5 Innovative Lending Solutions from King James Lending’s COO

Michael Stansbury (00:00.864)
in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Mike Stansbury today, special guest from Houston, Texas, Rob Trigg. Rob, how are you, sir?

Rob Trigg (00:14.434)
I am doing absolutely great. Not as good as you, but I’m doing great.

Michael Stansbury (00:18.28)
come on now. Well Rob, we gotta pay the bills here first. So guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, two to fivex their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Now Rob, let me ask you this. This is my question for most of my folks. I wanna know the origin story. How did you get on the yellow brick road of real estate investing? Maybe what were you doing beforehand?

Tell me about that.

Rob Trigg (00:49.062)
So I was in the army for 21 years, made a career out of it. my brother-in-law, a big real estate investor brought me to Houston said, hey, we’re gonna get you involved in this real estate game. And at the end of the day, he kind of got me hooked on it, kind of worked for him and his company for latter part of about eight years, worked my way up there. And a lot of people recognized what I was doing. And at the end of the day, I…

was offered another opportunity and took it. And that’s why I’m currently here at King James Lending here in work, know, a little small company out of Seabrook, but we’re the number one lender in Houston. And I’m hoping to change that to where we’re the number one lender nationwide.

Michael Stansbury (01:36.16)
Okay, we’ve got big plans. Alright, so tell me, I always like to get to the origin story too, like what were you doing in the army for 21 years? What did that look like?

Rob Trigg (01:44.786)
Well, I mean, five combat deployments, Afghanistan, Iraq, 21 years of aviation experience and just doing different odd jobs from recruiting to door gunner to middle, I guess you call it middle management supervisor, retired as a staff sergeant.

Rob Trigg (02:16.297)
It’s in the military, there’s a lot of ups and downs, a lot of things that you do in the 21 year period that I could sit here and talk all day about.

Michael Stansbury (02:26.091)
Right. But let me ask you this. So with the experience in the army, like what have you taken with you as far as that helps you being as your, the CEO of the company now and helped you with real estate? How did, you know, what did, what maybe some of the things that you took away from your time in the army that you brought with you?

Rob Trigg (02:43.75)
Well, correction, I’m the COO, not the C- Yeah, COO.

Michael Stansbury (02:45.611)
COO, yes sir, sorry about that. I get dyslexic on Fridays.

Rob Trigg (02:49.97)
Well, I will tell you, in the military you’re kind of like a band of brothers, right? I mean, I don’t know if you have any family or if you’re ever in the military or anything like that, but you you kind of carry that with you throughout your life. Cause you’re, it’s, you know, it’s like, it’s ingrained in you for better.

almost half your life. So when you wake up every day, you know, got your brother to your right, you got your brother to your left, and you got, you got you guys that are…

picking up the rear as well. And I think bringing that mentality to clients that we’re always gonna treat you like family, like a band of brothers and always being there for them and always being able to say, look, I know you’re going through a tough time. I’m not just your lender. I wanna be there in the tough times too. I want you to reach out to me when you’re having that so that we can work it out together. I take a lot of responsibility.

for my clients because their success is our success. And at the end of the day, you can build that, you’re unstoppable. When you can build that connection with your clients. I mean, I’ve got way over 200 plus Google reviews of people saying, Rob is the reason I got into real estate. And a lot of testimonials as well. I take those things to heart and say,

If I’m making that big of an impact on anybody, whether it be one person or ten, then I’ve accomplished something that I brought from the military.

Michael Stansbury (04:30.219)
Yeah, so it offers you to you in 21 years, obviously you’re very relational because you had your brothers with us and you you took that type of mentality on and your customers aren’t just your customers or they’re almost like family. So let me ask you this about your avatar. So tell me about some of the latest folks that you’ve helped. Maybe you can give me an example of somebody that you helped recently and maybe something creatively that King James has done.

we can get into exactly what King James does as far as the services are offered, but I always love to hear some anecdotal stuff about maybe somebody that you helped recently that you can give an example for us.

