Building Wealth the Right Way: Real Estate, Lending & Financial Freedom

Christian (00:00.76)
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. Today we have a special guest. name is Mary Hart. She’s a retired attorney, a highly experienced commercial residential real estate investor, and a nationally recognized speaker. She is also the founder and CEO of Fair Oaks Funding, a hard money lending company, and the co-founder with Wendy Street of the Sweetheart Women in Real Estate Mastermind and the Sweetheart Private Lending Institute. Mary’s passion is financial literacy and helping others grow their wealth.

And in the words of Ted Lasso, Mary believes that doing the right thing is never the wrong thing. So without further ado, Mary, it is a pleasure to have you on today. I’m very excited to speak with you. Why don’t you just introduce the audience, who you are, your background, and just overall your story.

Mary Hart (00:44.898)
Sure, sure. Thanks, Christian. I really appreciate you having me on. It’s always fun to talk about the things we’re going to talk about today. My name is Mary Hart, as you said, and currently I’m a residential and commercial real estate investor and a hard money lender. So I have a company called Fair Oaks Funding and we do mostly right now fix and flip loans, the short term fix and flip loans. We may offer more products in the future, but that’s what we’re doing now. And then with Wendy Sweet, I do the Sweet Heart. We have these great names, Mary Hart, Wendy Sweet, so Sweet Heart kind of

happened Sweetheart Women in Real Estate Mastermind and the Sweetheart Private Lending Institute, all of which are coming up this October for our next events. And yeah, I love to teach. I love to speak. And I’m a retired attorney. I don’t know if I said that. So that helps me in the lending business quite a bit. But I decide I did not want to practice law anymore. So here I am.

Christian (01:37.518)
Everything led you to now, right? That’s awesome. Well, I know you have a lot of experience in commercial and residential real estate investing as well. I’m curious, Mary, what was your background as far as that? What were you investing in specifically? And ultimately, what made you transition into that commercial and residential real estate space?

Mary Hart (01:40.012)
Yes, that’s right.

Mary Hart (01:56.28)
Sure, so I was practicing law and I owned my own law firm with about 10 employees when I first started getting into real estate investing. Actually, right before I started that firm, I moved from Alaska to North Carolina and I rented my house out in Alaska because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stay in North Carolina. I might go back to Alaska. So I was sort of an accidental landlord initially. I liked that. We got good rent and it was fun. And then somebody asked me to be a private money lender for a deal.

did that all while I was practicing law full time. Then I sort of accidentally got in the vacation rental space in 2006 before anybody I knew was doing it. I renovated a building in downtown Asheville. I had gotten divorced. I was living 25 minutes from downtown and I wanted to have a downtown crash pad for when I did not have my children. And so I renovated these four loft apartments and they kept getting booked up. So I bought another building downtown and renovated it.

It kept getting booked up. So then I went into vacation rentals with another friend. Anyway, at some point I realized that I was making way more money as a real estate investor than I was as the owner of a law firm with 26, seven years experience at that time. And so I decided I’d rather be an investor than babysit employees. So I shut down my law firm in 2017 and have not looked back. And then last year I got into my first storage, self storage development deal

with some friends of mine and we’re about to purchase our second self storage facility. so mostly I’m doing storage and lending and vacation rentals right now. I have some farmland that I’ve sold at a profit. And so I’ve just been doing a little bit of everything. I did one flip as a baby investor and I hated it because I way over renovated it. So I said, that is not my forte. I’d rather lend the money to the flippers than be the flipper myself. that’s kind of, it was all very accidental, I feel like, but I just said,

to a bunch of opportunities that showed up and it ended up being what I love. Same thing about teaching around the country. know, had somebody ask me about 12 years ago to come teach. Dykes-Botterford out of Atlanta asked me to come teach with him. People heard me speak. They started asking me to teach and now I teach all over the country and even on cruise ships around the world, which is kind of fun.

Christian (04:18.926)
That’s amazing. What a track record. I mean, I’m curious to know even with, you know, your company Fair Oaks Funding, right? I mean, what could you tell the audience? I mean, what sets your approach to hard money lending apart from traditional financing options? Like, where do people need to be educated on the differences from that, on the cons, the pros, and so forth? If you could maybe explain a little bit about that, that’d be great.

Mary Hart (04:43.47)
it.

So I have a lot of people that say, would a flipper or a borrower pay you higher rates and higher points than they could get at a bank? And that’s a legitimate question. We tend to work with those people who are, they’re moving faster. So they need to either fund a loan faster than you can do it through a traditional bank, or they don’t qualify for some reason. They have too many loans going on in one year than a bank will do for them. So there are a number of reasons they would use a hard money lender and they will build those numbers

into their offer price and into their budget so they can afford a higher price and still make a profit. So it’s usually when we can just move faster, we’re more flexible than a bank usually, and we have not had any problem getting borrowers. I think I funded just by myself seven million plus in loans last year alone, and then I just brought on a colleague to help me because we’re going to grow it even more this year, and we’ve already loaned in the first few months almost three million dollars. So you know people

out there willing to work with hard money lenders because they can get their projects done faster and easier. And so that’s why it works, I think.

