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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Deric Gwinn, a hard money lender who shares his journey into the lending industry, the growth of his business, and the creative solutions he offers to clients. Deric discusses the importance of understanding client needs, building strong relationships, and the strategies that have contributed to his company’s success. He also highlights the significance of networking and the role of a dedicated team in achieving business goals.
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Deric Gwinn (00:00)
But I can tell you, without any hesitation, the way to grow your business and your networkis to get out into the local community and begin branding yourself. And our people are getting so good at that. They are now understanding that while there’s a lot of things to do at your desk and to originate loans and to do some outreach and some cold calling,
that the true way to move the needle is through relationships and that is face to face.
Michelle Kesil (02:06)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone that I’m looking forward to chatting with, Deric Gwinn, who has been making serious moves as a hard money lender. So, excited to have you on the show today, Deric.Deric Gwinn (02:25)
Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Looking forward to it.Michelle Kesil (02:30)
I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching creative solutions in your lending industry, so let’s dive in. First off, for those not yet familiar with you and your world, can you give the short version of what your main focus is?Deric Gwinn (02:54)
Yeah, of course,are a full service hard money brokerage. We originate fix and flip loans, DSCR loans, ground up construction. We’re getting into a little bit of commercial as well. ⁓ Our focus is really on understanding our clients and understanding our investors and their needs so deeply, as well as our lending partners needs so deeply that we make these transactions as seamless as possible for our clients.
Michelle Kesil (03:26)
Awesome. And what markets are you currently operating in?Deric Gwinn (03:32)
Yeah, good question. We’re currently, we’re not quite nationwide. There’s a handful of states we are not lending in. ⁓ But for the most part, for the purpose of the podcast, we would say nationwide. We would have people reach out to us and ask us specifically for states, but it’s only about five or six that we currently are not active in.Michelle Kesil (03:53)
Awesome. How did you get started with your linting business?Deric Gwinn (04:00)
Yeah, it’s a great question. Really good story. I was in sales my entire career not related to real estate. And in 2007, ⁓ I bought a property to flip and wanted to get on on the real estate flipping craze and realized quickly that it took some skill and that I didn’t really know what I was doing. ⁓flipped the property, had a really great experience and had an opportunity after that to start originating loans through a friend of a friend that was working for a hard money lender. And it was really a great balance and a perfect marriage between my skill set in sales and my newfound passion for real estate. And I also found it a way to start understanding more about the backend of
real estate investing in terms of financing and specifically hard money. Hard money was always a little bit intimidating to me. I didn’t know that much about it.
And I originally took the position with the thought of it being kind of temporary and a way for me to understand how to underwrite my deals. And if I was getting, ⁓ you know, a decent price and a decent program for my needs. Once I got in, I loved it. ⁓ I was able to build a lot of relationships.
I loved the sales aspect and the repeatability of having clients that were coming back over and over and it stuck ever since. So after working for direct lenders for the first half of my career, it became very clear to me that the real value that I was bringing to my clients wasn’t so much the company or the loan programs as much as it was me. I was the value.
⁓ and as a direct lender, ⁓ you know, you just have a certain box to lend out of and my repeat customers, even though they was the same person, their situation from one project to the next could change and it could change drastically. And I found myself saying no more than I wanted to. And that’s kind of where the idea to go out on my own.
came from and flash forward now another five years and I merged my company with ⁓ another ⁓ colleague of mine and we put ourselves together and started Futures Funding. So that’s where it all started.
Michelle Kesil (07:32)
Awesome, I love that story. That’s so cool that you were able to leverage different opportunities and skill sets that you have.What do you feel has made the biggest difference in allowing your business to be able to grow and to run smoothly?
Deric Gwinn (07:58)
You know, we were very passionate about what we do. ⁓ when we started our company, it was just a couple guys slinging loans, taking care of their customers. And that was great for a while, but the biggest difference that’s got us to where we are today is now we’re treating this like a real company. We’re being very aggressive in the way we’re going after the marketplace.in our expansion and in our growth. We’ve brought in another partner who has been very instrumental and is just, we’re all relentless when it comes to growing our business and when it comes to our relationships with our clients, we’re absolutely relentless. And so,
That passion to take care of our clients is really what is translating into our success. We know for a fact that if we simply do what we say we’re going to do and we go a step beyond and we don’t get hung up on any one specific loan, our goal is to earn that first phone call and to earn that first opportunity and to take care of people so well that we
always get the first call. So anyway, that passion to our customers and then that deep understanding of our lending partners has really catapulted us to where we are with tremendous growth over the past year.
