Dealing in Defaulted Mortgages – How to Broker Notes

Here’s a question from one of our particpants in the Private Access Club (you can check it out with a 30-day trial for only $1 currently; LOTS of ongoing note buying training & support for you there) asked at a live-webinar this week. It speaks to one of the key aspects of business – not just note-buying, but business overall:

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My reply:

Here’s something to keep in mind. First of all, why are you spending any time at all looking at note buying? Is it to make money?

Of course.

Is it to make lots of money? Sure.

OK, now. Why are you attracted to this more than some other aspect of real estate?

Well, one of the key reasons SHOULD be the repeat-ability of this business. The 1R, remember? (the ‘A-Z Profiting from Discounted Mortgages Biz-in-a-Box‘ Course will walk you through this, pounding this into your head!). “R” stands for “relationship”, and the idea that a single relationship can generate significant deal flow for you.

So to the question at hand.

If you’ve just spent a significant amount of time generating a lead on a note or pool of notes from someone, and come up with a data tape (a data tape is usually an excel spreadsheet with 1 or more notes for sale included on it), then you should be thinking 2 things:

1. how do I make money off the notes on this tape?
2. how do I make recurring revenue off of this relationship?

It looks like the company mentioned before may have addressed (1) above, but it may not address (2) unless you have “secured” yourself with some sort of contract to cover future transactions.

In order to help you to protect yourself as a note broker, here’s a draft commission agreement (right-click & ’save as’ to your PC) that you might want to use as reference (note that it’s California specific so you’ll want to edit it accordingly) – in order to “protect” your interests.

BEWARE THOUGH: a contract is really just a piece of paper. You need to litigate to enforce it. And to litigate, you need to have evidence that the terms of your contract have been violated.

What am I getting at?

Once you’ve signed a brokerage agreement (and I have brokerage agreements with people that are just verbal agreements, by the way), you then have to trust that the person who you’re brokering to will send you money each time they do a deal with the seller you introduced them to, at least for the duration of your agreement.

So now you’ve become an enforcer. If you don’t trust that the person you signed the brokerage agreement with is sending you money WHEN they do a deal, now you need to “check up on them” to make sure that they’re not doing deals and NOT sending you your commission.

And you may not like having to do that.

So what’s my advice on how to broker notes?

Broker to people you can trust.

Simple as that.

If you feel like you can trust someone, then go ahead and enter into an agreement with them.

But don’t ever do business with someone that you don’t have a good gut feel to.

Trust your gut.