From Boots to Buildings: How a Veteran Conquered Real Estate Challenges

Stephen Schmidt (00:02.606)
Welcome back to the show where we introduce you the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs It’s your host Stephen Schmidt and I’m back with a real treat for you guys today I got Clayton Silva in the house Clayton has a very decorated background He’s formerly active duty in the army and then is now in the National Guard still house hacked his way Accidentally into some real estate success got into the lending space He’s been investing in the single-family spaces now for over six years

and is also a licensed mortgage banker in all 50 states and including Puerto Rico. So if you’re trying to get into that Puerto Rico market, you don’t have a connection. He might be your guy. Owns his own branch of mortgage banking. And we’re going to get off on talking about a whole lot of stuff today and how, what he does benefits investors and just his experience in the real estate world. So just remember before we get started at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs.

two to five X their businesses, which allows them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. That being said, Clayton, welcome to the show today.

Clayton Silva (01:07.571)
Thank you Stephen for having me.

Stephen Schmidt (01:10.134)
You bet, Hopefully my intro to you did you some justice there. I tried to fit as much in as possible, but for our listeners sake, I know we had a little bit chance to speak pre-show. Could you just give us a little bit of background to how you got started and what got you to where you’re at today?

Clayton Silva (01:28.637)
Sure thing. I got started. Truthfully, I blame my high school econ teacher. Got me into a stock project. I got really excited and interested in investing that way. And then from there, it was just looking for investment opportunities wherever I could find them. I joined the military right after graduating college and went enlisted into the 82nd. Had a good time there jumping out of airplanes and doing some fun stuff with the boys.

I got the opportunity to meet a lot of really good people there and I was in Fayetteville, North Carolina is where that base is. I joined a little bit older because I had been through college and everything like that and I decided I wanted to buy a house rather than live in the barracks. I had two buddies that were really pushing me to do that because I knew I could qualify for something and I got into my first house there on a VA loan and then rented out two of the bedrooms to them and

I started trying to scale and it just kept getting harder and harder with the financing so I decided to learn a little bit more financing. But that’s definitely how I got started.

Stephen Schmidt (02:36.001)
So on that note, you talk about getting harder to get the financing. What are some of the things that people don’t realize when you’re going to buy multiple properties, especially in your own name, not in an LLC, all the things that I’m sure you’ve come to find out now yourself, personal guarantees. What are some of those things people don’t really think about when they think, well, it’s simple. I just have to figure out a down payment and then anybody will give me money so I can just go buy 50 properties. Doesn’t really work like that.

Clayton Silva (03:02.707)
Correct. The issue I think looking back that I ran into is I worked with a loan officer that didn’t have a ton of options, truthfully. And so he just knew the cut and dry conventional VA FHA stuff. I think I probably had a DTI issue because I didn’t have…

Stephen Schmidt (03:13.133)
Mm.

Clayton Silva (03:22.993)
like a 12 month rental history on that second one that we were trying to purchase. So it was probably a debt to income issue is my guess. He didn’t really explained it to me, but looking back, that’s my best educated guess. I ended up having to get my dad to just co-sign on the loan for the second one to be able to buy it. That turned out to be one of my best investments.

But I think that was the biggest issue was working with a lender that wasn’t very creative, kind of just cookie cutter. And then secondly, the big thing like you were asking that people run into is debt to income, too many finance properties, the paperwork starts getting more more complicated. So you got to kind of think outside the box and get different loan products that are available out there. And the financing starts to get easier if you have someone that has a really wide toolkit in the arena with which they can help you fund your next deal.

you

Stephen Schmidt (04:17.485)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. being in the army, you’re kind all over the place too, naturally. And so when you bought your house, was that where you’re centrally located or are you all over the country now at this point with houses just where you were living at the time? How’d that work out?

Clayton Silva (04:36.723)
So I bought in Fayetteville just because that’s where I was living in Fayetteville in North Carolina for those that don’t know is right outside of Fort Bragg. It’s one of the largest military installations in the world by population so there is a huge influx of potential renters every single year.

