00:25
Robert Chadwick
Hi everybody, this is Robert Chadwick with America Mortgages. Thank you again for joining on our webinar series. This webinar is something unique and it’s been requested by many of our clients. As most people are aware, the whole Airbnb craze, or short term rental craze is phenomenal. Great way to optimize your rental yields when you’re buying us real estate. And we’re happy to have Rob Mehta from Rob Mehta Partners. Rob is the founder of the company and an expert when it comes to short term rentals in the US not only just Florida. So with that said, Robert, Rob, why don’t you take few minutes, introduce yourself. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it and take it away.

04:06
Rob Mehta
Okay, fantastic. Thanks, Robert, and good to be with everybody today. Yes, as Robert said, my name is Rob Ma. My company is Rob Mehta Partners and we have a brokerage division called the Florida Property Group. We do specialize in the Florida market. However, we’ve worked in a number of markets across the United States and over the last seven to eight years in our business, the Airbnb, we call it the str, the short term rental market. And short term rental clients have become a huge part of that market. And so if you would have asked me eight, nine years ago, is this a specialty that were going to wade into, I would have said, well, we’ll see. But it has become that way.

04:45
Rob Mehta
We’ve formed relationships with some very strong property management companies in this space that send us their clients as well, not only to buy, but to sell as well. And so we have become experts in this and unknowingly, but that’s what’s happened over time. And so our market, our primary market, which is Florida, which is I’m going to discuss today, is a little bit of what I’m sharing with you. But however, realize that this really does apply to a lot of Airbnb STR markets across the United States as well. So we’re very bullish on Florida because it is our home market. And I’m going to share with you some pointers, some key statistics, as well as to why we are so bullish on this market. But again, we can assist a client pretty much in any major market across the United States. So.

05:37
Rob Mehta
So a little with that, I’ll jump off into the first slide a little bit and give you just a little bit of background as to what’s happening with the Florida market.

05:47
Robert Chadwick
Well, hold on, Rob.

05:48
Rob Mehta
Okay, sorry. Sorry.

05:49
Robert Chadwick
Yeah, I’ll share the slides in a second. But so everybody on the webinar is aware how the process will go is Rob will discuss, you know, his business, the market, etc. Then I’ll talk about obtaining a mortgage as a non US Resident, both foreign national or expat. And then, please, any questions that you have, we’ll save them to the end and then Rob and I will answer them. As you know, they pertain to each one of us. So during the chat or during the webinar, there’ll be a chat box. Feel free to put your question in there at any time and they will be addressed at the end, within the chat as well, you’ll see a link or a couple links if you want to make an appointment directly with American Mortgages to speak to a loan officer or.

06:39
Robert Chadwick
Or you’d like to speak with Rob or one of Rob’s team members. So with that said, Rob, I will share the slides and let’s go.

06:49
Rob Mehta
Fantastic. Thanks, Robert. Okay, great. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s happening in Florida. I’m sure this is a market that probably no one on the webinar is not somewhat familiar with, but this is one of the heavy growth markets and has been for a long time in the U.S. However, what’s happening is that demographics are changing, and I’ll share those with you in a few minutes. Our inflow of migration is changing as well as the investors that are entering this market. And so that’s what really makes us a unique opportunity, or has been for the last few years and will continue to be moving forward as well in migration, of course, does play into this, and I’m going to share some stats on that as well as our tourism market, which is among the strongest in the world.

07:36
Rob Mehta
And so with that, also a lifestyle play, Florida has some of the most cleanest waters and cleanest air anywhere in the world. And that also does drive tourism and it does drive livability, of course, when you’re in an environment where you don’t have to worry about these things. And I spend a significant amount of my time in Asia, where I do have to worry about these things at time in certain markets. And this is just not the case in this market. So go ahead and click on the next slide there. So the STR play is a very interesting one, in my opinion. And the reason for that is that we are the largest Airbnb STR market in the United States. There are pros and cons with it. Go ahead and pause there For a second, pros and cons would be that you have.

08:26
Rob Mehta
The biggest pro would be that we have a lot more revenue yield on a property that is a long term, sorry a short term rental property versus a long term property. So str or slash Airbnb versus some a property where you would rent it out on annual basis. Now that being said, I also like to discuss what the cons are. The cons are, is that you have more revenue volatility, meaning that every month there isn’t a stable income. It can go up and down depending on seasonality and trends. It is a more labor intensive type of property to own, meaning bookings have to be managed, guests have to be managed, communication has to be managed, turnover of the property has to be managed.

09:03
Rob Mehta
Now we found solutions to all of these, but I never want to cover up the fact that it is a more time intensive process depending on how you run your property. So great. Now we’re on some stats here which let me share these quickly with you. So I mentioned in migration, what we’re looking at here specifically is not migration. First we’re looking at visitors into the state. And you’ll notice that Florida is a, of course, as I said, a large tourism market. But what’s interesting is that about 80% of our tourism is driven by the domestic market. Now why is that important? It’s important because this is a market. And we noticed this during COVID We had about a 30 to 45 day Covid shutdown and then the state was open again for business.

09:45
Rob Mehta
And so what happened is that our property owners never suffered much of a Covid effect. Properties maintained bookings. In fact, bookings got even stronger during that period, minus a little bit of a dip you can see in 2020. And that was mainly due to that little bit of shutdown that we had. So yes, flights were expensive, so on and so forth, but the domestic market stayed very, very strong. And so that kept the market very buoyant, which was fantastic for our owners. Go ahead and go to the next slide there. Now we’re looking at growth by region. So now we’re actually looking at some in migration trends. Florida has been the largest in migration market now for several years, along with other areas in the U.S. Like Texas, Arizona, Nevada, so on and so forth.

10:30
Rob Mehta
So what you’re looking at, the green bubbles, if you will, that I’ve highlighted, are the largest in migration markets in the state. You can also see that there is an orange bubble here as well. That market, the Daytona Beach Melbourne market, a Little bit of a slower migration market and there’s actually been a little bit of population shift out of there. Why is that? Primarily because NASA has moved some of its jobs and some of its resources into the subcontracting market. So some of those NASA staff have left, some of those support staff have left as well. And then you’ll also see a couple of markets that I’ve got marked in red. Now, I don’t have them marked in red because they’re bad markets in migration wise. However, they are not markets that we would generally recommend from an STR perspective.

11:13
Rob Mehta
And why is that? Well, number one, we’re looking at the Miami Fort Lauderdale market and number two, we’re looking at the Florida Keys. Both markets are very regulatory intensive. Both markets are also more susceptible, more so than other parts of the state, and especially the Keys when it comes to climate change and hurricanes and so on and so forth. And I’ll address that a little bit later as well. So the green bubbles, if you will, are the markets that we’re the most bullish on and also where we see the most growth. And so how that helps our investors is that perhaps in the future, maybe you don’t want to hold your property as an str. Maybe you do want to put a long term renter in there.

11:50
Rob Mehta
When you have a market that’s got this kind of growth, you can flip back and forth if you want to. You might decide to switch to STR mode for one year and then after that perhaps your investment goal has changed. Okay, let me put a long term renter in there. And if you’re happy with the revenue, leave it as a long term rental. So our goal is to give our investors maximum flexibility whenever we can. And these markets allow you to have that maximum flexibility. So the next slide here, this is an article that just came out a couple of weeks ago. This is another reason we’re a little bit less bullish on Miami. Because Miami right now is going through a huge condo boom. And not just a huge boom, but condos that are specifically targeted toward the STR market.

12:33
Rob Mehta
So what does that mean? It means that there’s going to be a glut of inventory on the market in the next three to five years. Whenever there’s a glut of inventory, that means that yields go down. And we are not looking for properties where yields are going down. Now, we’re not going to say don’t buy in Miami. Sure, if you’re investing goals and your lifestyle goals match up with Miami, you can still earn revenue in that market. But from a pure investment standpoint, what we see coming is we see a lot of inventory that’s going to cut those yields down for the investor. And that’s not going to be a good thing. Generally. Go ahead and go to the next slide there.

13:06
Rob Mehta
The other thing to realize, and this is true of any market in the United States, very much so of Florida, is that as an STR investor, you’re not exposed necessarily to the entire property market as a whole. And what do I mean by that? Well, there are regulations. We’ve got overlays, we call them overlays. So regulations, homeowner association, HOA policies, so on and so forth. So if you pick any market, let’s say we pick Tampa, if you look at 100% of the market, what you’ll realize is that based on local regulations, there’s probably only about 30% of the market that actually qualifies as short term rentals.

13:43
Rob Mehta
And when you divide that even further, when you divvy deep down onto that, you’ll realize that on top of that you’ve got hoa Homeowner association regulations will then bring that actual market down to maybe 10 to 12%. So you’re not looking at the entire market. But where this also helps you is when you go to sell, because the vast majority of properties do not qualify as STR properties due to these regulations. So yes, it’s a much smaller market to enter, but we’ll realize it’s a very finite amount of stock when it also comes to exit. And that also helps, of course with rental rates and so on and so forth, because the US is a very regulated market. So next slide there. So the next couple things we’ll talk about are what we call the key market drivers.

14:27
Rob Mehta
You know, why is this such an attractive investment and especially for our home market? So go ahead and jump to the next slide and this is a little bit of an overview. This applies pretty much anywhere in the United States. You know, number one, the US is a freehold market, fee simple ownership for everyone. And I do mean everyone. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. Citizen or a citizen of a foreign country, you have the right to hold that property, as we call it freehold or locally we call it fee simple. Big data in our market allows you to see transparency in pricing and ownership. You can literally look up any property in the United States today and find history online, public information as to when that property was sold last, how often has it traded hands, so on and so forth.

15:08
Rob Mehta
There’s a lot of data around this which makes investing with the right information very easy to do. Very clear zoning laws. And specifically when it comes to Florida, what you’ll discover is that the state has been very stringent on development. So what does that mean for you as an investor? It means that if you buy into a development, it doesn’t mean that in six months there’s going to be a development next to you. You can typically look at development maps and look at city planning to see what’s happening in those areas. And so that also assess you’re not typically looking at a lot of inventory all over the place. Title insurance, if you’re not familiar with title insurance, basically it’s an insurance policy you buy once you buy it at closing.

15:49
Rob Mehta
And what that does is it protects your title and it protects any liens, encumbrances, anyone that might come back at some point and say, hey, I have ownership in this property. That’s why you have that policy. So it’s a very ironclad protection for you as an investor. Obviously, title checks are done before you close on the property, but this insurance protects from anything that might come up as well. You can own the property in your own name or in a legal entity. We’ve had foreign investors where we help them set up legal entities, so that’s easy enough to do as well. Robert’s going to talk about financing, so I don’t want touch upon that. But obviously foreign purchasers through GMG and American Mortgages can use financing and he’ll touch on that. And lastly, the round trip transaction costs are typically between 6 and 7%.

16:32
Rob Mehta
What do I mean by round trip? What I mean is that from the time you buy to the time you sell, and I’m estimating a little bit on the high end, but I’m the kind of guy that likes to estimate a little bit high rather than a little bit low. So your cost might be 5%, but again, realize you probably want to budget for 6, maybe even 7%. Depends on what the market is doing. And that includes things like selling commissions, title fees, miscellaneous, you know, selling costs, buying costs, so on and so forth. So again, I’m estimating a little bit high, but realize that you’re probably going to be somewhere in that neighborhood. So go ahead and jump to the next slide. Relatively low prices and strong returns.

