Alternative Lending Explained: How Real Estate Pros Find Capital Beyond Traditional Banks

Oz Konar (00:00)
I think that was a pivotal point for us to kind of break down that limiting belief of, the only way to get people is just smile and dial versus I call it permission-based marketing. The people who want it apply so you can help them, right? So it sounded too good to be true. But once we started implementing in our business,

that allow me to kind of surround myself with people who are interested in doing it that way, right?

Scott Bursey (01:57)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host Scott Bursey and today I’m joined by someone I’ve really been looking forward to chatting with, Oz Konar. One of the biggest hurdles for any real estate professional isn’t finding the deal, it’s finding the capital. Oz has made it his mission to solve that problem. Joining us from New Jersey, he is the founder and the president of Business Lending Blueprint. Oz is a multiple seven figure entrepreneur.

and pioneer in the alternative lending space. He’s helped thousands of people step away from the corporate grind to build recession proof businesses in the lending world. And today he’s here to pull back the curtain on how the real estate pros can leverage created financing and alternative capital to scale their portfolios. Oz, welcome to the show.

Oz Konar (02:45)
Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Scott Bursey (02:47)
I think our audience is really going to take something away from your unique perspective on how the invisible side of real estate, the capital portion, you you break that down so people can understand it easily. Let’s dive in, shall we? So first off, for people who may not be familiar with your world, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days?

Oz Konar (03:08)
Yeah, great questions. Our main focus is helping people understand alternative lending industry. It’s not a topic that is searched a lot online, and most people do not wake up thinking about alternative financing. But it is such an integrated thing in the entire universe, especially for people who want to grow real estate. I remember when I invested into my first rental properties, got the second one, the third one. And when I wanted to get the fourth one, the bank was like, yeah, you’re a little too high risk.

I’m like, what do mean? All the properties are cash flowing. I’m not late on my payments. Like, what’s going on? They’re like, yeah, based on our underwriting criteria, you need to kind of take a break, right? So if you think about, probably most of your audience, ambitious business owners, they want to grow. And that was my first, like, roadblock in getting access to capital, because I thought I did everything right. And all of a sudden, the banks, like, their internal processes and whatnot would stop me from investing further, right? And then I was, fortunately enough, someone

⁓ offered to teach me how alternative lending works by asking me to send my referrals to him right and he gave me like a fifteen minutes brief on what kind of deals he could find from equipment sb a to merchant cash advance i honestly this was ten years ago i don’t understand half of what he was saying i’m like okay so what do you want to do that went to see the businesses you need capital right i’m glad i did it and that led to are basically

him funding the first deal and handing me a check for four thousand dollars which is an amount that i never seen with my name next to it basically and that was my entry point to the alternative lending industry and from there we expanded our universe into different funding options including commercial real estate ideals that are in our network so that’s what we do with people who wanna and learn alternative lending and have access to the partners who can make ⁓

I guess their dreams come to reality if it is the right deal and whatnot. Because you can Google your way into things, but the problem is you don’t know who’s who and how they might or they might not be able to help you. And then you will need to be a little more informed when it comes to real estate investing or business funding and things like that. So in my universe, we try to cover that area based on our experience on what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Scott Bursey (05:13)
And what markets are you currently operating in?

Oz Konar (06:04)
all 50 states basically in the United States. We have some funding options in Canada, but Canada’s alternative lending industry is not as developed as the U.S. So even the Canadian members, we recommend them to focus on deals in the U.S. because in both real estate, commercial real estate, and also business funding, I mean, the area is wide open. The United States, there just so many opportunities.

Scott Bursey (06:24)
love it. What caught my attention about you was the way you’ve been able to position yourself as the go-to alternative when traditional banks say no, showing real estate pros that they can, they don’t necessarily have to let a rigid lending system stow their growth. That’s not easy, especially in this climate. What’s been the key to keeping your machine running smoothly?

