7 Key Lessons from a Mortgage Broker: Chris Cavazos on Real Estate Resilience

Michael Stansbury (00:21.974)
Hello everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Mike Stansbury, my special guest today from Sugarland, Texas. Chris Cavazos, how are you sir? Bless, good to see you. What’s temperature out there in Sugarland right now?

Chris Cavazos (00:36.636)
I’m good man. Blessed.

Chris Cavazos (00:42.27)
is hot and humid, man. We got a little bit of overcast, so it’s not too bad right now, but I think earlier it was like 100 something, it felt like at least.

Michael Stansbury (00:48.892)
man, know, it’s the heat is starting to get to us. I’m in Tennessee, you’re in Texas, and it’s gonna be hot for a couple of months. But speaking of hot, we got to do this at Investor Fuel. Investor Fuel is the sponsor of the podcast, and we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs 2 to 5X 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. So Chris, let me ask you this. What’s the origin story of your…

real estate mortgage career. When did you get started and why did you pick this industry?

Chris Cavazos (01:20.478)
Yeah, yeah. So I got started in 2000 and my father was a mortgage broker. He had opened his brokerage in 1997 and I had actually tore my meniscus in my right knee and I couldn’t, you know, hold a regular job or work at the time. So I went to go work for him as they just answering phones and I started seeing settlement statements and good face and tills. And I was like, man, this is a cool industry because it’s the one transaction I always felt that everybody walks away happy.

It’s not like when you buy a car, you know it’s depreciating. When you buy a home, you’re realizing your dreams and all these things that you’re thinking in your mind from a homeowner’s perspective. And loan officer walks away with money, realtor walks away with money, title company walks away with money, and a lot of people benefit off that one transaction. So I just thought that’s so cool.

Michael Stansbury (02:05.518)
So the beginning, so this is great, so it’s in the blood, your dad had his brokerage and then you got to see, obviously some people go to a job and they’re never curious, you got curious and you’re like, alright, well how can I kind of move up the ladder here? And so when did you start originating loans and doing that in the office there?

Chris Cavazos (02:25.822)
So I started with him in 2000, then probably about six months later, in turn 2001, and that’s when I got licensed. And back then, it was just pretty much showing up, took class for a couple days, and you’re good, man. It wasn’t a very big, or difficult bar of entry back then. But yeah, that’s where it all started in 2001, when I started originating.

Michael Stansbury (02:48.942)
Okay, and so, know, fast forward to 2008 hit, 2009 hit, you know, what did that do to your business and kind of what pivots did you make during that time? Everybody has a story about 08, 09, and then COVID.

Chris Cavazos (03:04.774)
Yeah, well, you know at the time oh eight or nine I was a banking failures and and you know the mortgage tree wasn’t spared and it just seemed like the Easy loans became very very difficult. I just got frustrated to be honest and in 2009 I left went to go work a couple business development marketing positions and That was really good for me though because you know when I started my dad back in the day Our biggest thing was advertising in Houston Chronicle

you know, back when people used to read newspapers, you know, so it was a whole different ball game. And as things started changing with the internet, we didn’t really know how to keep up at the time. And then when I went to Orphanage Marketing Company, that’s where I learned about branding and marketing, all these various things to, you know, generate more business.

Michael Stansbury (03:45.167)
Yeah, so the whole, the scene of marketing in the last 25, 30 years has been wild with the advent of the internet age, the advent of social media, organic leads, paid leads, and it is just wild how people get to know each other. But you’ve been in the business now since 2016. How is your referral word of mouth business, what does that look like?

Chris Cavazos (04:09.758)
Yeah, so you know, we probably get about 80 % of our business from realtor partnerships and 20 % is past clients and word of mouth. And you know, we always found that I’ve done Facebook advertisements, Google, we’ve done Zillow, we’ve done a lot of things. But at the end of the day, it’s that buyer who spends, you know, 90 % of their time with the realtor. And that realtor can either make or break you as a loan officer or champion you as a loan officer.

Michael Stansbury (04:32.994)
That’s it, it’s all about relationships. So you’re really good at growing that network of realtors and you’re their trusted mortgage broker. What are some of the things that you guys do, Chris, that kind of make you stand out from maybe some of the competition?

Chris Cavazos (04:46.782)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that, you know, one is that we’re very competitive with rates. I’m the broker, owner, originator, and I’ve built a team around myself. So I’ve got little minions that helped me that allows me to do volume, but it all starts and stops with me. We do a lot of communication. So, you know, every Tuesday, for example, we call everybody on an executed contract and we update them on where we’re at in the loan process. Every Wednesday we do bomb bomb videos and I’ll send out, Hey, this Chris is home trust. And I let them know, okay, appraisal turn times expected this date back. We’re looking

good for closing date and you we found you know being in this business so long when I was younger you know my I used to see how reactive we were in receiving phone calls from agents hey what’s going on with this what’s going on with that now years later as we know kind of changing gears and being more proactive it’s awesome my phone really doesn’t ring quite as much at least not for people trying to find out status because they already know where we’re at or they know they’re expected that following week

Michael Stansbury (05:43.983)
Yeah, that was always, it’s always not fun to not hear about what the loan is doing and just to sit there and you’re hoping like, hey, no news is good news. It’s a lot better though to hear somebody say, hey, we’re just tracking, everything’s going good, where ABCD is happening. I’ll let you know if a snag hits. But I’m always like this, I’m always like, okay, well, I haven’t heard anything, so closing’s in a couple days. We’ll see what happens.

Chris Cavazos (05:53.195)
All right.

Chris Cavazos (06:11.422)
Right, right, high hopes.

