we can lever it and we have levered it in the past. Historically, the reasons we’ve levered is because a great deal comes up. We don’t have enough money to buy it. We’ll take short-term leverage to close the deal and pay it off as more equity comes in. That’s what we’ve done historically. That can generate unrelated business taxable income, UBTI, as you referred. That can be a challenge for IRA investors. For AHP speaking, there’s a threshold. I forget the threshold, but it’s $500,000 or something.

There’s a point at which it’s de minimis and you don’t need to report it. Consult with your tax advisor, but if it’s a small percentage of UBTI, typically it doesn’t translate into any additional liability for the investor. We’ve kept in that range. It doesn’t say that it’d be that way in the future and it can impact it. On the other hand, to pay that UBTI, I don’t know the specifics, but it would be interesting to trade-off, “I’m getting a 10% return. If I pay it, does it drop my return to 7%, 8%? What does it do?” I don’t know, but it’s still maybe attractive trade-off even if you say, “Even though there hasn’t been a history of UBTI on this fund, worst-case scenario, what would that be?” It may be an interesting calculation to do.

Consult with your tax advisor. We’re certainly not giving out tax advice here to anybody. We could definitely talk about this all day. I’m curious some investors get concerned about especially if they’re first getting into real estate from stocks and REITs-type of publicly-traded background where there’s a lot of liquidity. If they’re looking at getting into a note fund like yours, what does the liquidity situation look like there? What’s the typical lockup period? We’ll round numbers. We don’t necessarily need super specifics, but what’s that look like compared to stocks and bonds?

I can be super specific because we built in the ability for liquidity. It’s best efforts liquidity so it doesn’t mean you can press a button like a bond or so you can sell it or stock, you can sell it the next day, it’s liquid. With us, you can give us 30 days’ notice that I want to redeem all or part of your investment and we will undertake our best efforts within that 30 days to liquidate that investment all or part, whatever your request. If you do that in the first year, your return will drop from 10% to 8%. If you do it in the second year, it will drop from 10% to 9%. Any time after two years, you get to keep the full 10%. That’s what we offer. It’s worked out pretty well. Historically, we’ve been able to honor redemptions within the 30-day period. Lately, there’s been management changes. There was a delay, but we’ve caught up everything.

In a lot of syndications, you don’t have that opportunity. You’re in it until it sells essentially. There are no guarantees there. What is the best investment you’ve ever made?

You may know it because you read my book. I bought the Ford Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It was an awesome investment. I paid $800,000 for 298 units in downtown Los Angeles. I sold it a couple of years later for $2.5 million. That was a good deal. I had to put some rehab money in it, but I still cleared $1 million, which was pretty early in my career. As you read in my book, it was a mixed blessing. It was a big reward. It gave me a little bit of overconfidence, which ended up with me giving that back times 26 a few years later. As an individual investment, that was awesome.

The book is called Burn Zones. It’s one of my mentor Joe Fairless’ favorite books about real estate investing. That’s a huge endorsement. He says that pretty freely. It’s a great book. I read it quickly. I’m not a fast reader. It’s definitely worth looking into. Second question and I feel like I know what your answer is going to be. What is the worst investment you ever made?

That is such an easy answer if you read the book. It’s called Woodland Meadows. It was a total disaster. For those of you who don’t know the story, it was 1,100 units, one of the biggest apartment complexes in the country. I bought it for $13.5 million. I had this history of turning around bigger and bigger properties that started with four units. Now, I was at 1,100 units. The property was nicknamed Uzi Alley because of all the drugs and crime that had infested the property. I bought it. I moved in. I turned around the property, great success story. An ice storm hit the property. It triggered this extraordinary sequence of events in which I lost Woodland Meadows. I owned about 3,000 other units. I lost everything else. Even after losing everything, I had $26 million in debt. How do you do that? You have to read the book because it’s such an extraordinary sequence. It’s something I could never imagine happening because I had so much success and now it was failure after failure. It was a complete disaster.

The book is the full story. It’s a life story too. It’s only 240 pages. Pick it up. It’s a good read. It’s a good story. It makes sense that it was your answer. My favorite of these three questions, the last one, what is the most important lesson you’ve learned in investing?

I’ve learned a lot. As I reflect, you always learn more from your failures and your successes. I’m thinking of the big failure, Woodland Meadows, what could I have done wrong? What did I do right? I did a lot of things wrong. What drove my success, I put blinders on and I focus, “This is the goal and I’m going to achieve it no matter what. I’m going to focus on this goal and I’m going to achieve it.” As things started going sideways at that property, it started going wrong. I said, “I’m going to rebuild. That’s my goal. I’m going to do it.” There were points if I listened to others, maybe step back a little bit or maybe decided to change course, which wasn’t my nature. It was like, “This is the goal. I’m going to attain it.” Being more flexible and having a plan, but allowing that plan to change as the circumstances change.