Christian (05:55.928)
No, of course, absolutely. That’s great. Thanks for sharing. Awesome. I’m interested to talk about too, you know, the sweetheart woman in the, real estate master memory, what inspired this initiative and what impact has it had? And also what in the next, say the next five to 10 years, what more of an impact are you looking to create inside of that?

Mary Hart (06:16.202)
So this started two years ago. We were at Jim Ingersoll’s Dealmaker event in Richmond. In fact, we’re going back there this coming week. And Jim always does a charity auction. And so there was a woman there, friend of ours, who had done some tiny cabins. And she was offering them up as a vacation rental. And my friend Wendy Sweet came over to me and said, why don’t we sweeten the pot and offer a women’s mastermind for anybody who books those vacation rentals?

was born and we ended up, so many people wanted to do it that we ended up taking not only those four cabins but we rented an entire lodge down the street and we had I think 26 women that first year for two and a half or three day event and

people told us it was life changing. had people say they will never miss another sweetheart mastermind as long as they live. So we decided to open it up again a year later and we sold out the first session within 36 hours and we had to open a second session, sold that out within a few days. And so this is our third year coming into it. And we have two sessions this year and we’re sandwiching now a private lending institute because so many of our

women mastermind members are either lenders or want to be lenders. And we’ve opened that event up to men and women. And what’s interesting, I think, about the women’s mastermind is the way we do it. We don’t do it at a hotel. We rent a large, like 25 or 30 bedroom house. And so everybody comes in for three days. They have their own bedroom, their own bathroom. All the meals and beverages and swag are all paid for. And in the mastermind sessions, each woman gets about 30 minutes

at the front of the room on their hot seat presentation, although we call it the heart sweet presentation, just as a play on words. And everybody gets to come up there and say what’s working for them in their business, what’s not working, and we all give them feedback for 30 or 45 minutes. And what we have found that’s been really interesting, and I think it’s because it can be a room full of women and they feel comfortable with this, is that we’re getting a lot of people talking about things that aren’t business related. It might be their marriage, their children, their

Christian (08:27.342)
you

Mary Hart (08:31.318)
health and we realize that if those pieces of your personal life aren’t really working well then your business isn’t going to work well. So we give whatever people ask for we give advice as do the other women in the room and it truly is very life-changing and powerful. It’s changed masterminds in general have changed my life but those women’s masterminds are super powerful. And then the Lending Institute we just opened it up to men and women so just because you know.

Christian (08:41.518)
Yeah.

Mary Hart (08:59.618)
We thought that would be a little more fair to have them in come as well. So this was our first year as a lending institute, both. Yeah.

Christian (09:05.75)
Right, absolutely, right. Enough on the table for everybody.

Mary Hart (09:09.666)
That’s right. But both Wendy and I have each have over 20 years of lending experience. We both teach around the country. We both see a need for a really deep dive nuts and bolts into how do you set up a lending business. How do you run it. How do you service the loans. How do you do your risk mitigation. How do you do loss mitigation if something goes wrong. And so that is not going to be hot seats in the front of the room. That is going to be three days of intensive education by Wendy and me and possibly some guest speakers.

And everybody will come away with a manual that will have a lot of information for people to be able to do their own lending from A to Z.

Christian (09:50.882)
I love that. love your approach as well. And something I wanted to touch on was you even speaking about, you’re trying to even see and tap into their personal lives as well to see what, is the bottleneck? What is the disconnect? Right? Because I’m a firm believer that, you know, you can have money, successful business, entrepreneurship, whatever it may be. Right. But you have to make sure the kinks and the water hose are fixed as well in your outside life as well. Right. So I think that, you know, as men and women, we are all facing those types of challenges. Right. And it’s inevitable.

Mary Hart (10:13.847)
Yeah.

Christian (10:20.194)
that these things do appear in our lives, but it’s so important to be part of a community, right? Like a mastermind of people that have been there, done that. They have the experiences and you’re going through it, right? It’s tough times, whatever it may be, but to really crack and get to that next level in life, it helps to have those types of people that have been there and done that. It can give you actionable steps to get you to that next level, right? So I think that’s incredible, you know, what you’re doing for people. It really is. That’s awesome.

Mary Hart (10:43.627)
Absolutely.

Mary Hart (10:48.311)
Well, thank you. Thank you. We love you.