Rob Trigg (05:11.978)
wow, there’s so many stories. I’ll tell one that’s always near and dear to my heart. There was a guy, I won’t mention his name, I don’t have permission to, we’ll call him Alberto. And Alberto always sticks in my brain because…

You know, when we first met, we kind of had a conflict, you know, and now we’re like brothers, you know, because we both kind of had this mentality of, hey, I know I’m the best at what I do, but I needed to see things from his point of view.

I took him as a very young investor and I was able to provide guidance, was also able to get him connected with a certain individual that actually coached, mentored, and got him out, completely out of his job that he could not stand. Now I’ve done that with several investors. I mean, literally say, Rob, I’m doing this so I can quit my nine to five job. I don’t like where I work.

this is not where my passion is. And getting those investors to see the potential of what they can make outside of a nine to five job by using different resources like mentorship and getting them connected with the right people, it’s life changing, it really is. mean, it can change, as long as you’re around the right people, your mindset can.

can completely change. I’ll tell you a personal story for me. Getting into the right mindset and getting around people that are gonna challenge you to do better every single day. I mean, I was closing loans for almost eight years and never done a fix and flip.

Rob Trigg (07:05.97)
left my previous company, came to this company, within 30 days, I’ve already bought, completed, and fixed. And it’s on the market right now, my first fix and flip. Now I’ve owned rental properties, but not a, you know, as far as investing, I’ve never done, you know, a fix and flip. And I did it within the first 30 days of being here. So changing your mindset and being around people that are not gonna let you fail.

that are not gonna accept no for an answer and are gonna push you to the next level, I think that’s powerful in being around those people.

Michael Stansbury (07:45.816)
You know, so this is a good testimony for what exactly what you said and for what some of the services you guys provide there in Houston is you don’t just provide loans. We were talking earlier before the show started about some of the other services that you King James provide. Kind of go over that a little bit. Tell us, you know, especially for those that are in in Texas and I know you’re wanting to go nationwide. So maybe these are some of the services other places in other states can be offered too. But yeah, tell me about those things that you guys offer there locally in Houston.

Rob Trigg (08:14.62)
So we can lend in all 50 states, which is something new. DSCR 30 year loan, something new that we just introduced three months ago, slowly building. just turned it on and we already got like five loans going this month. So, I mean, that’s pretty good, just getting the word out and getting people attracted to that.

Michael Stansbury (08:37.291)
Well, hey, I know that you and I know what DSCR loans, but let’s say somebody doesn’t have, they’ll be like, what does that mean? They’ve heard that acronym for the first time. I run into this all the time, so I have to act like I’m in fourth grade again. But yeah, tell people what that means.

Rob Trigg (08:51.794)
So a a DSCR loan is, it’s a non-stated income loan. Basically it’s a debt service cover ratio loan, which means if it falls, if your rents are higher than your PITI by at least 1%, and that’s not a lot of money. mean, if you know, if you got a thousand dollar PITI, you literally got to be like a thousand and $60, you know, just to be able to make sure it’s cash flowing plus some extra.

They don’t care about your bank statements usually. They want to see liquidity, but they don’t really care about your W-2s. They don’t care about where you’re working. So it’s for the investor to be able to hold multiple properties. I don’t know if a lot of your viewers will know this, but Freddie and Fannie Mae will cap you out on how many properties that you are allowed to have.

based off your debt to income ratio usually is what it goes off of. And when you max that out, it becomes increasingly difficult every property that you get to be able to hold on a conventional loan. So when you run into those problems, you go to a DSCR loan debt service cover ratio loan where you can take the income of the property and qualify.

Now, you have to have a 680 credit score, 660 in some cases, and you’ve got to show some investor background that you’ve There’s a little processes to it. Now, if you’re doing your first one, you’re going to pay a little bit more of an extra premium. They will do first time investors, but again,

Michael Stansbury (10:31.735)
Yeah, little moxie, yeah.

Rob Trigg (10:45.656)
It’s all about how many deals you’ve done, what’s your credit score, and how much money do you have in the bank.

your debt to income ratio off your taxes and stuff like that. So it’s a real, very efficient way, in my opinion, to get more rental properties under your portfolio. And you can have as many as you want, 50, 60, 100, 200. I mean, I’ve got a client right now that he’s working on. We’re doing like a five-loan package, and he’s, I think this’ll make his hundred and 70th property.