Michelle Kesil (09:41)
Yeah, amazing. I know that when we chatted a little bit before recording, you mentioned that you have creative solutions for the ways that you’re able to ⁓ obtain the finances. Can you share more about that to the audience?Deric Gwinn (09:47)
Mm-hmm.Sure, You know, as a broker, we lean really hard into the fact that we have more than one solution for our clients. ⁓ And I’d like to preface that by saying we’re not the type of broker that says, hey, I have 100 places where I could take this loan. In my world, what that means is that you don’t have great relationships with any of your lending partners. We have about five or six.
We have lending partners that are kind of straight down the middle of the fairway. We have some that are way more creative and allow us to fund deals in as little as 12 hours. We have some that specialize in ground up. We have some that will do any asset class up to farms and golf courses. So we’ve aligned ourselves.
very strategically with a very small amount of lending partners whose loan programs vary just enough that we rarely have to say no to our clients. And one of the laurels we stand on is that even though we know we have a lot of solutions and that we are a great fit and we’re not gonna have to say no terribly often, there are times we have to say no. And it’s better to just quickly give somebody a no.
I’m not the right fit for you today, then it is to spin your wheels trying to find a solution and then find yourself telling them a week later that you can’t do the deal when you could have just let them go find the solution from day one. So that’s how we have structured our business in terms of our lending.
Michelle Kesil (12:19)
What are some examples of people that you have the solution for and the ones that you are turning away?Deric Gwinn (12:29)
Yeah, we have great solutions for, I would say, investors. The ones that we are probably not as well ⁓ placed today would be commercial loans. ⁓ We haven’t really gone down that road. As we are growing, we are looking into more solutions for commercial loans and solutions for our partners. ⁓We are not as strong today in ground up, but that is changing. We have brought in a couple lenders. As we dive in head first and understand their guidelines more deeply, I know that part of our business is going to grow dramatically. And I think there’s a really big opportunity for us there as well. ⁓ I’d say anyone that has, let’s just say a little bit of capital.
we can get the loan done. The hardest thing for us right now is, you know, there’s a lot of people in the industry, there’s a lot of people that are new, there’s a lot of people trying to start investing and we want absolutely to encourage them and to be their partner and to help them be on the right path to being successful. ⁓ That being the case, sometimes we have to be very mindful of not writing bad loans, just to be frank.
⁓ And if we see a risk involved with mostly low capital, those are some deals that we are turning away as of today. ⁓ FICO score for us isn’t always an issue. We have options where we’re truly asset based and we aren’t looking at FICO. But liquidity is always the sticky point when we’re turning people away today.
Michelle Kesil (14:29)
Yeah, absolutely, that makes a lot of sense.What are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?
Deric Gwinn (14:45)
Yeah, I just kind of mentioned it a little bit ago. There’s two things we’re really focused on. ⁓ Internally as a company, ⁓ we are really working on dialing in our marketing programs.You know, when you start your own company, the one thing that you take for granted is where you were before your marketing and your systems were already in place for you. So as an entrepreneur,
as a business owner, a lot of those things you can have the best plan on the planet when you start, but you realize there’s a lot of pivoting and adapting. So internally, we’re really working a lot on our processes. ⁓ We actually have what I believe is one of the better training programs in our industry, and that would include the direct lenders that I’ve worked for.
So we’re really focused on bringing in the right people with the right DNA, regardless of their experience in real estate or lending and having an absolute top notch training program, including AI and some custom GPTs, some very kind of out of the box tools that help us get them prepared to be killers.
Michelle Kesil (16:45)
Awesome, that’s exciting.Deric Gwinn (16:48)
It’s been really fun.Michelle Kesil (16:51)
Yeah, when you’re working with investors, are there certain types of loans or strategies that you’re leaning more towards?Deric Gwinn (17:07)
Yeah, I mean, our company was founded primarily on a lot of existing fix and flip relationships. So by far we are originating more fix and flip loans than anything today. Our objective is to change that mix over time. ⁓ just like, just like an investor has to, ⁓ make sure that their portfolio is diverse.to withstand market conditions, it’s the same in lending. If we’re just focused on one lending avenue, one loan type, one type of customer, then we aren’t very well positioned for changes in the market and that can affect us. As we all know, real estate is very cyclical. It’s very up and down. It can be a roller coaster ride. So we’re focused really hard on diversifying.
our mix of client, our mix of loan types. I see a really big opportunity with DSCR loans right now and we are ⁓ really good at originating those and understanding the intricacies of them. ⁓ So we’re focused on those and then also as I mentioned earlier, I think ground up is gonna be a really big piece of the puzzle for us.
