Welcome to Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli. Well, today I wanted to bring back a good friend of mine, Mr. Aaron Chapman. He is a 24 year veteran, as in like 1997. That's how long he's been in the finance industry. He's focused on real estate investors and doing investment loans. That is his core expertise. He has a great team. The last count I had was 11 staff members. That's probably grown at this point, but him and his team, that's all they do is they work with real estate investors to finance investment property. He's a great guy, sharp dude, as I like to call him. He likes to follow what's going on in the mortgage market and the market in general. He talks about inflation. He likes to talk about how to finance intelligently even with rising interest rates. And so those are some of the things that we're gonna talk about today. None of this is scripted. This is all on the fly off the cuff, him and I just thought let's just get on and record a podcast episode to talk about the state of the market and how to proceed in today's environment. And I don't even have questions written down for him. So we're just gonna see where this goes.

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If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Ask Marco – Too Many Properties for a 1031 Exchange, Buy a Home or Rental First, Building an Acquisitions Team, Fast-tracking



Aaron, welcome back to the show.

Thanks brother. I did notice it's gotta be a long time since I've been on here, cuz when you said you had 11 staff members down, we're at 32 now, so it's been, it's been a while. .

Okay, well you're right. So it's been a while. Either that or are you ramping?

There was, I ran at 11 for, for God, it had to be like 6 or 8 months to a year. And then we just start finding the 11 was not enough. And we keep adding, keep adding, keep adding. Now we got quite the, quite the process and quite the group.

Well, growth is good. That's good. So you must be doing a lot of loans then.

We are, we've done as much as averaging about 125 a month. It's not that high right now, but it's still high enough that I get recruiters calling me all the time saying, Hey, you're one of the few out there. Still getting a lot done. We're still doing quite a bit of business a lot of business. In fact, I got a call, obviously you ever heard of an outfit called Modex. They called me up to to, to interview me as the number one loan originator in the state of Arizona and like number six or seven in the United States for the transactions closed over the last 12 running months. Like where the hell did that come from? And they, they track everybody who does loans, whether you're a licensed loan originator, you work at a bank. And they said there's 1.4 million people out there and that are doing this. And that's where I sit amongst them, which was pretty amazing to hear. I don't pay attention to it. So it kind of threw me back a little bit.

So anyone listening to this right now is hearing two things. One, you're growing, which means you're doing more loans even with the rising rates, you know, as the backdrop. So let's talk about that. Let's probably a good starting point. We've seen mortgage rates more than double since the beginning of the year. In January we were at sub 3% for a 30 or fixed conventional loan. You know, you can fill in any of the gaps here, but today we're more than double that. And so people are asking the question, you know, does it still make sense to get a mortgage loan to invest in real estate with financing? And if I use leverage, how much and do the numbers pencil out? I mean, I'm throwing a lot at you here. Obviously we can break this down into multiple questions, but that's probably one of the main questions people are thinking as they're listening to this and they wanna know what your thoughts and opinion is. So let's just throw it out on the table and just see wha...