Michael Stansbury (11:19.627)
Nice.

Rob Trigg (11:20.494)
So I mean, at end of the day, he’s just like, he’s like, Rob, I’m going to be your number one client. And I’m like, heck yeah, let’s do it, man. Let’s do it. So we provide DSR loans. We provide fix and flip loans nationwide. I mean, we focus in Texas and we can lend in Texas a little bit differently than we can outside of Texas. Here in Texas, we are a true loan to value. So I can get you a hundred percent.

of purchase and 100 % of rehab if it falls into a 70 % spread inside of Texas in a major populated city like San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Tyler, Longview, know, the bigger cities, anything rural, we’re gonna probably dial that down a little bit, you know, to protect ourselves. But cabinetry and flooring, if you need it in the local Houston area,

Michael Stansbury (11:59.363)
Right?

Rob Trigg (12:18.572)
and I don’t know if we’ve worked out the logistics about shipping it to Dallas and San Antonio because we just kind of got this up and going. I mean we got our hands in a lot of stuff that we’re just now getting into. We’re growing at a rapid, rapid rate and those are just some of the things. Mentorship, we have a weekly meeting here at King James Lending where investors

can tune in, it’s usually on my Facebook or it’s on the owner’s Facebook page. They can tune in and learn from other investors. We have a hundred people come through the door every week, know, a hundred people that come in, learn, network, close deals right there on the spot. mean, literally two or three weeks ago, we had a client that called right before the meeting and said, hey, I can’t close on this property. I just, you know, I don’t feel good about it.

We’re like, dude, this is a great property. He’s like, look, I’m, you know, keep my earnest money. I’m sorry, I just can’t. But we announced it at the meeting and said, hey, we have this investment property needs to close on Friday. Two people in the audience raised their hand and said, I want it. Yeah, close. We closed it in 24 hours.

Michael Stansbury (13:29.921)
Can’t I love it? Yep.

So when did you, so you guys are doing like monthly networking events there or weekly? Okay, and they’re in the house? Okay, yeah, when did you guys start doing that?

Rob Trigg (13:41.639)
Week.

and house. The owner has been doing it, I’d say better since it started really, but we’ve kind of grown it over the last three months to where it is now. Getting a lot more people involved and doing a lot more things. After the meeting, we’d go and do a…

We go and do a walkthrough of a local property that’s on a fix and flip or something like that and show the progress. And a lot of our investors like that because we can walk them through a real life scenario of where a property is and versus where it was. And that’s, I mean, that’s powerful when you can take a new person and take them in there and they start getting hungry. They’re like, yeah, like.

Michael Stansbury (14:30.669)
Tangible, yeah, something they can eat.

Rob Trigg (14:32.55)
can touch and taste and feel this instead of just seeing it on a PowerPoint presentation or somebody’s just sitting up there talking about, you can do this, you can do this.

Michael Stansbury (14:42.431)
Right? And so, but one of the things that’s cool about what I’m hearing is, is when you say that everything is in house, so if you have inventory, right? And then somebody has the qualifications and the numbers are right, because you can’t sell a property or you can’t do a deal unless the numbers work and you guys wouldn’t lend, you know, on it if it weren’t numbers work. And so you’re solving a big issue in the marketplace where, hey, I want to be in real estate, but how do I, how do my number one thing is how do I, how do I get financing for it? I,

Rob Trigg (14:57.938)
Correct. That’s correct.

Rob Trigg (15:06.234)
Hello.

Michael Stansbury (15:09.611)
I have decent credit but I don’t have a lot of cash. I don’t have $400,000 to do a deal. And you guys have, we got the solution for that as well. How?

Rob Trigg (15:20.146)
Yeah. Well, mean, deal flow for any investor, that’s going to be the hardest part. And having an honest wholesaling operation where we’re not taking all of the meat off the bones. I mean, there’s a lot of companies out there that, you know, they don’t care about the investor. They’re out to make their money. They’re transactional. We’re more client-based relationship. If we got to make just 5K on a

Michael Stansbury (15:40.397)
transactional, right?