It turned out to be a great market for a number of reasons. I won’t get too deep into that, but one of the biggest things is BAH, which is your basic allowance for housing. It’s a tax free, paid for by the government for housing for married soldiers and soldiers of a certain rank. And you can just Google, look up exactly what the BAH rate is for a soldier based on their rank and their situation. And then we just backed into houses from there. So was like, I know I can get at least this much in rent.

this is what they’re getting tax free and we would just buy accordingly so we would look for a purchase price where that rent made sense and we were able to scale pretty quickly that way. But as for your question of where we’re at we had a few in North Carolina, sorry didn’t mean to cut you off, but we had a few in North Carolina then we bought a luxury Airbnb in Phoenix and then we have our primary here in California so I’ve got kind of east to west coast we’ve got homes everywhere.

Stephen Schmidt (05:37.949)
No kidding. So are most of your properties

Stephen Schmidt (05:56.366)
That’s awesome, man. So what got you into the lending side of things? How did that transition work from starting to have some success in the actual investing side and then realizing, man, I need to really learn more about the actual finance piece of it? How’d you get into that?

Clayton Silva (06:15.283)
Sure. So I originally started by reading.

By the time I was buying that second one, I knew I was getting ready to get out of active duty and head back to California where my family lived. I knew I was gonna switch from enlisted to officer, from active to guard, and do what’s called a Green to Gold non-scholarship program. I knew that was on the horizon for me, so I was like, man, I really wanna keep this house. Even though we’ve got a little bit of equity, I don’t really wanna sell it. I wanna see how I can keep this and keep growing this. And so I literally Googled

something like how to invest in real estate long distance. And then that book, Long Distance Real Estate Investing by David Green came up. I read through the whole thing, I think in like a weekend. And I was like, this is a gold mine. This is how I’m gonna do what I wanna do. And so I started there and then I got real heavy into bigger pockets as I’m sure a lot of real estate investors do. A lot of other real estate podcasts such as this one and stuff like that. I started just listening and just acquiring as much information as I could.

One of my favorite quotes is just trying to pay that stupid tax as quickly as possible. And I was able to learn a lot in a short period of time and then I realized, hey, I need to learn a lot more about the financing side of the house if I really want to scale this. So I got into…

Being a mortgage broker and then did that for a couple of years got a lot of reps Practice with a lot of different hurdles tested a lot of different sales pitches products ideas all these different things that we came across and then once I felt that I was confident in my abilities we started our own branch here at cornerstone first mortgage our branch is called Atlas mortgage group and We’ve been doing that for a little over a year now, and it’s really taken off for us

Stephen Schmidt (08:07.297)
What’s your grand vision with that?

Clayton Silva (08:11.507)
My grand vision with the branch, right now we have three full-time loan officers, one full-time processor, my wife works with me now full-time and the operations side of the house, she does all the marketing, advertising, branding, all the website design, and then a lot of the accounting and a lot of the procedures that people don’t see in the background, just continuous optimization, trying to make the process better, smoother, faster for the client.

I think long term my goal would be to have a team of about 10 full time loan officers. We do a lot of training for them. We do a lot of like accountability stuff. So I’m really big on holding myself accountable and helping hold others accountable. So we give them kind of a couple products. We give them a spreadsheet. It’s like, you literally just have to make X number of calls every week. Here’s kind of what you got to do. Here’s how you can bring in business, things like that. So a team of about 10 loan officers, maybe one more processor.

and just grow that to the scale that we want. really, we work very heavily with investors. So my goal is to always stay ahead of our investors, stay big enough that we can continue to help service our bigger investors, our mid-size investors, and even the first time investors for as long as possible, no matter which market they want to scale into or how big they want to scale. We want to stay kind of ahead of them so that we can be a one-stop lending shop for all of their residential lending.

needs. So that’s kind of my dream. I really want to build this out. It’s kind of a family affair. My one-year-old’s in here with us three days a week in the office kind of roaming around. So it’s a real fun family project. I love what I do and we love helping investors scale because I remember how frustrating that was for me. So we started with that vision in mind.

Stephen Schmidt (10:00.085)
Right. And with what you’re doing, what are some of the ways that you differentiate yourself and your operation from, you know, let’s say like the key obvious of the RC ends of the world.