Michael Stansbury (06:14.59)
Hi Hobs, yeah. that kind of makes you guys different in the market, the level of service and obviously you’re competitive with interest rates. So we talked about a lot of people are kind of moved by what the media talks about. right now, in my mind, a lot of media is just negativity because they got to sell.

their advertising, they’ve gotta get clicks to their website. And so talk about what is real and what is not real when it comes to mortgages and interest rates right now.

Chris Cavazos (06:52.552)
You know, what I’ve noticed since I’ve been in this business for so long that the last four five years, maybe a little bit longer, that the media has such an influence on markets. And just like you said, right, they have to be that negative is what they’re pushing. And that narrative when, you know, in actuality, there are a lot of positive things this administration is doing. There may be some things that people don’t like and there’s some things that I don’t necessarily like, but for the most part, it seems like things are going in the right direction.

And the media makes it seem like, well, are crashing. It’s the end of the world. So I think that’s playing a huge role right now in people’s perception nationally and locally. And I just, you I can see it. I can see. I talk to realtors all the time. We talk to several realtors a week. And they tell us, hey, Chris, it’s slowing down. It’s scarce. And we ask them why. they’re like, man, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the, a lot of them say it’s the terror stuff. That’s what they’re hearing from their buyers. It’s the stock market going up and down. It’s the uncertainty.

really at the end of the day is with the perception that that’s out there, unfortunately.

Michael Stansbury (07:52.463)
Right. You know, some of the things that we don’t do and we’re not going to go off and kind of any kind of rabbit hole, but it’s interesting that what we don’t do is life is so fast paced that most human beings don’t take time to consider, Hey, this is what I believed at this time. And now I know it’s a lie. Maybe I shouldn’t believe the people that are telling me this all the time, but we just get caught in this loop where we hear something, we believe it, we find out it’s not true. And then we go, Oh, but we turn on the news again and we believe it. And the loop continues.

And it affects, and obviously it does have a effect, negative in my estimation, on how people operate their lives because they’re waiting on somebody to tell them what things are actually are instead of going to somebody like a resource like you or really somebody that actually knows what the local market is telling them. So Chris, tell me about life in sugar land outside of real estate. I think we talked about this.

where you are an empty nester now, how many kids you have, are they local, and what do you do for fun out there?

Chris Cavazos (08:56.67)
Yeah, man, I got four kids. Two of them are local, two are not. We don’t do a whole lot. What we do in real estate is very time consuming. Weekends, we make ourselves available to a lot of our clients. So we’re constantly on the grind. I can be out to dinner, 7, 8 p.m. at night, and somebody calls. And if you want that deal, we’re in a market that if you don’t answer that call…

It’s very easy for them to jump to that next person on Google or another referral that they have and call that person. So we make ourselves available. When we’re not working though, know, in Sugarland, mean, we got to Houston Astros, man. We got to Houston Texans. We got the Rockets. So there’s a lot of great sports teams in Houston. There’s a lot of great bars, a lot of great restaurants. So we like to go out and have fun, but it’s difficult to vacation in this business because, you you step away for two days and you come back and it feels like you, you know, like you’ve missed like,

Michael Stansbury (09:51.982)
Okay.

Chris Cavazos (09:53.318)
years of work and in reality you have him but it’s just a perception and the way you feel.

Michael Stansbury (09:58.831)
Right, so you guys have always lived in Texas and around the Houston area? You know, you’ve got Galveston there, so you can actually go quickly to the beach. So you got that access, yeah.

Chris Cavazos (10:03.25)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Our way. I don’t know about that water though, man. If you’ve been to Galveston, that water’s a little bit… It’s a little… It’s a mystery water. It’s little sketchy.

Michael Stansbury (10:15.446)
Sketchy? Well, I remember I did go, I had cousins that lived in Houston, I think I went as a kid, but we go to the Panhandle around Florida and the water’s just awesome. It’s just something else. And so you had the Houston Cougars this year did well, I guess the Astros, Astros have been competitive for a while in baseball, and then the Houston Rockets, how did they do this year in NBA? Did they go to the second round?

Chris Cavazos (10:26.568)
Absolutely.

Chris Cavazos (10:34.259)
Sure.

Chris Cavazos (10:39.966)
They did okay. They didn’t do bad. mean, the big one that I think that we’re all kind of disappointed this last year was the Texans, man, because we’ve got the new QB and we had high hopes this season. He is awesome. But maybe it’s his second year and this will become his third year. So kind of curious to see where it goes this next season and some of the moves that they make in the off season. And we do get out to lot of games, the Astros games and Texans games. So that’s always a lot of fun.

Michael Stansbury (10:48.564)
Mm-hmm. He’s great.

Michael Stansbury (11:06.254)
That is really cool. so Chris, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you in your market, where are you located on the internet? Tell everybody where you’re at.

Chris Cavazos (11:14.418)
Yeah, so my website is home trust financing dot com. you always tell everybody, look, man, the best way to get in contact with me is just call. Right. I mean, I my my number directly is two eight one seven six three one eight seven six. I’m happy to have a conversation with anybody if you’re interested in purchasing home or just want to be educated about purchasing home. I love to talk more. I’ve been doing this for pretty much almost more than half my life now. And I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.

Michael Stansbury (11:39.566)
That’s awesome. And I appreciate you being on the podcast. Folks, if you want more information about Chris and Home Trust Financing, the information will be in the show notes below. Thanks again for watching and thank you Chris folks. Do all the things, like and subscribe, comment below and we’ll see ya next time.

Chris Cavazos (11:54.898)
Thanks, man.