Christian (10:50.316)
I’m interested too. I mean, why do you think financial literacy is such a critical issue, right? And just in general today, mean, what, could you give any advice for maybe what steps can people take to improve their financial knowledge, whether that’s in real estate or just overall money, just the topic of money in general? You’ve had so much experience, Mary, so I’m curious to get your take on that.

Mary Hart (11:19.854)
Sure, I think the sad thing is that in our country we’re not taught from kindergarten on about money issues. We don’t know what we don’t know because we’re never taught it. And unless we have parents or mentors who take the time to educate us about the whole, what I call the life cycle of money, the life cycle of wealth, which is how do you earn it? How do you grow it? How do you keep as much of it as you can through tax savings or credit or protection or whatever? And ultimately the end goal is how do you pass on as much of it

as possible to your loved ones or your charities, right? So there’s this whole life cycle of money that we’re just not taught about in this country as part of our school system. And some of us are lucky enough to have parents who teach you. I was not. My parents just didn’t say anything to me about it. And it wasn’t probably until my 40s that I became a real estate investor. That was 20 years ago. And I just realized that there’s, if we don’t learn about money, if we don’t find a way to have our dollars

for us while we sleep or stop trading time for dollars in a job, we’re going to work the rest of our lives because you can’t really save enough for a good retirement like it used to be. They used to say, build up your assets, you you’ll live off 4 % of that a year. I don’t think that model works anymore. And if we can’t afford to support ourselves, we become reliant on the government and without getting into any politics, any way whatsoever, I don’t think any of us should be reliant on the government.

or anyone else to support ourselves. We should all be able to live the life that we choose and sustain it with our own efforts. And it’s either working for that. You you might have read the Robert Kiyosaki’s Cash Flow Quadrant. We start out as employees trading time for dollars, and then we self-employed where we move into our own business, but it’s still a job for us. And then the next quadrant is a business owner where you own a business, but it can run without you. Well, the Pinnacle Quadrant is the

Christian (13:05.774)
Yes, great book.

Mary Hart (13:19.65)
investor quadrant where you can live the life you want while your dollars go make dollars for you 24 hours a day. That’s where I am now and that’s where I want other people to be because then we have a truly free life. Free life makes for happy people. Happy people makes for a great society and I just think if we’re all self-sustaining it’s a great way to go.

Christian (13:44.142)
I love that, I love that. I’m curious, even just circling back on everything you just talk about, I’m curious, Mary, what are some of your core values that help and guide you in your business and your investment decisions with everything that you’re doing right now? Because you’re so passionate on these topics, so I’m curious to get, what are your core values and what really is your drive? What is your why behind your why on the impact that you’re making right now?

Mary Hart (14:07.53)
So the core value is you saw my tagline from Ted Lasso, the TV show, which I really like, which is doing the right thing is never the wrong thing. And I truly, truly believe that. And I believe in, I think it was Zig Ziglar who said, if you help enough people get what they need, you’ll get everything you want. And so everything I’ve done has never been driven by how much money I can make. It’s by how many people can I help and how many people can I serve? Because I know if I focus on that, then everything I need is going to come back to me just naturally.

Christian (14:14.467)
Yes.

Christian (14:27.287)
Mm-hmm.

Mary Hart (14:37.454)
It’s just going to work. And I believe in that saying a rising tide lifts all ships and that we do not live in a zero-sum society, meaning that one person doesn’t have to lose for another person to win. And so my goal is always to structure win-win situations for everybody, whether that’s in a loan, we want the borrower to win.

us to win, a new homeowner to win, the seller to win, we want it to be successful for everyone. In a relationship, you don’t want to have one person who dominates over somebody else to the extent that the other person’s miserable. It needs to be a win-win. And so I think if you look at life that way, how can we help as many people as possible within our skill set?

then everything else will be taken care of. And to treat every person and every opportunity with an open mind, because you don’t know when you’re going to meet your next best friend, your next client, your next business partner, your next borrower, whatever. And so I just like to go into life with a really open, like…

French saying, joie de vivre, love of life. Let’s experience this. We have one life in this body. Let’s experience it and let’s make it the best for everybody we interact with and leave everybody a little bit better than we found them. That’s my goal in life.

Christian (15:51.288)
Yeah.

Christian (15:57.144)
That’s it. love that. Cause there, is no guarantee on a second chance of this. mean, this is our only opportunity. It’s our only shot. We’re only here for such a short amount of time. know a lot of people will say, that’s very cliche, but it really is. mean, when you really think about it, how many days is in a year? And then ultimately the average lifespan is, is, decreasing now on lower than ever. And it’s like, you are here for a reason. Like the chances of you even being born, I think it’s over 44 and a trillion.

Mary Hart (16:15.683)
Yeah.