That is something I’ve learned to be more flexible. It’s you chart a course and you’re going to find your way to reach whatever the target is. Sometimes the course will need to change, sometimes the target is going to move and you need to accommodate that. Be flexible as you see things changing. That’s where the biggest opportunities are, is when you can be flexible, can accommodate change and make decisions where you don’t have all the necessary information. You’re making the best decision you could at the time. Reflecting on Woodland Meadows, I did make the best decisions I could at the time with the information that I had. They ended up looking back some of the decisions were very poor, but at that time they made sense. It’s still tough. I fall into the same trap now. I don’t know. It’s what drove my success and it’s also what drove my failure.

You wouldn’t be who you are now and you wouldn’t be where you are now if you hadn’t gone through that experience and learned everything you learned. It’s a tough balance to strike. You’ve dropped the Led Zeppelin lyric, my favorite band, “The course may change some times, rivers always reached the sea.” As real estate investors, especially at the beginning, you have to avoid shiny objects syndrome. You go to these seminars especially, REIA or something like that. There’s always somebody new that’s making all kinds of money in what they call super easy investment vehicle. If you’re not careful and you don’t pick a course, you’re going to be buying yet another educational course and on a monthly basis, you’re never going to do anything. You have to be flexible. As you alluded to there, you have to pick a course. You can’t be blowing in the wind. Striking that balance is difficult. I don’t think you can be faulted for that.

The other part is hard work for everything. Whatever you do, if you work hard at it, that’s what’s going to drive success. Even the best plan possible if you can’t execute on it and work hard, whatever you see at those classes, there’s no one out there. Generally to succeed, you’re going to need to work hard.

It might not be anyone for the most part. Everybody out there that are having a lot of success in whatever they’re doing, they had to put a lot of work in to get there. There’s a saying about overnight successes, but it took twenty years to get there. You don’t see the repeated failures, sleepless nights, money lost or money sunk in that it takes forever to come back. It takes a lot of dedication. Thank you for all that. Note investing is definitely an interesting topic. I get more intrigued as I learned about it, but shiny object syndrome, I’m staying on the course. Where can folks get in touch with you if they want to learn more about the fund and all that good stuff?

AHPServicing.com is where you can connect with us. Go to AHP Servicing, you can invest there. If you do decide to buy a note, we may be able to offer you notes for sale. We can also service those loans so you can do that in a compliant manner. You can quarterback us. Even if you only own one loan, we try to make a conscious effort to treat every investor the same, whether you own one loan or you own 1,000 loans. Feel free to ask us all the questions you need and use this as a resource because ultimately we had to make a decision early on, “Are we going to accommodate small investors?” I can reflect back, not that many. A decade ago, I was a small investor in the note space. Our first purchase was nine loans. Over the last decade, we’ve probably bought 8,000 plus loans. A servicer who turned me down early on saying, “You’re too small.” In the end, it was an 8,000 loan plus portfolio. At AHP Servicing, we’ll treat you as well as possible. I don’t want to sound like an ad saying we’ll do our best.

I definitely get it. People reading get it. You never know who you’re talking to that’s the beginning of something huge. I want to treat everybody with respect and treat everybody equally. Jorge, thank you for joining us. It was a great conversation. Notes are fascinating. I’m going to look more into your fund here in the near future and everybody got a lot of great information out of it. Thanks again.

I appreciate you having me on, Taylor. Thanks.

It’s my great pleasure. Everybody out there reading, thank you for joining us. If you’re enjoying the show, please leave a rating and a comment on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s a big help. If you know someone who could use a little bit better passive wealth in their life, please share the podcast with them and bring them into our tribe. Thank you for joining us. We will talk to you on the next one.

Important Links:

• Burn Zones
• American Homeowner Preservation
• Loan MLS
• NoteSchool
• Auction.com
• AHPServicing.com
• iTunes – Passive Wealth Strategies for Busy Professionals

 About Jorge P. Newbery

Jorge P. Newbery Is On A Mission To Help Americans Crushed By Unaffordable Debts.

He is Founder and CEO of Debt Cleanse Group Legal Services, a nationwide legal plan to help consumers and small businesses get out of debt without filing bankruptcy. He is also Chairman of American Homeowner Preservation LLC and AHP Servicing LLC, which crowdfund the purchase of nonperforming mortgages from banks at big discounts, then share the discounts with struggling homeowners. He is also a non-attorney Partner in Activist Legal LLP, a law firm in Washington, D.C.

A 2004 natural disaster triggered the financial collapse of Newbery’s former business, leaving him with $26 million in debts he could not pay. Newbery rebuilt himself through AHP, sharing what he learned from his challenges to help families at risk of foreclosure stay in their homes. In 2018, he founded Debt Cleanse Group Legal Services to assist consumers and small business owners settle all types of debts at big discounts – and not pay some at all, He is also a Board Member of the Group Legal Services Association.

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