Rob Trigg (15:49.266)
assignment, just a small little fee, that’s great for us. It’s great for us because we’re building a relationship by putting a client into A, a property where they can learn on and B, a loan to where we can coach them through the whole process because we help you withdrawals.

Michael Stansbury (16:02.657)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Trigg (16:10.578)
We’re an educational company to where we’re gonna educate you to become a real investor, not just sit back and say, oh, we’re gonna teach you, but we’re gatekeeping everything. Our biggest thing is we don’t wanna gatekeep.

Michael Stansbury (16:21.28)
Right. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (16:28.193)
Well, one of things I heard a long time ago was, you want employees, you want employees to be loyal, but you want to understand how people need to learn and create. And eventually every employee is going to want to leave you if there’s something better. And maybe that’s something better is, you know, creating their own on their own. And so the fact that you’re not gatekeeping is just an indicative of like, Hey, we, we respect you and your ability to learn these processes and then take them on your own and then.

and go create for yourself. And I think that validates what your offer is and helps people be more, I guess, the fact that you’re leading from that point of view makes them trust you in a way that most wholesalers are not trustworthy. I always tell people it’s the Pareto principle. There’s 20 % that are awesome and then the 80 % are really, they really gotta figure stuff out.

Rob Trigg (17:13.82)
Yeah.

Rob Trigg (17:24.816)
Yeah, they don’t know their comps. don’t know. I mean, so when we get a property in, we sit down and we talk about it. Whether we’re going seller direct or somebody that’s like another wholesaler that can’t get rid of it because they don’t have a good reputation, they’ll give it to us and we’ll vet it. We’ll say, you know, this is not a deal. You know, we’re not going to blast this out to our pool of investors.

because this is a 80, 85 % deal, there’s no meat on this. Go back to the seller and get it lowered or, hey. So at the end of the day, we want to be able to provide good 70, 75 % deals to where there’s enough meat for everybody to be able to feed off of that. Because at end of the day, if I put you in an 85 % deal and you get through it and it takes you six months and…

everything does not go to plan, you’re probably going to owe money. You know, at the end of the day.

Michael Stansbury (18:25.677)
Right. Yes. Yes. Done that before. I’ve seen that movie. Yeah.

Rob Trigg (18:30.608)
Yeah, probably got tickets.

Michael Stansbury (18:33.901)
I got tickets. Yeah. So it’s one of those things where you talk to a lot of real estate investors and if they’ve done over, if they’ve done a couple hundred deals, their best stories are their losers. My best stories are my losers, but I didn’t, didn’t, in fact, I always tell people the first deal I ever did, I lost 10 K on and I turned to my wife and I said, Hey, we’re going to do this again.

Rob Trigg (18:43.975)
Yeah.

Rob Trigg (18:52.836)
Yeah, yeah, that is a hard conversation right there. I bet you were sitting there going like, how am going to do this?

Michael Stansbury (18:54.251)
She was like, no. Tough.

Michael Stansbury (19:02.771)
How am I going to do this? How am I going to say that I learned my lesson when we’re in the hole like this? Well, luckily she was a good cheerleader and she, you know, saw us through it. yeah, absolutely Rob.

Rob Trigg (19:15.644)
Yeah. And you need that in your corner. I think that’s one thing that we also talk about here is having the partner that you have, my wife, James’s wife, James is the owner. She’s the CFO of the company. You’ve got…

to have that significant other that is your cheerleader on the sidelines that’s going, hey, you got this, you know, don’t worry about it. It’s going to be okay. I’m not going to be upset if we, you know, take a loss. She’s like, I’m going to, you know, be concerned, but I’m not going to be upset. You know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll learn from it and move on. You’ve got to have that. You got to.

Michael Stansbury (19:50.85)
Gotta have it, gotta have it. It’s a beautiful thing, especially when you’re in valleys. They’re the best in the valleys. And they’re always really great too when you’re up on the mountaintop, they’re cheering with you. Memphis, Tennessee. Yep. So Rob, where can people find out more about King’s James Lending, more about you, more about what services you got pride if they’re in, if they’re listening to this and they’re in Texas. Yeah, what does that look like for you guys?

Rob Trigg (20:01.291)
Where are you at? okay, Memphis.