Christian (16:26.282)
It’s very high. mean, so for you to be in this position, you have to maximize everything you can out of this life and get in the right rooms and help other people grow because it’s gonna help you grow, right? Your whole goal of being put on this planet is to be able to serve other people. Yeah, you know? So that is what it’s about. everything that you’re saying, I align with 100%. I think it’s what you’re doing right now, Mary, is…

Mary Hart (16:26.552)
Yeah, I don’t know.

Mary Hart (16:38.186)
Absolutely.

Christian (16:54.402)
It is what’s needed right now in the world more than ever. Cause as you just said, right, there’s a lot of people to where they’re relying on other people to take care of them. They’re not taking the bull by the horns is what I like to call it. And to ultimately get that freedom, you have to take the bull by the horns and release yourself from the grind almost, right? Of just like, I’m relying on this, relying on this. No, there’s nothing greater than having full conviction and ownership within yourself.

Mary Hart (17:06.094)
Great.

Mary Hart (17:11.778)
You do.

Christian (17:24.448)
And so you can provide that also for your family and then help another family achieve that same common goal. So with all that being said, what is, what is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody out there who wants to build a legacy, right? Who wants to build generational wealth for their family?

Mary Hart (17:29.016)
Right. Right. Absolutely.

Mary Hart (17:47.63)
Well, you’re going to limit me to one. I don’t know if I can come up with just one. I think the first, and I’m going to give you a few, I can’t do it. I think you have to start out being, knowing who you are and being true to yourself because you’re never going to get too far if you’re fake. You have to have a life of service and.

Christian (17:53.112)
Well, however you want to take it then. Yeah.

Mary Hart (18:08.846)
just go for it. have to be able to go for it and trust in yourself that you can do it. I think we all struggle with mindset sometimes and if we give ourselves, have faith in ourselves and get ourselves in the right room, we can do a lot more. And so my piece of advice is really that it takes four pillars in any successful venture in, let’s say real estate. You need the right mindset, you need to obtain the right knowledge, you need to work with the right network of people

you need to take action because you can learn and meet people all day long but if you don’t take action you’re not going anywhere. So it takes four things and I call them those propellers that push you down the runway to liftoff. There’s mindset, knowledge, network and action. That’s my biggest advice.

Christian (18:57.548)
I love that, right? Because so often many will take information overload and then not apply that information that’s given, right? And it’s so important to, you you got to dip your toes in the water. You have to get a little uncomfortable to put yourself out there to make a change, right? Because you can absorb and yes, you know, Mary, I mean, there’s so many different more podcasts out there just like we’re doing now. And just all this information that’s out there. I mean, you have a tool in your hand 24 seven, but most don’t.

do anything with it, right? So that’s the biggest thing is just really applying what you’re learning and actually just taking immediate action. Because if you wait too long, you might not ever do it, right? You’ll let the fear slip in, right? And then the thoughts start to come into your mind. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Mary Hart (19:37.964)
Right, and I think that’s where, yeah.

I think that’s where masterminds and mentors really come in handy because you can learn all day long and you may have analysis paralysis where you just analyze all day long and don’t do anything. But if you align yourselves with people who are already doing something in that space you want to be in and get them to help you, then you’re closer to being able to take action yourself. So I think that network piece is really important.

Christian (20:11.864)
Yes, absolutely. And with that being said, Mary, where do people need to go to reach out to you? Where can they go to work with you? Why don’t you just share some information on where people can go and do that?

Mary Hart (20:25.304)
Sure, so they can always just email me, maryhart at fairoaksfunding.com, so F-A-I-R-O-A-K-S, funding.com. Or my other very easy email is just maryhart at maryhart.net. So either of those will work. That’s probably the easiest way. If you’re gonna be in Richmond, Virginia next week, I’m giving the keynote talk at the Dealmaker Conference, so you can see me there. But I would say just reach out and email me, tell me what you need, how I can help, and then I can point you in the right direction

either something that I can help you with or maybe someone in my network can help you with.

Christian (21:03.182)
Amazing. Well, you heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. Mary, I love everything about you. Honestly, I mean, the impact and just everything you’re about. I’m just wishing you nothing but the best. And I’m excited to see what you continue to do. And I know I gained a lot of value, gained a lot of insight. just love your energy. I know everybody else is going to love it as well. And I would love to have you on again in the near future because there’s a lot of stuff I wish we had more time that I want to talk to you about that I feel like we could get into. So we’ll talk about that.

But again, Mary, thank you so much. was a pleasure having you on today.

Mary Hart (21:33.059)
Thank you.

It was great and I’m happy to be on again. Thank you.

Christian (21:42.3)
huh, yes ma’am. All right guys, well as always, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode as much as I did. And as always my friends, we will see you on the next episode. Take care.