Oz Konar (06:47)
a lot of education so we get train a lot and having our lenders come and educate our members right it’s one thing for me to educate our members but we never liked idea of the whole training dependent on one person skill set an ability to teach that’s why we created the network these lenders we are required them to jump on a weekly calls with our members because as you know the funding opportunities and the funding qualifications change all the time and alternative lending so they’re the best to

come in and show examples, creative financing options that is available. So that was like the biggest lever that we could pull. And this allows us to ⁓ educate our members on what could be done so they don’t end up

over disqualifying their leads, right? That we see that a lot. So they have two options and they say, oh, this wouldn’t work. We make that happen all the time. So not every deal gets funded. But if you lack the knowledge or you’re not working with an underwriter or a funding company who’s seen deals like that from ground up to like commercial to multifamily and things like that. I believe, I highly, like I mentioned, I highly believe in education. So if you’re into real estate or funding,

you need to know what you’re talking about and you need to know what could be done and could not be done. And as of now, we don’t have a way of kind of exporting that knowledge into somebody’s brain. So they just need to sit down and understand and also take massive action. So that’s what we focus on as our core model.

Scott Bursey (08:13)
Couldn’t agree more. That collaborative communication is so critical, especially in your field. Now, it’s impressive that you’ve reached that level of autonomy. Was there a specific moment, Oz, or maybe a particular deal where you realized, okay, hey, this is actually working?

Oz Konar (08:32)
I wouldn’t teach anything that I haven’t done myself. So it was doing a lot of the deals, but I started burning out because all of my lead sources were like buying data, telemarketing and call calling. I came from the sales background. So that’s what I knew. Like I used to dial 600 people a day through Power Dialer three days a week. The remaining two, three days, I would be on the streets of New York.

pulling on doors and talking to people and going to networking events and things like that. I’m like, wow, this ⁓ is brutal. We’re making money, but it doesn’t seem like this is scalable unless I go through the traditional way of how Wall Street companies grow, have a massive office and like a boiler room mentality, Wolf of Wall Street, and have people smile and dial. That’s when I started investing into marketing to understand how do other people who are far advanced than me actually do this.

And that’s when I know the strategies such as, you can actually do email marketing. You can do paid advertising.

I think that was a pivotal point for us to kind of break down that limiting belief of, the only way to get people is just smile and dial versus I call it permission-based marketing. The people who want it apply so you can help them, right? So it sounded too good to be true. But once we started implementing in our business,

that allow me to kind of surround myself with people who are interested in doing it that way, right?

Because alternative lending industry, although it’s relatively young, the way most companies operate is very old school. Like they want to have big leases and big offices and things like that. And when we talked about, we can actually email your list and like get like 10 deals out of it today, they’re like, no way. And when we started showing people how that is done through like core marketing skills,

I would say that was the pivotal point that differentiated us from everyone else, where we show them there’s an easier way to do Yes, there is still skill set required, but marketing skills will not go anywhere. Google might not exist tomorrow, but there will be another platform where people will need to go to a place to search for information, right? But if you know how to utilize it, you’ll never have lead problems. So I would say that was the turning point in our company.

Scott Bursey (11:17)
What a huge transformation and continually to transform as different opportunities arise. Now, odds, every operator I know has a moment where things got real. Maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that you had to pivot fast. You mind sharing one of those moments with us?

Oz Konar (11:35)
Yes, so one thing I learned from one of my mentors, Alex or Mozi, you might be seeing him on YouTube, so I personally get mentored by him and his team. So one thing he mentioned is that what got you to a certain amount will not be enough to double that business. Let’s say you’re making a million a year to make two million a year, you might not just get there by doing more, right? So that was a limiting belief because I come from the hustle mindset, like being on the streets is like if I just work harder,

I can double the business. What I noticed is as you scale businesses, I remember when we did our first, you know, three million a year, I’m like, wow, okay, so we’re officially a seven figure company. I’m just going to double that. Then I noticed that everything started falling apart because we were just trying to push the existing model that was designed to make that much to double it. And it required a different model. Like a company, a company does a hundred million acts and do things a lot differently than how we used to do it, right?