17:10
Rob Mehta
If you take a look at the investment hotspots and the markets in Florida, we are still globally a very affordable market on a price per square foot or price per square meter basis. And so that makes us a very attractive market. Even if you look at areas such as Miami, which I just talked about, Miami and Fort Lauderdale, the price per square meter is literally a fraction of what it is in any other world city out there, whether it’s Hong Kong, New York, London, etc. Etc. So the value play is definitely very strong. If you bought property on the west coast of the United States, such as California, you know what I’m talking about. That is a very expensive market. Very, very difficult to make money in a market like that, where you’ve got a lot more opportunities in a market such as this.

17:53
Rob Mehta
Go ahead and go to the next slide. Quality of life. I kind of touched upon this briefly, but one of the things that attracts not only a lot of tourists, but of course a lot of folks that want to relocate is of course, the environment, the air quality, the water quality, the amount of recreational opportunities and so on and so forth that exist. Our local leadership, state leadership, doesn’t matter if they’re Democrat or Republican, have been very strong on protecting those natural habitats, the natural resources, and also limiting the amount of growth in any given area. And so, again, if you look at the city planning for even a place like Orlando, what you’ll realize is that they’ve set aside a tremendous amount of green space to ensure that there always will be that green space that will exist for future growth.

18:39
Rob Mehta
And a lot of that is government lands. Wetland areas, Florida. The old joke is don’t buy a swamp in Florida. No, of course not. But there is a lot of wetland, and that wetland is protected. So it’s not designed to be infilled in the future and built upon. It’s protected, and it’s there as a natural resource to exist for decades and centuries to come. Go ahead and jump to the next slide there. So now I want to talk a little bit about some properties, and I’ve got three properties in particular that we’re going to talk about and share with you again, a little bit of pros and cons from each of these properties, because each of them are distinct from. From each other. So the first one here, and I’ve pulled up some properties that are currently on the market.

19:22
Rob Mehta
But as everyone knows, properties come and properties go. We do have these listed on the America Mortgages website, of course, as well. So feel free to go and take a look at additional information. This property is a villa. It’s in a town called Ocala, Florida. Ocala is about an hour and 15 minutes northwest of the Orlando market. So it’s not necessarily a part of the Orlando submarket. It’s kind of its own market. But Ocala is a growing area. If anybody has heard of the development called the Villages, it’s one of the largest single family developments in the world. It is located not that far from Ocala. This property is not in the Villages. And I’ll. And the reason why I picked this is because of the numbers. But you can find similar properties like this in the Villages if you’re so interested.

20:08
Rob Mehta
This property is priced at 289. It has a gross avenue. This is a producing property right now at about 24,000 a year, roughly as a short term rental. STR has about $8,400 a year in expenses. Now that would be your taxes, your insurance, your management fees. One thing I haven’t included in this is such variables like electricity, because those can go up and those can go down. Water usage goes up, goes down. So we’ve got to add a little bit of buffer there. But just to keep the math very clean, we’re looking at about a 5.4% cap rate. Cap rate is what we like to use, capitalization rate, which is basically taking the revenue and dividing it into the purchase price to see how this asset stands up against other assets out there in the marketplace. So clean property turnkey.

20:51
Rob Mehta
What’s interesting with a property like this is when you buy a performing property, you’re buying the property and you’re buying all the assets inside. So this property comes fully furnished. In fact, the date you close on it, you pick up all of the future bookings, those transfer to you. So you’re buying, in effect, you’re buying a business, you’re buying a property, but you’re really buying a business that is already running, already has goodwill and you’re taking it over. So it’s a really fantastic way to own property. Two, this is a small condo in Fort Myers. Very, very inexpensive. It’s very difficult to find a property like this. And I wasn’t even going to include this until recently where I saw the news that America Mortgages is offering financing down to this price point, which I’m sure Robert will touch on.

21:37
Rob Mehta
But this is a very difficult find out there. And this will not last very long. 105,000 is pretty amazing. And this is making 24k in gross revenue a year, same as the property, which is phenomenal. 9,200 in expenses. The expenses are a little bit higher because you’ve got HOA fees, homeowner association fees that are of course not on the single villa. But look at that cap rate. 14% to be honest, anything north of 8, 9, 10 is really, really good. So this is a really phenomenal buy. And if somebody is looking to make a move very quickly, I would say contact us on this one very quickly because it will not last. And then we’ve got property three. This is, I call it new. This is a new property. It’s Orlando, but it’s actually Orlando. Orlando Southwest.

22:27
Rob Mehta
It’s in an area called Champions Gate, which is about a 20 minute drive to Disney. So South Orlando, Southwest Orlando are your hottest str markets in that market. Why is that? Disney, your closest proximity to Disney and then second closest to the Universal resort markets. And if you’re following any of those, you know all the growth that’s happening with Disney and all the growth that’s happening with Universal and they are both competing against each other to build, build, develop, develop. And they’ve turned into bigger destinations today than they were even five years ago. So that’s pretty amazing. So this particular property, this is a new construction property. It’s priced at 560. This one we’re estimating gross revenue at 48k. We’re basing that on the comps in the immediate area.

23:14
Rob Mehta
So knowing what properties typically fetch now Orlando is interesting because it is a, it is probably the most seasoned market in the state and it’s also the one that has the less, the least, excuse me, seasonality as well. And why is that again, Disney and Universal, they attract families year round. If you look at stats on short term rental properties, you’ll notice that Orlando holds its own very well. It doesn’t matter what month of the year you’re in, taxes are estimated. But again this is a pretty accurate estimation of taxes, insurance, management fees. And you can see this one comes out at a 6.1 cap rate. Not bad for a new property, a new construction. By the way, in the United States, new construction properties are sold with 10 year warranties, structural warranties.

23:57
Rob Mehta
So if you have any problem, you can go back to the builder. It is the builder’s responsibility to correct any structural defects. So you’ve got a property, it’s like buying a new car that you shouldn’t have to worry about maintenance wise for a long, long time. So, so that’s our third property there. And I’ve got a couple of stats that I want to share with you. That are specifically interested if you are based in Asia. I’m sure many of you traveling around have flown on Airbus’s new A350 which is I think been around now for at least a couple of years. The A350 is actually has the capability of flying direct from Asia into an east coast market like Miami.

24:35
Rob Mehta
We haven’t seen that yet, but I don’t think that it’s far away to see flights from areas such as Hong Kong and Singapore to Miami. And I think that’s going to be a phenomenal ad and create some new opportunities in terms of tourism and so on and so forth that didn’t exist before. And I always say watch where the airlines go. An airline is not going to launch a new route unless they’ve done all their research. They know all the economics and they know that they’ve got demand. So when an airline launches this route, you know that the demand is already there and it’s going to bode well for investors. And then a little bit about us. So go ahead and jump to the next slide there. This is just a look at all of our services that we offer.

25:15
Rob Mehta
We work with buyers, we work with sellers, we’ve worked with developers on projects directly in the past as well. But realize that we are an end to end solution. We can assist you in the acquisition of your property. We are not a property management company, but we can place you with property management. We have a number of really strong relationships throughout the US and we can assist you when it’s time to sell as well and sell in a very economical manner so that you’re hanging on to as much of your equity as possible. So realize that we’re with you a whole step of the process. We’ve also assisted our clients with things such as setting up LLC to purchase the properties and so on and so forth.

25:50
Rob Mehta
So we can be a resource for a number of different things in addition to the actual property process. So and with that I’m going to hand it back over to Robert.

26:07
Robert Chadwick
Thanks Rob. Super, super interesting stuff. You know I, as a real estate investor myself, I’ve actually not, I’ve not gotten into the short term rentals but I do have a lot of friends that are, and they love it. I mean it increases the yield on the properties and I think especially the property number two that you showed with the 14 return that is absolutely fantastic. What’s your thoughts on buying I guess less expensive properties to buying more expensive properties when it comes to rentability, whether it’s short term or even long term. And also I think one thing that is really important, especially in the US is the capital appreciation. So I don’t know if you could expand on that a little.

27:01
Rob Mehta
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great question. Well, a couple of different thoughts on that. So you know, generally speaking, when you look at, you know, a long term, a property that has a long term renter, you’re going to put a long term renter in there. Long term for us is a year or more versus the short term. There’s a, there’s a few trends happening there in any given market. If you’re buying a property and you say, okay, I’m going to just keep this as a long term property, rental property, it never hurts to go after the smallest property because there’s always going to be a renter for that. You know, to pick up a two bedroom house and rent it for fifteen hundred dollars a month. Easy as pie to do that. No problem.

27:34
Rob Mehta
There’s always a huge base of renters when it comes to this market, a little bit more different. So some of the trends that we’re seeing is especially with villas or what we call single family properties, those properties tend to do best when you’ve got at least three bedrooms, four bedrooms. Because the trend that we’re seeing is that your target market likes to holiday together. Sometimes two families get together, sometimes even three depending on the size of the property. And instead of booking separate hotel rooms, they want to book a villa where they’ve got a pool, they’ve got amenities, so on and so forth. One of the things which I don’t see this trend perhaps lasting in the way it has.

28:09
Rob Mehta
We’ve seen this in the Orlando market where there are mega mansions literally with eight and 10 bedrooms that are being rented for, you know, pretty good sums of money on a nightly or weekly or monthly basis. Now the challenge there is that if that trend changes, you’ve got this mansion that probably is not going to fetch what you need it to cover the cost and the debt service on the law on the long term market, as it does on the short term market. So there are a few things to look at. We want to be careful of the outliers. So of course as well you mentioned about appreciation. Again, this is where, you know, location, location is the adage in real estate.

28:45
Rob Mehta
We want to make sure that you’re not buying in an area where there is not growth potential, where there is not, you know, industry coming in, you know, businesses coming in. And obviously that’s what drives of course, the in migration foreignmost what’s interesting today versus maybe 15 years ago in the Florida market is that a lot of the in migration today is families moving in. It’s, it’s, you know, Gen X, gen Y. Why are they coming? They’re coming for jobs. And so when you look at a lot of the new development today, you’re not looking at single family villas, you’re not looking at single story, you’re looking at multi story properties. Why is that? Because it’s more attractive to a family. So again, the demographic change has been a rather interesting one and that’s where you want to focus.

29:26
Rob Mehta
If you’re looking at also long term.

29:29
Robert Chadwick
Appreciation, great perspective. I also too three year discussion. It absolutely makes sense. But I had never thought of it this way. When you are buying something that’s an existing Airbnb, you truly are buying a small business because, you know, as you mentioned, you’re getting not only the property, but you’re getting all of the, you know, the furnishings inside. But I wasn’t aware. But it makes absolute sense that you’re also getting any of the forward bookings that are already in the system. My one question is, and is, you know, there are reviews obviously for Airbnb. I know when I’ve looked at Airbnb, I’ve looked at the reviews and I’ve looked to see, you know, okay, how is this person perform, you know, how is the property?

30:21
Robert Chadwick
If you are buying an Airbnb, do your reviews or I guess your feedback from does that all start fresh or how does that work, whether it’s with Airbnb or other services?

