Jason got his first taste of real estate investing after joining a local real estate club. In 2012, he made his first transaction and hasn’t looked back. Jason founded HoustonHouseBuyers in July of 2013, in its' first year produced $3M of gross revenue, through wholesaling, leasing, and flipping 70 houses.  HoustonHouseBuyer's is expected to buy 100 houses in 2015 and produce nearly $6M in gross revenue.   

Jason has more than a decade of experience in risk management in the private and public sector. He managed the risk finance program for The University Of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. During his tenure he managed the workers’ compensation program for 5,000 employees, property conservation program for $2B in insured assets, business continuity and emergency response program. He also managed the Fire and Life Safety program responsible for nearly 5MM gross square feet of laboratory, class room and office space. His program additionally reviewed plans for new biomedical research facilities, one facility built annually during his tenure at $250MM per project.

Jason has a BS in environmental Science from Sam Houston State, Masters in Security Management from The University of Houston and an MBA in finance from Houston Baptist University. He lives in Houston with his wife Sarah and two sons, Cameron and Carson.

This episode is full of great tips on getting funding from when you don’t have any experience real estate investing up until you’ve built relationships with small local banks.

It took Jason 6 weeks to buy his first house which was a rental. He worked through the tough times making 15-20 offers per week and not getting very far.

Then he decided to partner with someone and put a 40k budget to work for marketing.

That’s how you get the ball rolling!

So many people are afraid to spend money to get the deals.  The fact of the matter is you can net over 40k on a rehab and do it multiple times for that 40k budget in marketing.

The numbers don’t have to be that big, but an investment will likely need to be made to get going.

Jason’s tips for finding a good hard money lender to get funding for your first deals are as follows:

* Go to local Real Estate Investor Association meetings

* Find out who does lending and how long they’ve been lending and how many deals they’re funding per month

* Narrow down your list to the ones that are doing the most and for the longest amount of time

He was paying roughly 3 points and 13% interest for his hard money loans in the beginning.  Those aren’t bad numbers for hard money.

After getting some deals under your belt, put together a packet showing before and after pictures and the numbers for the deals to show to potential private lenders. 

Private lenders are people that lend money to investors to fund their deals.  They typical lend the money because the interest paid is much better than other forms of investing and a lot less risky.

The best thing to do when looking for private lenders and who to borrow from is to find the ones that are already lending to other investors.  This way you don’t have to convince them to lend money.  You don’t ever want to have to do that.