Because up until that point, it was like a founder-led company. I was the leader, and the people around me were just helpers, amazing people, but more like assistants. It wasn’t like a democracy. I was like, we do this, Scott, and Scott does it, or vice versa, right? And then I noticed that if I wanted to go to the next level, I need to hire leaders, not employees. So then we had to go through the painful process of looking for a proper coach.

I’m like, because I carry all the knowledge in my mind, now I need to either transfer it or find someone who already has it so they can take over that department. Same thing happened with the sales and marketing. So that was a point that it was like very interesting that I feel like, my God, everything is falling apart. What is really happening? But then that’s when, you know, when you get coaching that helps because someone else who’s been through that, they were like, no, this is normal. It’s not like, ⁓ this is the process you’re going to go because you’re trying to double, which is not normal.

and you’re trying to use the old framework, the system to do that, it’s just not gonna work. It’s like trying to tow a trailer with a Toyota Corolla. If you’re just commuting to work, that’s gonna be enough, but if you’re gonna tow something much bigger, it’s not gonna be enough. It’s not because the car is bad, it’s because you’re using the wrong vehicle, basically. Does that make sense?

Scott Bursey (13:47)
It certainly does. What a unique building step process. And just to elaborate on that unique process, looking at your business today, what tripwire or system have you built specifically so that exact misfortune doesn’t reoccur again?

Oz Konar (14:04)
We’re still working on it, but one thing that we get lot of compliments on is our online presence, like the branding, right? So like free content. So we utilize our YouTube channel. We have about 55,000 subscribers. And then we use it as a platform to provide a lot of information. Like I said, my industry is not the top of the mind for many people. Like people think about crypto, real estate, know, investing.

starting an Amazon business and becoming a real estate agent, but they don’t wake up thinking about becoming a business loan broker and funding facilitating those deals. So it’s almost like we have to channel the demand. And then what we figured out is if you consistently create content and put it on the area that has the most usage as a consumption, which is YouTube, right, and then grow that channel that allowed poor people to get a taste of who we are and what we do before they decide to invest or come onto our universe.

So we’re doubling down on that effort right now to build a massive presence online so people don’t have any doubts. Or also you can kind of weed out people who are not a good fit, either because they’re not really interested in this or we’re not interested in working with them, right? ⁓ That has been a really, really important decision. We knew that it’s always been a long-term project because you can’t just grow a channel in two days. It takes years. Our YouTube channel has been in existence since 2018.

But it was underutilized. Now over the past year, we’re leaning heavily on it, and we’ll do more and should do more. I think that’s going to build a lot more resilience into business itself. we’re not just relying on paid ads and other means of getting customers. People organically find us. And the people who would be a good fit for us or us being a good fit for them would be attracted to it.

Scott Bursey (16:27)
absolutely, and that’s adapting at its finest. That’s the kind of stuff, Oz, that people don’t talk about enough. And honestly, it’s what separates the folks who just dabble from the ones who stay in the game long term. Let me ask you this. What are you most focused on solving or scaling next?

Oz Konar (16:38)
Ha

I am as the founder, since I have department heads on all departments currently, my main focus is making the technology move, making it easy for our brokers who are involved in our platform to utilize AI. Because obviously we live in the age of AI, right? And many people are extremely confused on what to do with it. And the system makes you feel like you’re falling behind if you don’t do anything with it. I think my problem with that is AI is capable of doing a lot of things.

But if you’re not clear on what to do with it, you feel like you’re just going to dabble in there and just try different language models and just doing this and that, take a course on it, which is all fine options. But if you’re in a network, they should be the one kind of thinking about what to do with it. That’s why we tell our students, us become the technology platform. So we built an AI underwriting system so our students can upload whatever information they have about their potential lead. And they can get instant decisions on the likelihood of that file being built.

So I am converting that into also a marketing system where they can attract referral partners instantly because it’s one of the ways that I’ve grown my business working through referral partners. I used to partner up with accounting firms, banks, and anyone who has the customers that I want. And since I didn’t have a personal brand, I would borrow their authority, basically. Scott is famous. So I’m going to build a partnership with Scott. And if he likes me enough, he’s going to probably open his network to me.