30:34
Rob Mehta
Yeah, that’s a great question. So typically what happens is when you’re, you know, you’re inheriting those bookings. That’s correct. We’ve had properties close where, I mean, the day of closing, there’s already 50, 60, $100,000 in future bookings. Now of course, some of those bookings may cancel. That’s just a fact of life. But generally speaking, those bookings are already there. What we always advise our clients is it’s usually if you’ve got successful bookings into the future, it’s well worth staying with that property management firm, at least for a short while before you look at switching and that. So to your question about the reviews and such, that really depends on the contract that’s in place. Many property management firms will sort of hand over the keys, to lack of a better term, to, you know, the Airbnb listings and those Kinds of things.

31:20
Rob Mehta
However, if you’re with a property management company where the vast majority of their marketing is through their own portal, then of course you’re going to lose that visibility moving forward. But generally speaking, yeah, your Airbnb listings, booking.com, vRBO, those would all transfer to the new owner as well, whenever that’s possible to do so.

31:41
Robert Chadwick
Great, thank you. And one last question before we start online again. I find this to be. It’s something that comes up all the time and it’s very interesting, but when you buy an Airbnb and you’re getting these bookings and so forth, are you able to kind of readjust that, like cancel any forward bookings or, you know, maybe you want to renovate the property, you want to do something different to increase the value, to increase the rent. Is that a possibility as well?

32:14
Rob Mehta
It is, it is. And it does happen from time to time. I mean, you generally don’t want to cancel bookings whenever possible, but if you are doing a renovation or you have some other plans for the property, then of course, you know, the different booking sites have different policies when it comes to, you know, refunds of deposits and things like that. But yeah, absolutely, those things definitely are, are cancelable if need be. But again, to be avoided whenever possible, of course.

32:40
Robert Chadwick
Certainly, certainly. Okay, perfect. All right, so with that said, I shall start mine if I can figure out how to get this thing back up here. Okay, so again, thank you everybody for joining. As always, we like to have some amazing guests. And in this case, I think something that has been asked a lot about is Airbnb, how do we finance it, how do we find it, how does it work in the US And I think Rob was able to really address all of these issues. However, I know there will be a lot of questions, so please put it into the chat and then we’ll discuss it at the end. But right now I’m going to share American mortgages capabilities for financing for non US residents as both foreign nationals and US expats. So our general mortgage overview.

33:45
Robert Chadwick
We do purchases, refinances and cash outs. We’re seeing a lot of demand for cash out. A lot of that has to do with the strength of the US dollar. Obviously, if you’re able to release some equity or some money out of your existing US property and if you are living abroad and you move it in back into your home currency, you know, you’re getting a big upswing on that. So certainly that has been trending and you Know we’re open or our loan office is open to discussing this further if you have any questions on that. If you’re a foreign national, So a non US resident, non US passport holder, likely no US credit, we can get up to 75% financing.

34:30
Robert Chadwick
If you’re a US expat and you maintain US credit, we try to make it as exactly as if you walked into your local bank and you were living and working in the US you can get up to 80% at market rate, as everybody is probably aware. But if you are not, the US does not have any limitations when it or restrictions when it comes to the longest amortization based on your age. So with discrimination laws, you cannot discriminate against somebody that is 19 or 99. So regardless of age, you are able to take the longest amortization period available. So 30 year fix for a 90 year old person is absolutely not an issue. The most important thing is it really allows you to be able to capitalize on the rental yields because you’re spreading that loan over a long period of time.

35:29
Robert Chadwick
Interest rates have gone up as everybody knows. We’re hoping with the new administration, interest rates go down. But we’ve been able to, I guess, foresee this and we have a fantastic program that allows you to maximize on the yield but still take advantage of the fixed rate portion. So we have a 10 year interest only fixed loan. What that means is for the first 10 years the rate is fixed but you’re only servicing the interest. After that 10 year period, the loan converts into a principal and interest 20 year fixed without an adjustment in rate. Absolutely fantastic loan program. Especially if you’re looking at doing either Airbnb long term rental. You can truly forecast, you know what your payments are and you assume that rental curve is going up every year. Loan programs in all 50 states.

36:25
Robert Chadwick
So regardless of where you’re at in Florida or elsewhere, we can still get financing qualify on the rental income and not the salary. Common sense underwriting. As a direct lender in the U.S. We look at properties the way they should be looked at. You do not have to provide your personal income documents. We qualify the properties based on the cash flow of the property. Now that can either be long term or we have programs also for short term, such as what Rob had discussed with the Florida properties. If you want to use foreign income for some reason the rents aren’t enough to qualify for the maximum loan to value, then certainly we can look at foreign income.

37:12
Robert Chadwick
It’s absolutely allowed with us both foreigners and for US Expats, which, if you’re a US expat and you’ve dealt with any of the banks, you will know this is the biggest hurdle and getting approved, we have no issues. Again, the borrowers can be non US Citizens, they can be US expats living overseas. If you’re a foreign national, no US Credit is required and we have only dry lending. What does that mean? It means that you do not have to open a bank account or have a minimum deposit while you have these loans in place. Fantastic process. Takes about 72 hours once you submit your document. We have a very secure, easy to use mortgage application portal that makes this actually as seamless as possible.

38:01
Robert Chadwick
30 to 45 day loan closing and you never have to travel to the US you can open the application and close the mortgage all from your home country in a variety of ways. We’re really proud that 97% of our loans that we submit into underwriting get approved. So huge advantage, especially when we are using common sense underwriting and qualifying the properties on the cash flow. We have 24. 7 service. There will be a phone number within that chat that will allow you to speak to a loan officer in your time zone and in your language. So loan officers based all over the world and also based in the US Allowing you to have perfect service. You’re not staying up at 2am to talk to somebody in New York. So going forward in 2025, we had this webinar last, I think a couple weeks ago.

39:04
Robert Chadwick
Our goal is to make US real estate investing easier and more accessible for everybody. You know, as we had Rob on this conversation, you know, the idea that we want to make this as turnkey as possible. We bring in, we bring in partners like Rob Mehta and partners and we allow the investors, regardless of where they’re living, a seamless entry into the US Real estate market or if they’re already seasoned investors, to be able to come in and be able to increase their real estate portfolio and increase their wealth. So our u, our loan programs for non residents and US Expats, this loan program is going to cover exactly what Robin discussed. Again, we do not need personal income documents on this. We’re going to qualify the property on the cash flow.

40:02
Robert Chadwick
So if this has already been an existing Airbnb property or somewhat similar to an Airbnb company, we can get those records quite easily and we can present this as the income to qualify for the loan. We have loan amounts that go as low as $100,000 and when I say $100,000, it means that is the minimum purchase price of the property. I don’t think you will find anybody else in the market that has this advantage to go this low with the loan amounts. And of course you know, we can go on these programs up to $3 million. But it becomes a little bit more difficult when you’re trying to qualify on the cash flow of the property when you’re in a high purchase price. But certainly it is possible. It’s just maybe a slight LTV adjustment.

40:55
Robert Chadwick
Again, 30 year fix and interest only available on all these programs. And to show you how this qualifies, if you look at the bottom of the screen you can see that we used a one to one ratio. Certainly there are other people out there that maybe not specializing in foreign nationals, but most likely they’re using a one to two ratio, meaning for it’s much more difficult to qualify. We look at these programs again in common sense. So as long as the rental amount, whether it’s long term or short term, covers the mortgage, taxes, insurance, and perhaps if there’s an hoa, then the loan is going to qualify. If for some reason it does not qualify, it does are for the maximum loan to value, it does not mean that the loan does not qualify.

41:47
Robert Chadwick
It just means that maybe you have to come in with a little bit more cash for the down payment. Our US Expats Investor mortgage, this is super popular. And if you are a US expat and you have tried to get a loan, you know how frustrating it is. You have. I mean you could have been a client at a major bank for decades, but as soon as you move overseas, you start earning in foreign dollars or perhaps you’re working for a foreign company that doesn’t issue a W2, it becomes almost impossible to get a mortgage. We’ve changed that. We’ve made this, if you’re a US expat to be exactly like if you were living and working in the U.S. As long as you maintain U.S.

42:35
Robert Chadwick
Credit, you will have the same rates, the same programs, the same terms, except you won’t have what the standard requirements are for a US bank. Now with this, the minimum loan amount is $150,000. And like most US loans, we do qualify this on a debt to income ratio which is 43%. So as it would be the same in the US so if you again you look at the bottom of the screen, you can see how it qualifies based on the 43% debt to income ratio. This is what I Had talked about on the first slide. Say you want to qualify using the rental income of the property, but perhaps at this time the rental income is not supporting the highest loan to value which you would like to do. We have a way to switch this, but to not actually use your tax returns.

43:34
Robert Chadwick
As you can imagine, we’re doing loans all over the world from Sydney to Shanghai. And with that it would be very complicated for our underwriters to go through all of the tax returns in a variety of languages. Be very complicated for you to have these translated. So what we do is we make this as simple as possible. If you’re employed, we want a letter from your employer on your employer letterhead that basically states your last two years of income and your current year to date. If you are self employed, absolutely fine. We just need something from your accountant stating the same. With that we’re able to use your income as if you were to provide tax returns and pay stubs. So it makes it a very simple, easy to qualify loan.

44:25
Robert Chadwick
So again, loan amounts on this program are limited to 150,000 starting, but again up to 3 million 30 year fix and interest only available and 75% loan to value foreign nationals. So we work with a lot of investment banks, you know, they have their clients, they, you know, they want to be able to service them. But as most people are aware, most international banks do not have U.S. Mortgage programs. So we’ve created a loan program that allows high net worth borrowers to be able to qualify in a very straightforward, simple process, but for very high loan amounts. You know, we’re aware that high net worth foreign national investors maybe have very complicated tax returns. Various jurisdictions, perhaps they don’t even show their true serviceability of debt. This removes all of those hurdles. No personal income is required.

45:29
Robert Chadwick
How we qualify this loan is we take a two month average of your liquid portfolio. When I say liquid portfolio, I mean cash, bonds, stocks, things that can be liquidated easily. And we’re going to average that out over a 60 month period or a 5 year fixed loan. There is no, there is no encumbrance on this portfolio and no AUM required, meaning that we will use this to qualify. But the day after the loan qualifies, you can trade it, you can sell it, you can do whatever you want. There is no encumbrance on the monies that is used to qualify for this loan. And if you look at the bottom, it explains exactly how we do this. If you are a high net worth individual, you will probably find this to be the easiest loan that you’ve ever qualified for. So that’s my presentation.

46:26
Robert Chadwick
I’m sure there are quite a bit of questions. This is our contact information. You can scan the QR code. It brings everything up. You can reach out to, again, any of our loan officers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you speak, you know, a specific language, just please make sure you enter that in there. And also in the chat, you know, I’m sure everybody found Rob’s presentation extremely interesting. You can go on and you can book an appointment directly with Rob and his group to be able to speak about Airbnbs or, you know, just a catch up in general. So with that said, Rob, let’s start the Q A. Let me see what we got here. Okay.

47:17
Rob Mehta
Sounds good. Robert and I did answer a few questions in the chat as well. Okay.

47:23
Robert Chadwick
But we’ll talk them all out and then if you answered it, then I’ll leave it to you and we can go from there.