Clayton Silva (10:10.643)
Sure, so

I would say wide toolkit is what I always wanted. I wanted to have maybe not the perfect best product for one specific thing, but like a top five product in everything is kind of how we look at it. Like I said, our goal has always been to be that one stop shop for investors. And we want to have a product that is extremely competitive in every space, whether you want

Fix and flip, ground-up construction. You want to do DSCR, bank statement, no-doc, conventional FHA, VA. You want to buy a blanket loan for 30 houses. You want to do a builder forward for some residential development. Whatever that is, we wanted to have the widest toolkit that we could that was still extremely competitive. Not necessarily easy to sell, but just a good product that I would use that I would sell to my parents kind of thing. Something that I felt good.

and I can sleep well at night knowing I didn’t just put them into some goofy hard money that’s gonna end up taking their house down the road and stuff like that and ultimately hinder their goals. So that was for me when we were interviewing around trying to figure out what shop to end up at, that was the biggest thing for me. And then we really wanted the process to be very tech focused, very client focused. It’s definitely more work on our end than it was on the broker side of the house, but it’s been so rewarding.

because we can just offer such a wide array of products and keep the process as streamlined as possible for the client.

Stephen Schmidt (11:53.548)
Now, so why do you say that it’s more work on your end now versus when you were a broker? What are some of the differences there?

Clayton Silva (12:02.001)
Sure, so.

Let me back up just a hair. There’s three types of residential lenders typically. There’s brokers, which a lot of people are familiar with. They go out, they shop for a bunch of different products from a bunch of different banks, but they’re not funding any of these loans with their own money. So a lot of the work is actually passed along to the bank itself. So for example, if I’m a broker, I broke it to Rocket Mortgage. Rocket Mortgage is actually doing a lot of the LOS stuff in the background, which is just like the operating software that they use to process loans.

And the broker is really just collecting documents, passing along the rocket and being done. Then you have on the other side of the spectrum, you have direct retail. Think of like your Wells Fargo, Bank of America. They only offer these niche products that fit Wells Fargo or Bank of America’s buy box, right? So if you’re not in that tight little shock group, you’re not getting one of their loans. Then you have what are called correspondent lenders. Think of Cross Country, Cornerstone First Mortgage, a lot of these guys. They are both. So they will have a huge

Stephen Schmidt (12:39.981)
Mm.

Stephen Schmidt (12:51.606)
Mm-hmm.

Clayton Silva (13:03.055)
range of products in-house, direct retail that they’re funding with their own money. They’re a mortgage bank so they need that money back so they’re immediately going to sell your loan typically after a month or two.

And if there’s a product that they don’t offer, they can still broker. So think like hard money, fix and flip, ground up construction, anything they don’t offer in-house, they’re still able to broker it out. So you get kind of this amazing best of both worlds where you’re still shopping, interest rates, you’re still getting all the best products, but you have way more flexibility because anything in-house, you’re working directly with your own underwriters. You’re working directly with your own processors. You have direct access to the CEO, the management.

the head of underwriting, all these things, if you need to make exceptions or you need something rushed, things like that. So you have a lot more control of the process, but with control, with good pricing, all that stuff, puts a lot more work on our plate to be able to handle that. I have to do a lot more of the actual process than I would just on the broker side, if that makes sense.

Stephen Schmidt (14:09.163)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. So how have the disciplines of you being in the armed forces translated over into what you do now?

Clayton Silva (14:19.187)
I always joke that nothing is hard. There are things that people would consider hard. I know I never anticipated being in a quote unquote sales job. That was never on my bingo card for my life.

Calling people, calling realtors, getting rejections, all those things can be hard for some people. And I just think about some of the stuff that I’ve had to do in the past. I’m like, this is not that bad. This is a great job. I get to sit in the air conditioned office. I’m not sleeping on the floor in the swamps of Louisiana right now. I’m not in Baghdad right now being shot, anything like that. So nothing is that hard relative to that. You kind of build this confidence in your own personal ability. And then the team.

Stephen Schmidt (14:51.361)
you

Clayton Silva (15:07.221)
I love working on a team. I’ve always been in team sports. I’ve always loved working on a team, helping other people get better, working with them to help myself get better. know, like that constant growth that you get by being around like-minded, good, professional individuals, that’s something that I think a lot of people miss when they get out of the military. And for any, you know, veterans in transition, I always tell them, like, there are people like that out there and they might not be prior military, they might be just working professionals.

that are extremely passionate and good at what they do. And you can learn a lot from them and get a lot of that same camaraderie and team environment out of that. And I love that about the company I’m at right now. It’s very team focused. We have a huge open company group chat. People are constantly asking questions, getting ideas, and passing along a ton of just great free information to each other.