And then I’ve been teaching that to our students, but we didn’t have the technology to do that. Now each student can come in and create referral partnership landing pages, marketing collateral, and track all the referral partners in one place. So that’s the big mode that I’m spending a lot of time, and it’s going to take us about another two months to fully complete that project. But it’s super exciting, and I think that’s going to allow us to get to the next level.

Scott Bursey (18:33)
It’s really exciting and I’m excited for you. Let me ask you this. What’s the next real goal for you? The Bozai, if you will Oz.

Oz Konar (18:42)
you want to become the largest alternative lending funding company so with the largest coaching company currently we broke that record a few years ago were proud of that that’s awesome but as an entrepreneur i think the next phase for us is to make sure that our funding department captures most of the funding because the problem i see problem i’m trying to solve is that a lot of the brokers who are in existence either in real estate or alternative lending like business funding they don’t really

know why they do what they do that leads to a false belief of thinking that there’s not enough resources or not even funding options. So we’re going to keep educating it. But the bigger move is to make it easy for them to fund deals. I don’t think something like that exists right now that are funding platforms. But before you even use the platform, you got to know what the heck you’re doing. And that’s the gap. Like the platform does the job. But if you don’t know what your job is and how you can basically augment the information,

So that’s the big domino that we’re going to be working on tackling, which is going to take time. It’s probably another two to three year goal to get to that level. But that’s our big, I guess, North Star goal now.

Scott Bursey (19:48)
Utilizing the components that you have in place and taking them to a higher level. That’s very admirable. Now we see people chase doors of revenue all the time. For you, is that called the destination or is it just the fuel that allows you to build something even bigger?

Oz Konar (20:06)
I think the mission is important. We want to eradicate financial illiteracy as much as possible because when you think about what is causing the demand for funding, it could be operational issue, it could be the bad decisions on a business, or it could be the lack of experience from the entrepreneur side, but many of them come back to individuals, especially in the US, not understanding how financing and lending works, right? So my…

personal story is i when i came to united states i didn’t speak a word of english my father had been here before us and he had a small business two three months after our rival we found out this business was failing and yet the file for bankruptcy and this is when i didn’t even know what a bankruptcy was right and we learned the hard way we had to you know dig ourselves through that hole it took us three four years and since then i’d go up that pts to just ask that question why did this happen why is this happening

Then as great as my father is, he just didn’t understand how business worked. He was a great artist in what he did, like the skill set for what he does, but he didn’t know managing financing and getting, like the whole business could have been saved if he had access to a business line of credit, but he didn’t even know what a business line of credit was, right? So I think it’s not so much the destination, it’s just the people we meet along the way and helping them better themselves and prepare themselves financially or what is possible.

not just for themselves but helping other businesses in the US because if you look at the alternative lending industry there’s only about 15-20,000 business loan brokers and the number of businesses out there is about 34 million. Like there’s a massive mismatch, like we need people to be more informed about these options, right? So if you minus the actual like bank employed business loan brokers alternative lending is extremely small but the demand is much bigger.

Scott Bursey (21:52)
Yes, that network to the information is so huge. Now let me ask you this, your next move can either compound things or perhaps create chaos depending on how you play it. Now I know a lot of our audiences either earlier in their journey are looking to level up and I think they benefit from hearing this. When it comes to building relationships and growing your network Oz, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Oz Konar (22:17)
That’s a great question actually. Biggest difference is providing value before asking for it. Trying to be a resource to the other person. Like sometimes I see, I go to networking events a lot and people just meet you two minutes into it and they have an ask to make, right? But if you just become a valuable person to them, and then it goes two ways, right? Both ways that you start building that bonding and that relationship. And I highly suggest you nail that. If you want to grow your business,

trying to grow it from your own living room by yourself, hustling will help. But if you want to take it to the next level, you need to be out there talking to people. I’m an introverted person. I don’t like going to events. But if you’re serious about business, you have to overcome your limiting beliefs. So I go to networking events. Business doesn’t care how you feel about things. You got to do what you got to do. And I guarantee you, whether you’re introverted extroverted, every one of us is interesting. Like, Scott, you’re an interesting person. I think to some people, I’m a little bit interesting.