47:31
Rob Mehta
Sure, sure. Sounds good. Well, I can rehash a little bit. I kept the answers fairly limited. So should I go ahead and just ask the question and provide a little.

47:40
Robert Chadwick
So, so how it’ll work is I’ll read the question. If it changed to you, I’ll ask you to answer it. If it pertains to me, then I’ll take over. So the first question is, did I hear that the first 10 years is interest only payments? That would be for me, yes. So you have the option to do a 10 year fixed interest only loan or you don’t. You can do, if you want to do just purely a principal and interest 30 year amortized loan, you have that as well. What we do at America Mortgages is try to give you the flexibility to be able to get the most from your rental property. So you have the options. I would suggest probably going in and clicking and making appointment to speak with one of the loan officers to explain in more detail. Next question.

48:32
Robert Chadwick
For the 10 year interest only, is that optional or mandatory? Oh, perfect. I think I just covered that. So it’s absolutely optional. You have the choice to service principal and interest from day one or you have the choice to do the interest only. Next question. How much is the AM application fee? Oh, fantastic question. We get this a lot. We do not have an application fee. If you want to apply for a loan, it is very easy and straightforward. We have a platform that allows you just answer some questions, securely upload documents. Once we receive this, then we normally we run it through underwriting and we can issue you a pre approval letter within 24 to 72 hours.

49:19
Robert Chadwick
Once you have that pre approval letter, you can go to Rob or somebody like Rob and you can say, hey, look, I’ve already been approved for a loan and it shows that you’re serious. Next question. Sorry, Rob, this seems to be a lot.

49:34
Rob Mehta
I did, I did answer a few while you were chatting, so that’s okay.

49:40
Robert Chadwick
Question. I’m not a US citizen. How long would it take me to get a mortgage approval with America Mortgages? It’s very quick. A US citizen is a little bit different because you are submitting tax returns and so forth. But in general, once we have this, we can tell you very quickly if your loan is going to be approved or not and we can issue you the pre approval letter. And again, the pre approval letter is that’s, that’s the catalyst to be able to start shopping for properties. It’s the most important thing to do when you’re looking for US real estate is to actually get pre approved for a loan and be comfortable with the mortgage payments and actually the qualifying requirements and standards. Next question. Hi Robert, can you give us a breakdown of your services fees with rough estimates? Thanks.

50:35
Robert Chadwick
So whatever the fees are in that state, like title, escrow, insurance, all of these specifics are identical. There are no adjustments to this. These are what I would pay as a US citizen or what a foreign national would pay as a non US citizen. It’s very straightforward. The US is absolutely transparent. Everything and every cost of that loan has to be documented and has to be accounted for. For us, we charge a 2% origination fee which is paid only at the successful closing of the loan. But keep in mind too, and please, I’m not a accountant or a tax advisor, but check with your accountant or your tax advisor. With proper tax planning, most of these fees can actually be taken off of any income that you would earn on the property. Anyway, next question.

51:36
Robert Chadwick
Which loan program is most popular for investors keen on short term rentals? Well, I mean really for this type of program we truly have maybe two programs. We have the short term rental program. Keep in mind, because this is qualifying on short term rental, there may be an LTV restriction instead of, if you’re a foreign national, instead of getting to 75%, you know, we may only be able to get to 65%, but it will allow you to qualify on the short term rental income. If you buy it and you base the qualification on the long term rental, then you are Able to get the maximum loan to value at 75% and then how you rent it is really your choice. Next question. Oh, this is for you, Rob. Which states do you handle property management?

52:31
Robert Chadwick
Now I know you’re not doing property management, but I think you can still kind of expand on this.

52:35
Rob Mehta
Yeah, absolutely. So as far as property management goes, we have relationships across the U.S. Let me break this down a little bit because there are a number of different options when it comes to management. There are full service management companies that we work with. So we have full service companies in the state of Florida that we can recommend as well as other markets. Typically when you pay a full service company, it’s exactly that. They are going to take care of everything for you. They’re going to handle bookings, they’re going to handle revenue management, guest management, guest communication, turnover, all of it. You don’t have to do a thing typically. And this question always comes up. So I’m going to mention it here is what do fees look like?

53:14
Rob Mehta
Fees typically for a full service property manager are higher than they are if you’re hiring a full service manager to manage a long term rental. And why is that? Because again, you’ve got a lot more human power, if you will, involved. So typically those fees for a full service property management as I described typically are going to be in the neighborhood of 15 to 20%, sometimes even as high as 25% in certain markets. The next option is of course more of a regional company or a national company that is more of a booking agent and we do have those as well where they handle all of your bookings, your guest communication, so on and so forth. But because they are national companies generally they don’t have local manpower.

53:54
Rob Mehta
So for example, you still need a maid service to come in and turn over the property and so on and so forth. However, that being said, national companies charge much lower rates as well. So typically those kind of rates tend to be in the neighborhood of about 10 to 15%. And so you’re, obviously your yield goes up, but it does involve a little bit more work setting up those relationships initially in terms of having the right people on your team. But yeah, we can help somebody nationwide. It’s not something we do directly, but again, the relationships that we formed with some very solid companies, you know, to drive that exposure and make sure, especially for an overseas investor who does not have the time to obviously self manage, I don’t even recommend that to our US investors.

54:36
Rob Mehta
Some of them do, some of Them have their Airbnb and VRBR portals, but I would say it’s better to hand it off to somebody who’s a professional in this.

54:45
Robert Chadwick
Super good answer. And I think, you know, again, this all sort of circles back around on the questions that we get if we can finance a, you know, an Airbnb. And a lot of it comes back to, okay, if I can finance an Airbnb, I can find an Airbnb. How do I manage the Airbnb? So, you know, anybody has any questions on this, again, Rob’s contact and his team’s contact is within the chat. Please click on it and schedule an appointment with him. Okay, next question. Can you share an example of effective marketing strategies for Florida short term rentals on platforms like Airbnb, especially during the slower seasons?

55:26
Rob Mehta
I can, I can. So specifically, Airbnb and vrbo, one of the trends that we’ve seen, and I’m sure some of you that have used Airbnb and VRBO have noticed this where in the last few years there’s been a lot of padding of fees to drive revenue. So, for example, you book a property and it says 150 US a night. But when you get to the checkout page, you realize that you’ve got an Airbnb service fee, you’ve got a cleaning fee, you’ve got miscellaneous fees, and by the time you look at your true booking cost, now you’re up to 225 a night for just to make up an example. So what we’re seeing a lot more happening recently is that owners are eliminating some of those costs or they’re just adding them into the fee.

56:05
Rob Mehta
So it doesn’t feel like such a bait and switch for the renter for that holiday maker. So from that perspective, being very clear about your fees front the description of your property, I’ll tell you, a while back I was, I stayed in a property that we sold to a client. And even I didn’t realize this. It was a condo in Orlando. And when I got there, I realized it was a third floor condo. And I realized that it was one of the very rare buildings that does not have an elevator. So I’m dragging my suitcase up three flights of stairs and I thought, gosh, this should have, you know, again, we don’t handle the property management, but this should have been in the description to let us know.

56:40
Rob Mehta
Because if you have somebody that has special needs or has trouble walking or an elderly person, this could have been a real problem, you know, so it’s just little things like that you want to be very clear about as far as effective strategies. Again, this is where having a solid booking agent or property manager is really crucial. So criteria for a good one, they should have a very good presence on their own website and ideally a booking engine on their own website as well. And then of course, that they’re playing nicely with all of the other portals out there. Airbnb, Vrbo, you know, even sites such as booking.com, the OTRs, as we call them, the online travel agencies out there, you know, booking.com and hopper, and you know, all of these orbits and all these different sites that exist out there.

57:25
Rob Mehta
You want the maximum exposure you can get, of course.

57:27
Robert Chadwick
Right.

57:27
Rob Mehta
If you get the maximum exposure, you’re driving more. More eyeballs. More eyeballs means, you know, more traffic. More traffic means more bookings. The other thing with that is that a good property manager or booking engine will also help you price the property effectively. So that, and of course, with an STR situation where you have the volatility of the market, rates go up, rates go down, you really have to make sure you’ve got a good player on your team that will help you manage that in real time. Because obviously if your rates are up by a week and your competition is down, you’re not going to get bookings. Most likely. Most likely, unless it’s an outlier the week of the super bowl in New Orleans. Outlier, Right.

58:04
Rob Mehta
But other than that, you really have to have somebody on your group and your team that can really manage this on a real time basis and adjust that. Now, what you can do as the owner is you can set caps on that. You can set a base, and obviously no one wants to set a cap on the high end, but you definitely can set a base to say, you know, I want this property rented at a minimum of 150 a night and I won’t even accept bookings below that. So you’re free to do that as an investor, but you really do need somebody who can handle that in real time.

58:33
Robert Chadwick
Excellent answer. Thank you, Rob. You know, I think one thing that, especially as all of our clients are living overseas, the one thing that they’re concerned about, besides finding the, you know, the right property management or, you know, manager for this property, is the tax planning. If you have proper tax planning, I think you will find the US is by far the best place to invest in US real estate. With proper tax planning, whatever rental, your income or whatever income you’re making from this rental property, a lot, most of it, if not all. And of course, you know, we have, we’re tied in with this foreign national expat tax Planning Service and they are fantastic at making sure that you see proper rental yields on these properties, whether they’re short term or long term. So next question. I believe this is me.

59:34
Robert Chadwick
What is the current rate for a 30 year fixed? Well, I believe if you’re a US citizen right now it’s kind of floating below 7%, you know, in the high sixes up to seven. But if you’re a non US citizen, I think the easiest way to look at this, and we get this question all the time, you know, what are interest rates? And it’s kind of like saying how much is a car? Right. Interest rates are, especially foreign nationals and even US Expats. There’s a lot of factors that go into it. You know, what kind of property it is, what the loan to value you’re looking for, you know, where the property is located, is there a prepayment penalty. All of these things certainly impact the interest rate.

01:00:22
Robert Chadwick
In general though, a US citizen will pay whatever the market rate is, plus if there’s any kind of variance on loan to value or you know, property difficulties, etc. A foreign national, the easiest way to think about it is in general, somebody without US credit, with no US footprint and qualifying on the rental income of the property, you’re normally paying about a half a percent to 1% higher, which if you look at it on a global scale, because through our parent company Global Mortgage Group, we do mortgages all over the world. This is by far the most competitive when it comes to the difference between a non resident and a resident obtaining a mortgage. Next, let’s go to the questions that you answered, Rob. So I’ll read the question and then you can kind of just free flow on it.

01:01:18
Robert Chadwick
So given Florida’s hurricane seasons and insurance challenges, how do STR investors protect their investment and stay profitable during the slow periods? This is a very good question.

01:01:33
Rob Mehta
It is a very good question. Absolutely. So really two questions here. Number one, we’re talking about of course, what’s happening with climate and number two, how do you stay profitable? So let me touch upon number one, because this is a big one and I myself have lived through at least four hurricanes since I’ve been in Florida for the last decade or so. So definitely have some firsthand experience getting in my car and heading inland a little bit. So this is of course going to be an ongoing issue, what we’re seeing with climate change. However, you Actualize that is that the storms are increasing in frequency and in some cases intensity as well. Long story. If you’re living anywhere near the coast now, I my property is near the coast.