Stephen Schmidt (16:03.133)
Mmm. Love that answer. Nothing’s hard. I can understand that for sure. We won’t go into my background a whole lot, but I totally get that. Yeah, I mean, sitting here and talking to people all day is way easier than anything I’ve ever done, that’s for sure. So speaking of teams, obviously every good team has to have a great leader or else the team eventually crumbles. Who’s one of the…

Clayton Silva (16:07.761)
Yeah. Yeah.

Clayton Silva (16:21.244)
Exactly.

Stephen Schmidt (16:32.649)
maybe top two, top three if you have to, but who would you say is the best leader you’ve ever followed and what have you taken from them that you now emulate in your day to day?

Clayton Silva (16:43.923)
That’s a really, really good question.

I have to think about that a little bit. One that comes to mind is my grandpa. My grandpa has always been my inspiration for almost everything I do in my life. He grew up, not to get too deep in the weeds on his background, but he grew up very, very poor. He was a dairy farmer in central California. His parents were fresh off the boat from Portugal. And that was all he knew. And he worked his way up, went to college on a football scholarship, and then went

and got his masters, ended up starting a construction company and led that company to pretty immense success. And he’s always been kind of an inspiration for a good leader. And a lot of that was work ethic, never asking people to do anything he wasn’t willing to do. There are definitely, you know, he’s human. There are some things that I don’t want to emulate that he did, but there are a lot of things that I take away from his life and his story and just all of the drive that he had. I’d say another one for me,

I’ve had a lot of really good leaders in the military that I emulate a lot of aspects from. I would say one of them being even like my old first sergeant, he was extremely calm under pressure. He was that you could tell he’d been there kind of person and that brought a lot of peace to the soldiers, you know, in those really tough times when you’re abroad and you’re doing something that you’ve never seen before that’s very stressful or can be very

stressful and very difficult and you’re with someone who’s been there before. So I really emulate that in my own life. I seek mentorship wherever I go and I try to find those people that have been there before me because it gives you a lot more peace knowing like, hey, this person has traveled that path before. And that’s a lot of where actually the inspiration for our logo and for Atlas in general came from was, hey, we’ve been here before. We’ve done this lending process many times. How can we help shoulder this burden with you and be a partner for you?

Clayton Silva (18:49.813)
and really help you on your journey and help you up that mountain, because we’ve been up that mountain before, basically. And we’ve been there many times with many investors and many people buying their homes. And we want to help you by experience, basically, and making it a more peaceful process that way. So that is something that has kind of always stuck with me. But great question. I definitely have to think further on any other leaders, but those are probably the first two that come to mind.

Stephen Schmidt (19:15.565)
Yeah, well that answer man, especially about your grandpa being the first one that came to mind You know, that’s a big one for me, too actually my granddad was an e9 in the army at the height of his career 30-year vet and He was the type of NCO that you know if the guys were in the barracks having to scrub the toilets with their toothbrushes he’d be right there with them scrubbing him with his and Very very very well respected in his military career. So I love that answer about your grandpa, too so what

Clayton Silva (19:25.587)
amazing.

Clayton Silva (19:36.754)
Yep.

Stephen Schmidt (19:45.55)
You mentioned you’ve always looked for mentors things along those lines like who’s your who’s your mentor now? What do you really what do you really look out and I’m thinking of this from the frame of Someone that knows they need help Like what do you look for in a mentor who mentors you now and what should people be looking for as qualities in a mentor that are actually going to take them from X place to Y place where they need to go

Clayton Silva (20:08.989)
Sure, he’s going to be super embarrassed that I mention this, but there is another branch manager within the company. His name is Eric Rodner.

I’ll do his horn for him because he’ll never do that for himself. at in 2022 and 2023, he would have been a top 10 lender in the country. He is pretty exceptional at what he does. He is very knowledgeable, very kind of quiet in the background person. He’s not a big marketing personality like a lot of people think in this space. And whenever I’m looking for a mentor, I look at the people that are where I want

to be in a certain duration of time. So I think some people get this wrong and they skip the steps. So they look at the Warren Buffets of the world, these kind of living legends are like, that’s my mentor, I wanna be like that. And it’s like, you’ve got about 28 steps that you have to get to before you get to that level. And Eric is definitely multiple steps above where I want to be, but he has been extremely gracious with his time. And we meet weekly, we just talk a lot of the times, it’s more just,