We are just committed to understanding it a little more deeply before we just jump in.
Michelle Kesil (18:37)
Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense.Deric Gwinn (18:40)
Yeah.Michelle Kesil (18:42)
When it comes to growing your business, whether that’s connecting with lenders or investors through networking or other relationship building activities, what are some things that have made that biggest difference for you?Deric Gwinn (18:59)
Mm-hmm.Yeah, that’s a great question. I love that question. You know, we get real hung up sometimes as individuals in our companies on how do we grow our customer base, right? We all need more customers to survive and we all need more to fuel that growth. So marketing is a big piece of it for sure. We’re always finding ways to market. We’re ⁓
finding people to market to. We’re diverse in the way we market, whether it’s through mailers or ⁓ even cold call campaigns. ⁓ We’ve ⁓ done a little bit of AI outreach as well, ⁓ certainly email campaigns. We’ve done everything that everyone else is doing.
But I can tell you, without any hesitation, the way to grow your business and your network
is to get out into the local community and begin branding yourself. And our people are getting so good at that. They are now understanding that while there’s a lot of things to do at your desk and to originate loans and to do some outreach and some cold calling,
that the true way to move the needle is through relationships and that is face to face.
sometimes that really gets lost in our business because it’s really easy to sit at a desk, take phone calls, somebody needs a loan, I can help walk you through it. But to get out into your local community and have people recognize you as, hey, there’s the hard money guy or the hard money guy is going to be here tonight, I’m sure, right? You start to build your own brand within your company.
And that is truly how we are moving the needle right now.
Michelle Kesil (20:55)
Yeah, I love that. think it’s important and a differentiator when you’re face to face because we can get so bombarded on the phone and when you don’t have a face for the name it kind of just gets swept under.Deric Gwinn (20:58)
Yeah.for sure.
Absolutely. Absolutely. You can never substitute for sitting across the table from someone. There’s just no substitute for that. And something that we have done recently is we realize and we understand that, you know, our originators, that’s a really loose term that we use. They’re really salespeople and they’re very good at relationships and driving business. And we try to keep them
free of processing loans so they have the ability to do what they’re very very good at.
Michelle Kesil (21:51)
Yeah, amazing. And as far as your team, I know you just mentioned some of roles you have. ⁓ What does the team on your business look like?Deric Gwinn (22:04)
Yeah, so there’s three of us in the ownership team. James is our CEO. I am actually the VP of Ops and Ryan is our VP of Sales. ⁓ We have six originators right now, one of which is likely to take on more of a team leader managerial role for the rest of our sales team. And then we have a fantastic young processor who ismaking sure everything crosses the finish line.
Michelle Kesil (22:41)
Amazing, that’s so important to have all of that support with you.Deric Gwinn (22:47)
Totally, totally. And in the near future, we’ll certainly bring more salespeople in. We’ll absolutely need another processor. And I think there’s a high likelihood we may bring either a media person in-house or we may even bring an underwriter in-house. And as a broker, we’re always bound by the underwriting guidelines of our lending partners.But we differentiate ourselves a little bit by having our own underwriting guidelines as well. We want to make sure that when we submit a loan, it’s so clean to their process that it can almost go straight into underwriting. And that’s hard to do, and it doesn’t happen every time, but that’s definitely our objective. And having the right people in place help us accomplish that.
Michelle Kesil (23:36)
Yeah, absolutely. Before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?Deric Gwinn (23:49)
Yeah, for sure. ⁓ We are at futuresfundinginc.com. There is another company that’s with a similar name. So I just want to repeat it again. It’s futures with an S fundinginc.com. And my email address is Deric and that’s spelled D-E-R-I-C. Not many people would get that right. I have a feeling. D-E-R-I-C at futuresfundinginc.com.
Michelle Kesil (24:22)
Well, I appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. Thank you for being here.Deric Gwinn (24:29)
Thank you, this was really fun. I really enjoyed it. Have a great rest of your day. Okay. All right.Michelle Kesil (24:32)
I’m glad. Thank you.And for those listeners tuning in, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Deric who are building real businesses and we’ll see you on the next episode.