01:02:15
Rob Mehta
I’m about 10 miles inland from the beaches, so I’m technically coastal, but I’m fairly well protected where I’m at. But anywhere near the coast, you’re going to pay higher insurance costs. Insurance is really broken down into two separate components. You have what we call the actual hazard insurance on the structure itself and then you have flood insurance. And flood insurance actually protects you from, you could say flooding, but it’s a very specific type of flooding. It’s actually flooding that occurs because of accumulation of water. If you have flooding due to roof or structure damage that is covered by your base policy, the flooding insurance typically is an add on policy on top of it.

01:02:52
Rob Mehta
Many areas are not in flood areas, but we always recommend it’s worth having a flood policy if you have a main level property such as a villa or so on and so forth. So long story short, this is a risk that it’s not going away. It is pay to play. Of course, you know, wherever you look in the US California has fires, we have our issues with hurricanes. The Midwest has tornadoes. You have certain levels of risk. And to be able to recognize those risks and say, okay, this fits in with what I want to do, what I want to achieve, but insurance is a big part of that. It’s a big part of that expense.

01:03:25
Rob Mehta
So you have to consider that when you move further inland, Central Florida, Orlando, those markets, your insurance is significantly, not significantly different than if you were buying in the Midwest of the United States. So again, it’s going to, a lot of it’s going to depend on the location, proximity to water, you know, things like that. As far as staying profitable during slow periods, you know, I mentioned a few minutes ago really key to have somebody on your team, whether it’s a property manager, whether it’s a booking manager, booking agent that is watching revenue, adjusting rates for you, making sure that you’re staying competitive in the market. Because I’ll tell you, even today when I go to book an Airbnb in a different market and I like staying in str properties generally more space and amenities and so on and so forth.

01:04:07
Rob Mehta
I’m usually scrolling by price and then I’m looking at amenities and so on and so forth. So you know, people are price conscious, of course. And to make sure that you’re priced correctly, you know, in any given situation, week by week is going to be really key to make sure that you are driving, you know, occupancy rates that are, you know, hopefully 70%, 80%, 90%, so on and so forth.

01:04:28
Robert Chadwick
Yeah, great answer. Next question. What are your thoughts on competing markets within Florida? For example, how does investing in Orlando’s tourist corridor compare to beachfront properties in Tampa or Miami in the terms of ROI and expected occupancy rates?

01:04:44
Rob Mehta
Another great question. Yeah, so the best way to describe the Orlando market is that I would say seasonality. Orlando is least affected by seasonality. Why? Again, because of Disney? Because of Universal. It is a family market year round. Obviously there is a little bit of seasonality, but not that much. Not that much. And so Orlando is a very stable market. That being said, Orlando does have a lot of short term rental properties. So again, it’s a price sensitive market as well. Something to consider. Coastal markets tend to be a bit more seasonal. So I’m in southwest Florida and I’m also in South Florida and Miami. These are much more seasonal markets. We have high season and we do have low season as well. You know, high season is typically January through April. Low season is the rest of the year.

01:05:30
Rob Mehta
Now when I say low season, it doesn’t mean that it’s crickets. There are bookings, but again, bookings are driven by different things, not so much snowbirds and so on and so forth. Like you get with high season. ROI really is going to depend on the type of property, the location. There’s just so many variables. I think Robert, you mentioned this about one of the other facts as well. There’s just so many variables to play with there. One of the things that we do have access to is we do have access to some of this data through partners where we can evaluate and give some recommendations based on that. But again, a lot of that is really going to depend not just on the property, but the location, the amenities, you know, many things that come into play, you know, with that.

01:06:09
Robert Chadwick
Okay, perfect. Next question for villa properties. Sorry, that was your question. What type of properties? That is condos. Single family homes tend to perform best on short term rentals.

01:06:23
Rob Mehta
Okay, another really good question. And we have this discussion comes up, I would say fairly often and what I answered here as far as amenities goes for a villa property or single family, however you want to call that, you want to have a pool. People that rent these properties love the fact that they can hang out in their, you know, backyard, you know, use the pool, use the patio, so on and so forth. Now if you have a property without One or you buy one, right? You can add a pool, that kind of thing. It’s fine. You can even run one without a pool. But again, generally speaking, that is a very desired amenity. People come to Florida for the weather and, you know, they want to hang out at the pool.

01:06:58
Rob Mehta
Even, even folks that are going to Disney, you know, many of those individuals will not go four days in a row. If you went four days in a row, you’d, you probably need a vacation from Disney. So typically you’d go one day and then the next day you’re staying at the property, you let the kids play in the pool. That kind of thing, you enjoy, you know, you enjoy that property. So, so that is a big amenity. Also, this applies to STRs, to single family as well as condos is community amenities are a big deal. So community clubhouses, community pools. Many of the projects that we market have like Mini Mar, mini water parks inside of the project themselves.

01:07:33
Rob Mehta
And so those amenities are also very, very desirable to anybody that’s coming down and staying for, you know, four or five days or a week or whatever it is. Again, roi, it really is going to depend on the property in terms of what’s going to return the best roi. But again, having these amenities makes ROI go up. The last thing I’ll mention on that is proximity. So you could have the most fabulous property and you could have a review that says, oh, the home was great, but it took me 20 minutes to reach the closest restaurant. That can also affect you as well. So proximity to external amenities such as restaurants and shopping and, you know, things like that are also really crucial.

01:08:12
Rob Mehta
And obviously, if you’re not close to that, very important to spell that out, you know, in your marketing description because again, that will impact your reviews, that will impact, of course, future bookings and so on and so forth.

01:08:26
Robert Chadwick
Excellent. Okay, so I think we have one more question that popped up in the general chat and then I think we will end this. I think we’re going a little bit over time. So, you know, in respect for everybody’s time, again, I appreciate everybody staying on. And if you want to get an individual appointment with either America Mortgages to speak to a loan officer or with Rob Mehta and his team, please click on the links that are in the chat. So, last question. Would you recommend buying a condo in Orlando and Orlando as a str, given the new laws on condos and higher HOA fees? All good questions in depth conversation. I’m sure this could kind of expand for 30 minutes, but please, we’ll keep it short.

01:09:13
Rob Mehta
Yeah, absolutely. So the question has to do with new condominium laws that have come out since the Surfside disaster happened a couple of years back with Surfside, the building that collapsed due to poor maintenance. So the Florida legislature in the last two years has put out a number of new legislation. You can google it. So I’m not going to go into it right now in the interest of time. Those apply to high rise condos and the vast majority of the legislation has to do with older buildings, you know, 20 plus years old. So take a look at that legislation, you’ll see it. That being said, I definitely recommend a condo. A condo is a very good investment. There’s nothing wrong with a condo. Now I will say as a generality, if you look at condo versus a villas tend to appreciate better.

01:09:57
Rob Mehta
But as far as if you’re looking at ROI on revenue, again, a lot of that is going to depend on your purchase price, you know, nightly revenue rates, again, which will fluctuate, things like that. There’s nothing wrong with owning a condo and it is a very popular type of booking for the Orlando market. Now again realize you have to buy a condo that is in an HOA that allows short term rental. Not many do. Not many do. It’s a much smaller market than the general market. As I was talking about in the beginning, that we have a lot of overlays, you know, with laws and regulations. So again, you can’t look at the entire market.

01:10:29
Rob Mehta
There is a subset of market where you can buy one, where you can rent it on typically a weekly basis is kind of the minimum for these type of HOAs. But those do exist, but again, it’s not the entire market.

01:10:41
Robert Chadwick
Fantastic. So Rob, any final parting words to the audience? That’s left back on.

01:10:49
Rob Mehta
I know we’re running short on time. I just want to say to our audience, of course, thank you for joining us. My email is up of course next to Robert and happy to answer any questions whatsoever. For those of you that are tuning into Asia, I am based in Asia, part of my time as well in Bangkok, so I’m available a lot of different hours of the day. It’s not a problem. So feel free to reach out and you know, either myself or one of my team will get back to you right away and we’ll get a calendar slot booked with you so we can discuss anything you want. And even if you’re further out in the process, it’s okay. We love having conversations. Even if you’re a year or more out in the process. It’s okay.

01:11:27
Rob Mehta
We can start having the discussion today and when the timing is right, you know, we’re ready to move forward with you.

01:11:33
Robert Chadwick
Fantastic, Rob. Thank you. Thank you very much. And everybody, thank you for joining the webinar. There will also be a recording of this sent out in probably about a week or so after it goes through editing. And keep in mind, again with our series of webinars, on the 26th of February, we will be having a webinar on something that is actually extremely important. And I think, you know, Rob will also appreciate this on setting up a US entity or an LLC to be the owner of your US Real estate. Variety of reasons why you do it. We’ll have an LLC expert on there and can assist you with, you know, all the questions. So again, February 26, 9am Singapore time. Thank you again, everybody. Thank you.

01:12:24
Rob Mehta
Rob.

01:12:25
Robert Chadwick
We really appreciate you and your team working with us to get this out into our audience. And again for everybody, thanks again. Enjoy the morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you may be and we will see you February 26th. Thanks, Rob.

01:12:40
Rob Mehta
Thanks everybody.

---

Disclaimer: This transcript is AI-generated, so kindly pardon any transcription or grammatical errors that may be present.

00:02
Robert Chadwick
Robert, it says you’ve started sharing your screen, but we’re not able to see the slides. Okay.

00:19
Donald Klip
Can you say this one?

00:20
Robert Chadwick
Yeah. Two minutes to go, guys. Eight attendees.

00:24
Speaker 3
Wow.

00:25
Donald Klip
It. Hey, Donald, just so we’re clear, I’ll just say thanks for joining us or whatever, and then you can talk. And then just kind of start talking about the slides, and we can.

01:31
Speaker 3
Yeah, and then I’ll ease, I’ll transition to you.

01:35
Donald Klip
Okay.

01:36
Speaker 3
But I’m introducing everybody initially. Right? Right at the beginning.

01:43
Donald Klip
Okay, sure. You can do that.

01:46
Robert Chadwick
I’ll let you know when to go. So, make sure to turn on your camera. I’ll just drop a message on a WhatsApp group chat. So then just turn on your camera.

01:55
Donald Klip
And turn on your camera. I’ll stop sharing, we’ll talk a little bit, and then I’ll turn the slides back on.

02:02
Robert Chadwick
Okay, I’m going to broadcast at six sharp.

02:07
Donald Klip
But we’re not going to start though.

02:08
Robert Chadwick
Broadcasting. Yeah.

02:12
Donald Klip
All right, go on, mute.

03:24
Speaker 3
It. It.

04:31
Donald Klip
Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us. For another one of our webinars. This is quite a unique webinar. We have not had a founder’s chat for a long time. So, I’m happy to have my co-founder of global Mortgage Group and American Mortgages, Donald Clipp on with me to discuss not only the recent rate drop, but some really amazing enhancements for our business, which certainly adds or certainly adds value to you as clients and to our loan officer team and so forth. So, Donald, thanks for joining. It’s been a while. I’m glad you’re able to make the time for this.