Being in their presence, anytime you can get in front of them or stay near them or just listen to how they do business, how they handle objections, how they take their sales calls, what kind of things they focus on. He’s been a great mentor to me. I have a lot of family friends that have been extremely successful in business, not lending business, very, very different streams of business, but learning whatever you can from those people as well. If your goal is to grow.

in real estate and you think of it like a business, find other business professionals that are further along than you. And then lastly, what we just did recently is I actually hired a business coach. I’m about like two months into that with him and it’s been really good. He puts a lot of pressure on us of like, hey, you know, I think you’re great. I think you’re doing well here, but you got to hit X, Y, Z. And he’s just like, he’s very out of the mortgage business. He’s just a general business coach. And that’s been a really good fresh perspective for

Clayton Silva (22:17.703)
me because it’s easy to get kind of locked in that nitty gritty granular of the exact industry you’re in. So finding someone that’s kind of outside that to give you a fresh perspective on just good business practice in general. So those are kind of my top ones.

Stephen Schmidt (22:39.445)
Love that answer, So Clayton, tell me this. If you had to go back to the beginning of when you got started in real estate investing to where you’re at now, and I know we haven’t really even gone into whether or not you’re still investing or any of that, right? But if you had to go back to the beginning, but you could take all of the lessons you’ve learned over the last six years back with you, what would you do different and what would you do the same?

Clayton Silva (23:03.571)
It’s easy to say what I would have done different. I probably would have done most of it relatively the same. There’s one house in particular that I probably wouldn’t have bought knowing what I know now. I mean, real estate in the long run is a pretty forgiving asset.

I bought my first house. I’ve told this story before, but I bought my first house based on shower height and people like don’t believe me on this, but I had a roommate that was six foot four that was going to be living with me and we were walking all these houses and he couldn’t fit in any of the showers. And that’s literally how we found the first house was I knew this guy was going to be my roommate. I knew he was going be living with me. I didn’t want him to be uncomfortable. It turned out to be a phenomenal investment. We’ve, still have it to this day. I’ve got two officer buddies of mine that were in my bullet class.

Stephen Schmidt (23:34.785)
I love that.

Clayton Silva (23:53.173)
living there right now, taking great care of that house and stuff like that. you know, there’s not, people like to get all sophisticated with it. I was as naive as they come. I bought a house based on a shower height. And I think knowing what I know now, I probably would have…

focused more on income generation at my personal job than I would have on accumulating assets like real estate at this time. I’m only 30. I’m still pretty young in my career. I think it’s so much easier and

Stephen Schmidt (24:25.921)
Hmm.

Clayton Silva (24:33.563)
Not necessarily better. Everyone’s in a different situation. But for us, think focusing on that income generation would have been much more important early on. I was more worried about accumulating the real estate asset and it can be a great saving tool. It can be a great safe haven for your wealth and stuff like that. But I think my ROI calculation has shifted heavily. So we’re divesting from a lot of real estate. We’re dumping all of that into marketing and advertising for our business. And we’re really trying to grow this business, improve.

systems processes, software, all that good stuff. And that has had a higher ROI on my time and on my resources than just leaving it in some single-family residences. So I think that’s the biggest thing that’s been a mind mindset shift for me in the last probably six months to a year is focusing on that income generating activities rather than on the passive saving and investing activities. Apologies, phone went off. Should have put that on silent.

Stephen Schmidt (25:29.535)
Mm-hmm, 100%. You’re good. Well, Clayton, I appreciate you joining us today. If anybody wants to learn more about you or what you’re working on, where should they go for that?

Clayton Silva (25:43.571)
Can you say that one more time?

Stephen Schmidt (25:47.365)
Yeah, I said, I appreciate you coming on today. If anybody wants to actually learn more about you, what you’re working on, maybe hit you up for a Puerto Rico loan, where would they go for that?

Clayton Silva (25:57.747)
Hey, Kil. Sure. So our website is atlasmortgagegrp, short for group, atlasmortgagegrp.com. Find me on Instagram at atlasmortgagegrp. I’m on LinkedIn, Clayton Silva. Those are kind of the three main platforms that we use. Happy to leave my phone number or anything like that in the show notes or email if someone wants to give me a call. We take calls all day long.

Stephen Schmidt (26:25.343)
You bet. Well everybody, I hope you enjoyed today’s show and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks again for being here, Clayton.

Clayton Silva (26:32.019)
Alright, thanks Stephen for having me. I really appreciate your time.