Rob Trigg (20:20.08)
Well, I mean, you could call me direct. My phone number, I’ll answer it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. mean, unless I’m sleeping. I always tell people, don’t call me late, but don’t call me late for dinner. You can call me late, but don’t call me late for dinner.

They can go to our website. They can call me direct at 903-806-4400 or rob at kingjameslending.com. That’s rob at kingjameslending.com. And I mean, we will, we will sit down and talk to anybody, know, night or day, zoom calls, you know, anything to teach people how to do this the right way. That way there’s no gatekeeping, you know, and they’re,

Because I’ve never understood why people in real estate gatekeep so much because if you’re growing, eventually it’s all organic and it’s all going to benefit you at some point in time. you, let’s just say me, you’re one of my clients and I don’t tell you everything that you want to know.

Well, that’s going to deter you from going and buying an investment property from somebody that’s going to potentially be a loan for me that’ll potentially grow the real estate market because at the end of the day, we’re all benefiting.

Insurance companies get employed, title companies get employed, real estate agents get employed. You’ve got your general contractors, you’ve got your subs. That creates employment. It generates, it boosts the economy. Because each sale, you gotta think, each investment property, think about how many people are involved in a fixed inflow.

Rob Trigg (22:09.316)
If it’s a major rehab, just think about it for a second. You get your subs, you got your general contractors, you got an insurance company, you got a title company, you got a real estate agent, you got probably a lender. You got all these people and those people hire people and those people hire people. your real estate is really the only thing that I know of that can control the destiny of so many people. So many people at once.

Michael Stansbury (22:37.261)
Yeah, it does. It has that effect of there’s so many parts to it and there’s so many benefits to it. And I like how you say it’s a lot of people operate from the scarcity mentality and it’s gatekeeping or scarcity where they don’t, you know, they don’t share this or they don’t share that. And ultimately, I think what that does is it hamstrings relationships. Because one of the things I was taught early and I never, didn’t operate this principle until later on because I understood it is

You wanna give everything away as your knowledge, everything away, because not everybody’s gonna take it and run with it. And if they do, great. But most people, when you show them exactly how to do things, they never take action. That’s why I really love y’all’s model is because, hey, now we’re not just lending. We’re gonna go and show you, especially some new person, hey, this is how we do draws. I’m gonna go over there and check on this with you and let you ask me questions about how

Maybe we’ve in the past done things or how this contractor does things so we can improve your efficiency and improve your bottom line. Not a lot of lenders do that. A lot of lenders are just, they’re hands off until the first of the month comes and they’re ready for their premium payment.

Rob Trigg (23:56.242)
Yeah, you know, I’ve had this conversation with a lot of lenders, a lot of CEOs, a lot of people, they’ll call me and be like, hey, you know, what are you doing differently than anybody else? And in last four months, I’ve had a lot of phone calls about this. What are you doing differently that I could train my guys to do? I said, well, you can’t train relationships. I had somebody tell me once,

Because ever since I started doing this, I’d bring clients over to my house for barbecues and stuff like that. Somebody told me once, it’s like, you’re wasting your time doing that. It’s like, all they’re going to do is disappoint you. And I said, you know what? They may disappoint me. But what if they don’t? What if the relationship I built with them creates an empire, a real estate empire? What is the bond that we grow together on?

creates value for not only them, but for other people. They’re five generations down from, you know, now. Just based off the relationship that we start right now, their great grandchildren can benefit from. I mean, yeah, people can disappoint you. They can. I mean, it’s just human nature. But being scared of disappointment or being scared of not creating value with each other,

I don’t want to live like that.

Michael Stansbury (25:26.101)
Rob, that is a great place to end it. That’s affecting households down the line. I love it. So Rob Trigg with King James Lending. Rob again, we’ll put all the information about how to contact Rob and King James Lending in the show notes below. Thank you for being a part of the Real Estate Pros podcast. Really appreciate your time and getting to know your origin story and thank you for your service, sir. Folks, yes sir, watch or like and subscribe. Do all the things they tell you to do on this thing and we’ll see you next time.

Rob Trigg (25:48.338)
Yes, sir.