05:22
Speaker 3
Come on. I’m super excited. We haven’t done one of these in a while. I’m really excited to engage our audience and our community, and I really appreciate everybody tuning in. 06:00 p.m. Asia. Time to listen to this presentation. There’s a lot of information you read in the news. Interest rates have been coming down. There’s a lot of reasons on why that is, but the bottom line is they have come down. So, to the extent that you are looking to potentially buy real estate or invest in us real estate, you want to get an update on the key factor in that decision, which is the cost of funding. So, looking forward to kind of discussing that as we speak. So, let’s get started.

06:09
Donald Klip
Yeah, so how this webinar will go is we will talk about the recent, big updates that we have for America mortgages, and then we will discuss the recent rate drop and why and sort of our outlook on what’s going to happen with the US real estate market. And then we’ll do our normal going over the loan programs, and then we’ll have a question-and-answer session. So, during the process, if you do have any questions, please put them into the chat and we will answer it towards the end. One thing as well, if you want to use our new platform, which we will discuss shortly, you can apply for a loan directly through the chat, or you can arrange a time to speak with one of our loan officers.

07:06
Donald Klip
Our loan officers are based all around the world, and it is literally a 24/7 schedule. So, with that, Donald, let’s start. I shall, yeah, let’s do it. Can you say that? Okay.

07:24
Speaker 3
Yep.

07:25
Donald Klip
All right. Okay. So, US mortgage loans for international clients, that’s what we do with America mortgages and global mortgage group, as everybody is probably aware, our big updates. So, for, so for the loans in general, we have seen a decrease of at least 1% across the board. So, Donald, I know were talking about this earlier today in the office. Now, if you look at where were pricing foreign nationals, for example, just two weeks ago, they were around eight and a half percent. And I think today we price something out in the very high six s, which is absolutely amazing. Okay. One of the other updates we have is that we used to have, when we first started, a minimum loan amount of 150,000, I’m sure you remember, and that has been a consistent request for our clients.

08:51
Donald Klip
So we’ve recently been able to reduce our minimum loan amount to $75,000, which is huge for a lot of our investors that own a lot of smaller properties. So now, with up to 75% financing and a reduced loan amount of $75,000, Donald, I think we’ve really made it so that almost anybody can be a real estate investor. I don’t know if you have anything you want to add on that.

09:27
Speaker 3
No, the lower loan amount has really opened up opportunities in some states where the cost of the homes is much cheaper. And that makes it very attractive for a real estate investor. If you’re investing your disposable income, obviously, you could buy some stocks, you could buy some crypto. But if you wanted to buy a home, for example, in Manhattan or Los Angeles, it’s hard to come up with a million dollars for a 50% loan-to-value on a $2 million home. However, there’s a lot of growth opportunities in the Midwest, for example, in Ohio and Michigan, and those loan amounts are smaller. So, this lower loan amount allows an entry point for a bigger and wider audience who want to take part in this amazing investment opportunity, which is us residential real estate.

10:22
Donald Klip
Excellent. Well stated. So, I’m sure a lot of people are aware of our interest only program. I think this is one of the key features that we have as a company that is super attractive when it comes to investing in us real estate. And just to cover it a little bit, our interest only program is a fixed rate for ten years. Now, that ten-year fixed loan, you’re only servicing the interest for that ten-year period. After the ten years, that loan will not reset. It’ll stay at that same rate. But now you’re paying principal and interest, so you’re looking at a total 40-year tenure. And I think what makes it super attractive, especially as rates come down, you’re really going to be able to take advantage of the yield of a property.

11:21
Donald Klip
And you assume after the ten-year period, when that rate converts into a principal and interest, 30 year fixed, your rental rates are going to be significantly higher. Wouldn’t you agree, Donald?

11:35
Speaker 3
Yes. The purpose of real estate investing, or investing in general, is to maximize your cash flow. And so, if you can have ten years where you’re not paying principal and just paying the interest, it means for those ten years, you are maximizing your cash flow opportunity, that is rental income for those ten years. Now, obviously, in ten years, the property price is going to go up and it allows you more financing options down the road. But if you’re strictly looking at earning as much rental income as you can over a period of time, this is the best option.

12:11
Donald Klip
And I think one thing that also makes it very unique, too specific to the US, is there’s no age restrictions. So, whether you’re 19 or 99 in the US, they feel you should all have the same opportunity when it comes to housing, which is considered also for the mortgages. So, no age restrictions, as in most countries, you know, it’s going to be either limited to a specific age or to a working age. So, it really makes it fantastic. All right, the next big update. And this is something, again, much like the reduced loan amount we’ve been getting requests on a regular basis. And that is if you buy a property, you renovate it and you improve the value significantly. We used to have to wait six to twelve months before we would use the new appraised value.

13:09
Donald Klip
We’re really excited to announce that we reduce this to only three months. So, I think, Donald, you have a very good example of this for clients out of Singapore, so maybe you can give a little explanation on that.

13:25
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think for those of you out there, these sophisticated investors, which is our audience listening right now, you will likely have stumbled across an investing technique called the BrRr method, which is buy, renovate. Let me get this right. It’s bought, renovate, refinance, rent out, and repeat. And what that means is you buy a home that’s undervalued. Let’s just, for example, in the neighborhood, it’s 250,000. You see a home that’s worth 150,000, you go to Home Depot, you engage a contractor, you spend ten, $20,000, and once you’re done, it actually is worth $300,000. Now, historically or previously, up until now, you would have to wait six months before you’re allowed to refinance. But now, as soon as it’s done, we engage in appraiser, and that comes out at 300. You can refinance 70%, 75%, even 80% as an expat of the new value.

14:24
Speaker 3
So you pull out the equity of the increased value, and that can be done ASAP. So, the time in which you can execute these type of strategies has now been reduced to zero previously six months, and anything can happen in six months, and that ties up your capital for six months as well, as opposed to using it to make more money.

14:47
Donald Klip
We still have a minimum time that needs to be waited, which is three months, But we’ve reduced the time by half. So, it’s absolutely fantastic. Everybody is probably already aware that we have common sense underwriting when we do our loans. I mean, you know, specifically what that means is instead of asking you for your tax returns and your pay stubs and your end of year statement, or w two, or whatever it may be called, we are only qualifying the rental properties off of the rental income. I mean, if you think about it just makes sense. Sense. This is something we’ve been doing for a while, but not everyone is aware of it. So, we talked about this the other day on our group loan officer call, Donald, and I think you brought something up about what’s needed to qualify for this.

15:49
Donald Klip
Is it a one to one or what specifically are we looking at?

15:54
Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, I think, you know, the audience, once they contact us to learn more, they’re going to be really surprised and impressed on how easy that we’ve made this foreign nationals looking to buy property for investment income. So, the way this works is, you know, we, you know, like any purchase or refinance, we will have to, you know, you will have to. There will be an appraisal that will be conducted along with a rental comparison. And what that means is if the rental comparison comes in at, let’s just, for example, say, 2000, and your mortgage and mortgage related expenses comes out at 2000 or 1999, you qualify. It’s not based on, like Robert said earlier, your pay stubs, your human resources need to write you a reference letter. All these things that typical bank loans require; we don’t need them.

16:55
Speaker 3
And it makes it easier for our clients, which are all outside the US, because sometimes there’s different, there’s time zone issues, there’s language issues. And so, we’ve made these. We specifically created these to make it easy for our international clients to qualify when they buy property in the US.

17:15
Donald Klip
Yeah, it’s actually a fantastic loan program because besides the reduced loan amount of $75,000 and not having to have us credit, being able to qualify just strictly on the rental income really makes it to where almost anybody can be a real estate investor. Build your portfolio, and for the future have passive income. The biggest update that we have, and something that Donald and I and our entire team has been working tirelessly for more than a year, is the launch of Morty AM. Morty AM is our mortgage application platform. Now, what this does is it allows you to get a pre-approval and often less than 24 hours. This is an online application, but it is also available within two weeks on the Apple and the. What’s the other one?

18:24
Speaker 3
Android.

18:28
Donald Klip
It’ll be easily downloaded, and you will have access to this anytime you want to buy a loan. You get a pre-approval, you get it into the system. You’re talking to a realtor, maybe they’re somewhere in some country and you can zap them that pre approval letter. So, it’s a really slick program. The application itself, it’s really simplified. I don’t know if, Donald, you want touch on anything about, especially how we really worked. Very difficult to, I mean, in a very diligent way, to make this application applicable to our foreign clients.

19:08
Speaker 3
Yeah, everything we do for our clients. We created this to fix a problem. We’re a small company trying to fix a big problem, which is trying to get access to us mortgages while living overseas. So, we hear our clients, we hear the feedback. And what we’ve heard is that the world is ready for a digital solution. The world is ready to, you know, for certain aspects of a mortgage. They’re ready not to speak to somebody, obviously, you know, the initial call and the follow ups and, you know, the urgent questions, you know, we’re here for you, but a lot of the manual, things such as, you know, you know, uploading financial statements, things that, you know, that can be on autopilot through this software, just makes the clients lives a lot easier.

20:03
Speaker 3
And you could do it at your own time, as opposed to sometimes you get an email from a loan officer and forget, and you go to work and you kind of miss a day here and there. Here it’s all online. It’s, you know, you, you know, it obviously sends you reminders, but it allows you to. It allows the process to be a lot faster than normally it would be when you’re dealing with a financial institution back in the US.

20:32
Donald Klip
Yeah, I mean, I think with this launch of this program, we’ve made our services even more valuable than most of the big banks. So, it’s really fantastic. And if anybody wants to download the application or actually right now, it’s more of a link to the web portion of it. You can scan the QR code that is on this page here. So, we will go to the next page. Okay. More big updates. As everybody is aware, because all of our clients are living and working abroad, we understand that they don’t always have the ability to search for services or providers which you may have ready access to if you were living in the US. So, we’ve made it very simple.

21:33
Donald Klip
We have on our website in the middle section, our concierge section, and on that you can do everything from setting up an LLC for your company to own the property, to streamline your insurance with prime insurance coverage, to even getting the best rates on FX exchange when you need to move your money per se, of a down payment, to being able to provide proper and adequate property management solutions through a company similar to us that only focus on foreign nationals. So, another big update, and again, this comes from a lot of requests for our clients. We get clients all the time that get pre-approved for a loan. But once they get pre-approved for a loan, they don’t know where to find a property, or they’re not really sure where to find a property.

22:34
Donald Klip
So Donald has actually been the driver on the real estate portal. So, Donald, why don’t you tell us what we’re looking at and what our clients should be expecting?

22:47
Speaker 3
Yeah, so I don’t want to spill. I don’t want to, what do you call it? Unveil sort of the surprise. But I need to plug a report that we will be publishing very soon, which is, this ties into what you just said, which is we analyze the price per square foot for every major city in the US and every major global city. And we also analyze the rental yield in every major global city and the top 100 cities in the US based on population. And the reason why I say that is because once on your real estate journey, everybody has different criteria on where they’re looking for. Is it close to my relative? Am I going for pure, the highest return? Or it needs to be near an international airport or needs to. We all have different criteria, but finding the properties is difficult.