But just putting yourself out there will make a huge difference because you also start noticing patterns. A lot of business success doesn’t come from like hardcore application of stuff. It’s pattern recognition, right? And pattern recognition comes from watching other businesses, talking to other business owners, and seeing what they’re doing. Like, it might be in disagreement. So I think we need to start thinking more like how

the big entrepreneurs think, versus like a small business. Even though you might be very small right now, it doesn’t matter. But the trajectory of this needs to be like adapting to thinking like, I don’t know, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. And you might laugh to yourself saying, I have two properties, but it doesn’t matter. Because that level of thinking comes with a lot of experience and pain. I read a lot of books by Charles Munger, one of the greatest investors of all time. Why? Am I in stock market? Not really. But the thinking, the um,

thought processes or mental models are still the same that applies to every business.

Scott Bursey (24:07)
some excellent food for thought. And everyone says provide value odds, but when you were starting out and you didn’t have a huge bank account or a massive portfolio, what was your currency? How did you actually get to the attention of the heavy hitters?

Oz Konar (24:15)
Mm-hmm, no.

Solving a problem for them, that’s a great question, right? And understanding what it is that they need. Many of us, and I’m guilty of this when I first started out, I had my own agenda. I’m going to meet Scott, and I’m going to hopefully he likes me, and I can do stuff. But I never initially cared about what Scott wanted for his or her business, right? So it’s like super important. Ask him the questions of like, what is it that you’re looking to solve? What’s like the next thing?

And then if you attend those events, you probably know someone else. Like you might not have the value to provide, but you might be the connector of the person. Hey, I met John. He’s also in real estate, Scott. Like, do you guys, do you guys know each other? Can I connect it with you? And then all of sudden you get Scott’s attention because Scott is busy. He’s running a business and all that stuff. And this guy comes in and you can read from a mile away that he’s going to want something. But if you kind of put your agenda secondary, but primarily try to become a resource. Yes, that’s the great objection, Scott. Like what if I don’t know much?

perfect, but nothing stops you from knowing people. And also, there will be times that I remember going to networking event and we’re talking, this guy’s like, our business is growing but my website sucks. Horrible website. We had a bad designer. ⁓ man, it kills me. And I don’t know anything about website building, right? So I went back home and started looking for website developers from my network. Who’s that good person who does an amazing job for this industry?

After a couple of days, I had a couple of people recommended to me. I called the guy back and said, hey, I know you complained about your website. Have you figured it out? Not yet. All right, I have a couple of people if you want to interview them. I’m not making anything from it. Just wanted to provide. See, I didn’t need to understand how to solve the problem, like how to build a website, or why he thinks his website is bad. It’s just a matter of finding people who understands and making the connection. Whether he hires that person or not, he will just not forget that I did that for him. Does that make sense?

Scott Bursey (26:11)
it makes perfect sense, being authentic, caring. That’s huge. Relationships, odds are everything in this space. All right, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out, connect with you, maybe collaborate or learn more about what you’ve been doing, what’s the best way for them to contact you?

Oz Konar (26:20)
Yes.

Our best way is our website, businesslendingblueprint.com. There you can learn about what we do and also see our YouTube channel link. So you can go ahead and start consuming information. We have a lot of content there for you to understand how maybe alternative lending industry works. everything, my social handles and things like that on our website, I highly suggest for someone to at least be a little more informed about the alternative lending industry, whether they want to do that or not. It’s super important because you might not.

see that information anywhere else basically because it’s not like a very common knowledge.

Scott Bursey (27:00)
Perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate your time, your story, and definitely your perspective. We need more people in this space who are doing it the right way. Thanks again for being here.

Oz Konar (27:10)
Thanks for having me, Scott. Appreciate it.

Scott Bursey (27:11)
And for those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators just like Oz who are out there building real dynamic businesses. We’ll see you in the next episode, everybody.