23:36
Speaker 3
So that report is going to help you narrow down your search. It’s never been done before. We’re the first ones in the world that will be able to do this. So, keep your eyes out for that. And that leads into this portion, which is when our clients use us to get a pre-approval. First of all, you need a pre-approval to buy a property because sellers won’t sell you the property unless they feel comfortable that you have financing behind you. But being able to offer carefully selected and curated property that meets the needs, price point and logistics of our international clients is very valuable. And one thing, I’m going to talk about this in the upcoming slides, but there is a six to 7 million home shortage in the US. That’s why it makes.

24:30
Speaker 3
I don’t want to pre-empt sort of my portion of the presentation, but getting property to be sold is like gold dust. So, we’ve been trying for a long time and so we’ve been able to secure homes just outside of Dallas, Texas, which is a really amazing location for gentrification. A lot of people working from home. But anyhow, I want you to contact us. We’ll give you the details for that. The website is the link is up for the properties that we have available to sell. These are new properties. They come with property management. They’re amazing. They fit the price point for our international clients. So, we will, when we send you a thank you letter, we’ll add the link to that email. So, keep an eye out for that along with the research piece that will be coming out very soon.

25:18
Donald Klip
Yeah, I’m very excited about it. I know. Again, it’s just like all of the things that we work to improve or to fix this has been a huge contention for a lot of our clients. So, with that said, we will, Donald will discuss, is this the best time to invest in us real estate? And really, here is why.

25:42
Speaker 3
Thank you, Robert. That was a fantastic presentation. I’m going to talk about really quickly the current supply demand landscape of the US. I know you read a lot of things, maybe in the media, India, a lot of it is true, but a lot of it is not understood why. Now, interest rates have gone up a lot, but if you can believe it, home prices in the US went up 8% last year. I mean, that’s unbelievable. Interest rates went up 400% and property prices still went up. Now, I’m going to address this in kind of a systematic format, which is supply and demand. So currently, over the last ten years, there have been 5.5 million households formed versus homes built. That means there’s five to 6 million more homes, households that have been created versus homes that have been built.

26:35
Speaker 3
And like it says, so there’s a massive shortage, which you’ll read everywhere when you’re doing your research. Now, those are new homes. Now, existing homes, which is about 90% of, you know, kind of the transacted homes, 80% of the folks that have mortgages, 80% of those mortgages are fixed for 30 years under 5% and 40% are fixed for 30 years under 3%. Sorry, that’s a typo. Under 3%. So, what that means is that it’s kind of put this supply grip on the market. And so, if you think about it, what happens if new homes are being built? And this is also why it’s been really difficult for us to get new homes to bring, to show our overseas clients, is that as soon as homes are built, guess who’s buying them?

27:31
Speaker 3
The average person may not be able to buy them at 8% fixed for 30 or 7% fixed for 30, but institutions can, right? And this is their playbook. They try to buy as much supply as they can because they know the supply demand is imbalanced. They control pricing. And this is no secret. You can google institutional buying of single-family homes in the US and you will see what’s going on. Like any smart investor, it’s a lot better if you invest alongside smart people. And we think the folks like Blackstone and American homes and these type of landlords that you see are fairly smart. So that’s happening now. Next slide. Now what’s happening with demand? Now, what happened with COVID was that people worked from home, they went from.

28:22
Speaker 3
It was always kind of growing at 2.5% a year, so it was heading in that direction. But during COVID overnight it went to 100%. And I think a lot of companies realized that there actually is a portion of. Of work that can be done at home. And I think that’s allowed people who lived in different states to move to find work opportunities in other areas easier. Now, the US, it’s a lot of things, but in terms of its ability to gentrify is without a doubt the best place in the world. If you can’t afford to live in California, which many can’t right now, you can rent a U Haul and move your family to Texas, which a lot of people are now, and make a living.

29:07
Speaker 3
And you look at what’s happening in the US right now is a lot of the coastal states, specifically California and New York, a lot of these big companies are created there. Facebook, Amazon, you name it, Tesla. And they become so big that folks can’t afford to live there. So, companies move their headquarters to Texas to low or no tax states. And that’s happening end masse. And that’s driving the demand to rent homes. And you’re seeing that now. In fact, Dallas is the headquarters for the most fortune global Fortune 500 companies in the world. And coincidentally, I don’t want to plug our property again, but the new homes that we’re offering at the moment is 40 minutes away from Dallas. So really want to show you those homes when we get a chance. Next slide. So, this is really eye opening.

30:05
Speaker 3
So if you look at the G seven countries, I mean, this is just a select a number, the rental yield, and this is cash flow received from rents, it’s really low. In fact, I would argue that you cannot make money of renting homes anywhere in the world except Dubai and the US. Now, if you look at the average rental yield in the US, it’s 8% at the moment. Now, if you take out California, New York, that actually turns out to be twelve to 15% gross yield. It’s really hard to believe, but it’s true. And there’s just lack of information in the world about this phenomenon. So, if you are sitting in these countries where you’re making a good living, a good income, and for example, in Singapore or Hong Kong, where I’m from, getting in the real estate market is really expensive.

31:01
Speaker 3
It’s minimum, two, three, four, $5 million. Whereas in the US, you could play this game with 100, $150,000 and enjoy 15% rental yields. Now, there’s obviously a lot of things that you need to learn, but like anything in life, you’ve put in the hard work, you reap the rewards. This is just a snapshot. In fact, I would argue that this is a little outdated. The numbers are even slightly higher at the moment. But you can see this is not to say that you should rush out and buy a home in Detroit or Milwaukee or Omaha, where actually Warren Buffett is from, but you look at places like Ann Arbor, a huge college town. University of Michigan is there. You look at Las Vegas. It’s the center of all convention business in the US at the moment.

31:50
Speaker 3
Atlanta, the home of the busiest airport in the world. Each one of these cities represents a different thematic. And look at the gross yields. This is one of the biggest surprise slides that when people see that, they go, oh, my God, why didn’t I not know about this? But now you do. And now with leverage, you can take advantage of this. So that’s my bit on the market. I will hand it over to Robert to go into our loan programs and then towards the end, open it up for Q and A. And I look forward to that.

32:24
Donald Klip
Thanks, Donald. I think too, going back to just say the yield slide that you are showing, if you look at what the general yield is in the US, say 5% or less, that is taking into account the coastal states such as California and New York. But if you were to take those out of the picture, these are actually what people could potentially be looking at. And as you said, and because we do loans, not just in the US, but all around the world, we really understand this probably better than any other country or company that are offering mortgages. Okay, so let me give a general overview of the mortgages that America mortgages offer. Now, again, 100% of our clients are living and working abroad, but obtaining us mortgages, whether for purchase, refinance or cash out.

33:28
Donald Klip
I think as we’re seeing interest rates go down, we will see people just refinancing, not pulling cash out, but merely just to reduce the rate. So, if you’re a foreign national, you are able to get up to 75% loan to value in all 50 states. If you are a us expat, we try to make it exactly as if you walked into a bank in the US and you were living and working there. And for an investment property, you can get up to 80%. Something very unique to us mortgages. Again, there are no age restrictions. So, I always like to say, whether you’re 19 or 99, you still have the same mortgage amortization regardless of the age of the borrower. We discussed what ten-year interest only loans are absolutely fantastic.

34:24
Donald Klip
If somebody wants to maximize yield and lock in a rate to where they don’t ever have to worry about refinancing again, unless they choose to. We qualify on the rental income of the property for investment properties. It makes it a very simple, clean, easy way. We don’t care if you are self-employed or you are employed all we care about is the cash flow of the property, which again, is common sense underwriting and just makes sense foreign income. If you are, say, a US expat or you want to qualify using your income, we absolutely allow it, because again, this is all we do, all we deal with. It’s very common and very normal for us. Again, these are loan programs for non us residents, whether you are a non us passport holder or you are a us passport holder living overseas.

35:30
Donald Klip
What also makes these programs very nice and why we have a lot of business which is referred to from private banks, is all of this is dry lending. And if you’re familiar with lending in Europe, most lending requires the borrower to open up some sort of account with the bank that they’ve got a mortgage with a minimum deposit. We have no requirement for that. This is pure dry lending, meaning there is no requirement to open up a bank account with that lender. A loan process in general, once we get your application, we’re looking at 72 hours for issuing a pre-approval. With the launch of Morty, we can actually reduce that to 24 hours, if not sooner.

36:25
Donald Klip
Our average closing time is 30 to 45 days, and you can sign your closing documents in your home country without ever having to leave to travel to the US. So basically, you can start the application online through Morty, and you can close even at your local notary, depending on the country that you’re in. What makes us also very unique, and a lot of it has to do with qualifying off of the rental income of the property is 97% of the applications that get submitted are approved. It’s a number that we’re super proud of. And it’s something that if for some reason the loan isn’t approved, it’s normally property related and not really related to the borrower. Again, and this is in the chat link for everybody to work with.

37:22
Donald Klip
We have 24 hours a day, seven days a week loan officers all around the world. You speak, or you’re more comfortable speaking another language. There’s a variety of options, which, when you’re choosing a calendar time, you can click if you would prefer to speak Spanish or Chinese or whatever it may be. So, I’ll just go over a couple of the loan programs quickly and then we’ll get to the questions and answers. So, our most popular loan program is the America mortgages rental coverage plus loan. And this is something that Donald and I had talked about earlier in the webinar and what I had just gone over. This is the loan program that everybody loves. It requires you to submit no personal income. So, whether you, again, if you’re self-employed or you’re employed, you don’t show maybe your true serviceability of income.

38:19
Donald Klip
This allows anybody to still be a real estate investor. If you’re a foreign national, you can get up to 75% financing and a US expat, assuming you still have us credit, you can get up to 80%. No us credit or residency is required. It’s a very fast, simple loan program and the loan amounts are as low as $75,000 and can go as high as 3 million. Again, we offer on these programs 30-year fixes, interest only. If you look at how this loan qualifies, it’s on the bottom of this slide and it’s a very simple process. If the rental income covers the mortgage, taxes and insurance, the loan is going to qualify. So, it’s very straightforward. In the event, say that the rental amount does not qualify, it does not mean that the loan is not approved.

39:18
Donald Klip
It just merely means that maybe you have to bring in a little bit more money to be able to get that number to work. Next program is our expat program. If you are a US expat and you’re living abroad and you have gone to your local bank or one of the big banks that are well known, you will find out that you’re going to get halfway through the process before they realize that you’re earning your income in euros or in yen or whatever it may be, and they’re going to say, I’m sorry, we cannot do your loan. Well, again, because 100% of our clients fit this box. We’ve made sure that all of the loan programs that we have are specific for our clients living globally.

40:11
Donald Klip
If you’re a US expat, we allow foreign income, we allow your bank account to be in a foreign country, and there’s no requirement to provide a w two. That is huge. The only real, I guess, caveat on this is you still need to maintain us credit with at least a 646 80 credit score to qualify for this. The minimum loan amount is $150,000 and we can go all the way up to 5 million. This works just as it worked when you were living and working in the US, where it goes on your debt-to-income ratio. We have a debt-to-income ratio of 43%.

40:55
Donald Klip
So in this example, as long as you’re making $10,000 a month, and that is your gross income, not your after-tax income, and the mortgage payment, taxes and insurance are at least 4300 and below and including any other debt that you may have in the US, your loan is going to qualify. So again, we try to make this with the same rate, the same terms and the same programs as if you were living and working in the US. Absolutely fantastic program. So that’s it for our webinar for today. This is our contact information for our office in the US, as well as our office in Asia, where Donald and I are both based.

41:42
Donald Klip
You can click on, or you can scan the QR code, which is on the right hand side, that will link you directly to a WhatsApp messenger where you can reach out to one of our loan officers, ask a question about a loan, or even get the direct link for Morti to apply for a loan. Again, we have a link within the chat that allows you to schedule an appointment with a loan officer 24/7 or if you want to, you can go online and apply directly through mortgage. So, let’s get to the questions, Donald, and let’s see where we are at. So, what I’ll do is I’ll ask the questions and then we can both kind of enter and see where we go. So, first question is, what is the likelihood of being approved? Donald, do you want to take that?

42:41
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, the short answer is highly likely, you know, depending on what loan program you’re seeking. But as with regards to specifically the loan program that we mentioned earlier, which is based on the rental income of the property, you know, when you’re doing your research, you have a pretty good idea of what the rents are, right? You speak to you, you look on Zillow or Redfin, you speak to your realtor. So, you can do the math. And you just need a few documents to get a pre-approval with us. Robert, you want to talk about what kind of documents are actually, this answers the next question as well. What kind of documents you need to get a, a pre-approval.

43:25
Donald Klip
Yeah. Fantastic. So, to get a pre-approval for the loans, it is about as straightforward as you can get. Assuming you’re a foreign national, you’re just going to need your passport. And this is, again, on our portal, you can securely upload everything. So, there’s no security issue or trust issue on this go through, you can complete the loan application. And really the biggest concern or the biggest hurdle that most people have is the down payment for the property. So, we need to see for AML purposes that any money that is going to be used in the transaction has been in your account.

44:07
Donald Klip
It can be in the US, it can be overseas for a minimum of 60 days if you’re fine with that hurdle, then once you submit all the documents, your loan officer will review it along with the application, and we can issue a preapproval in 24 hours. Next question.

44:27
Speaker 3
Rates have come down, but will they stay down? Well, that’s a crystal ball question, but I think I could take a stab at this. Rates. I think we can all assume that rates will be cut. And these are fed fund rates now, will they stay down? I can’t see them going up. I think inflation print just came out overnight and they look like inflation is coming down. So, there’s more room to move the rates down, but who knows? But I would have to say over the course of the next few years, I can’t see rates going up, either staying flat or coming down, which is really good for being a property investor.

45:14
Donald Klip
Absolutely. So, okay, next question. What would cause a loan application to be rejected? Well, I think there’s a couple possibilities, is if you’re a us expat and say, maybe you don’t have sufficient credit, that could be a reason. Or maybe your debt to income doesn’t work. But we do have loan programs that will help you with that as well. For us in general, normally it’s not about does the loan qualify or not? We qualify 97% of our loans. It’s really, does the rental income cover the mortgage payment? And again, with that, it doesn’t really mean that the loan doesn’t qualify. It maybe just means that you have to come in with a bit more cash. Okay, next question. What is the most popular loan program in American mortgages? Funny, because that is exactly how I introduced that loan program.

46:12
Donald Klip
That is our rental coverage plus. And again, if we go back to the question about what causes an application to get rejected, this is the most straightforward, most common-sense underwriting loan program that you have where you’re qualifying off of the rental income and not the personal income of the borrower. Next question. Hey, great presentation. Which banks do you work with for underwriting and disbursement? Let me jump on that, Donald, and then maybe you can add something. But last December, we actually became a direct lender ourselves. So, we are able to lend in our own name, which makes it fantastic because we have a lot more control over the loan programs. Now, when it comes to loans that maybe don’t qualify for our own lending, then we have a variety of options.

47:07
Donald Klip
These are banks that likely you have never heard of, but banks that we’ve curated over the years that understand our clients being foreign nationals and expats.

47:20
Speaker 3
Yeah, maybe I’ll add a little bit of. A little bit here. So, it’s, you know, we’re preconditioned to think, well, most of us are not you and I, but most people in the world are preconditioned to think mortgage. They think banks. However, in the US, most and the biggest mortgage lenders are not traditional retail banks. I’ll give you an example that everybody knows. Rocket mortgage. Rocket mortgage is the largest mortgage lender in the US. But they’re not a bank. They don’t take deposits. And these are called wholesale lenders. So, these are the type of lending institutions that we work with. And we are one ourselves, as we are a lender ourselves as of December last year, which is great. So, this makes, you know, American mortgages is the only us mortgage broker outside the US. We created this process. We are the global leader.

48:20
Speaker 3
And just like, I guess, many restaurants like to use farm to table, we want to move higher up the food chain. So, we’ve become a lender so we can give you the type of service, pricing, transparency and accessibility that our clients need, deserve and want. So that’s a little bit of background on kind of our journey to becoming our own lender.

48:41
Donald Klip
Perfect. And Raul, to answer your question again, we don’t use a normal bank, even for us citizens. We’re going to use a bank that understands you as a borrower. So, it’s what we do is unique, and it really works when it comes to earning foreign earned income. As an expat, which I’m assuming you.

49:05
Speaker 3
Are, I’m going to give a quick anecdote to our audience, and I think folks in Hong Kong can empathize with this. We had a client recently call us and said that their loan got rejected because they could not put a zip code into the little box that says, what’s your zip code? Because Hong Kong doesn’t have any zip codes. And just because of that, they couldn’t move forward with their loan. Now, this is just a microcosm and a small sample of the issues that we’re trying to fix. And, like, we know the cultural and country idiosyncrasies of folks living outside the US. And this is just a funny example, but it’s true. And it happens all the time, but not with us, because all we do.

49:53
Donald Klip
Yeah, absolutely. I would probably say 20% of our business is expats that were going through a major bank in the middle of a purchase to have their loan officers say, oh, I didn’t realize that you are earning foreign income. So. Okay, next question. Can a loan commitment be less than 30 years, if you choose. Absolutely. If you want to have a 15-year term, that’s your option. In general, our loans are 30-year fixes just because people want that safety and that security. But if you want to pay your loan off or make double payments or even have a reduced 15-year term, that’s absolutely fine. Again, we just, if you’re qualifying off of the rental income, you know, when you shorten the amortization, that could be an issue, but is absolutely perfectly acceptable. Next question.

50:45
Donald Klip
How do we make sure that the rental price, I’m assuming this means, is accurate. And that’s a super good question. And I think we receive this every day when we order the appraisal or the valuation, depending on the, depending on where you’re living, we order a supplement to go along with that. That supplement tells us exactly what the average rent is for that specific property, and that’s the number that we use to qualify. So, it not only protects the lender, but it also protects yourself to making sure that this is the type of rent that, you know, you’ve been told by the realtor you’re going to get. Next question. Do your loans have unit count Max or minimum? I’m not exactly sure what that means. Donald, do you have an idea?

51:38
Speaker 3
Yeah, so I think it’s the number of doors per loan. I think you’re going to be more of an expert on this, Robert. But I think the per loan, the number, I think it’s a four-unit max for four door max on some of our loan programs. I really should get more involved in the loans, but I apologize. I believe that’s what this.

52:06
Donald Klip
Okay, so, yeah, if that’s what it means. So, a one to four unit, we can qualify technically as a single family. So, you have the same LQB options that’s available. So, thanks for the explanation, Donald. Next question. You mentioned that you qualify most of your borrowers, and usually the properties fall down to a 3% rejected application. Could you give us an example of the type of properties that you will not finance? Again, very good question. If you look at, say, exactly in New York has a lot of co-ops, very difficult to finance. We won’t do rural properties. So, properties that are quite far away from the city center, and we really will stay away from mobile homes or manufactured homes. Otherwise, it’s an open market.

53:04
Donald Klip
You find a property that you love, you want to be able to finance, you know it’s going to get fantastic rent a, give one of our loan officers a call and run it by them. They’ll tell you immediately if it’s going to be possible. Yeah.

53:15
Speaker 3
And one thing, you know, one thing that, you know, part of that 3% that were not approved, a lot of that has to do with the property that you may have missed when you. When you. When you. When you view the property. You know, for example, in San Francisco, there’s, you know, part of the appraisal is looking at asbestos, which is in between walls, which there’s no way you would be able to see that. So, in different cities, they’ll look at different things, you know, the structure wise or what’s in the walls or maybe holes that you didn’t see, and they don’t pass the appraisal process. So, a lot of times it has to do with the specific property, not actually you as a borrower. So that’s really important to say.

53:57
Donald Klip
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, next question. Some investor loans that fall into the better financing deals have a four-unit max. So, this is actually a really good question. In general, our very vanilla loan, especially the loans that we offer ourselves, are one to four units. So that is, we can do that every day. However, we also have loan programs that are for five to eight units. So, if you see something that, you know, it’s a fantastic loan, we can still qualify our fantastic property. Sorry. We can still be able to provide that loan for that up to 75% loan to value up to an eight-unit property. Next question. Can I close my existing loan midway through the tenor and reset my rate? So, in general, an investment loan will have a prepayment penalty.

54:56
Donald Klip
So that prepayment penalty normally will be a decreasing amount, that every year will get less, but it is still there for investment properties. However, it does not mean that you cannot. If interest rates go down and you’re able to do a simple calculation of what the breakeven is, it doesn’t mean that you will not be able to refinance your property at any time. If you wait until the prepayment penalty is finished, certainly you can refinance it without any penalties into either a shorter loan or you wanna pay it off, or even a brand-new loan and pull cash out. Next question. In the last question of the night, what is the minimum down payment required to qualify for a loan? So, in general, it’s 25% if you are a foreign national with no us credit.

55:54
Donald Klip
If you are a us expat, then it is 20% with that. Thank you, everybody, for staying through this hour. I think when Donald and I were talking about doing this, were saying we’ll probably knock it out in 15 to 30 minutes. But as you can see, with a lot of involvement and all of these fantastic things that we’re able to offer, this ran a bit longer. So, Donald, do you have any parting words that.

56:23
Speaker 3
Yeah, listen, all I want to say is, I say this to clients, is, if you can make the numbers work now, they’re only going to get better because the cost part of your equation is going to go down, interest rates and the income part of your equation is going to go up, which is your rental income. And then after, because the property is increasing in value over time, which has been proven that at some point you can refinance at a higher rate and recoup some of your initial capital expenditure. That’s what makes us real estate, the game of us real estate investing, unlike any other place in the world.

57:04
Donald Klip
Refinance at a lower rate.

57:05
Speaker 3
Lower rate. Sorry.

57:08
Donald Klip
So, again, I think just to kind of, like, add to that, if you’re waiting for interest rates to hit the lowest p or the lowest point possible, you’re going to miss out on what right now is still a buyer’s market. So, we always recommend, get in there now, rates are still absolutely fantastic, especially if you lock it in long term, you do an interest only. So, thank you again, everybody. Thank you, Donald. And we will see you, I believe, in a couple weeks for the next webinar. Appreciate everybody’s time. Don’t forget, in the chat box, there is a link to either doing the application on Morty or to schedule a time and day to speak with a loan officer. So, thank you, everybody. Appreciate your time.

57:52
Speaker 3
Thank you, everybody. Have a good evening.

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Disclaimer: This transcript is AI-generated, so kindly pardon any transcription or grammatical errors that may be present.