From Bad Credit to 9 Rental Properties – Step-by-Step

Dylan Silver (01:31)
folks, welcome

back to the show. Today’s guest is a ⁓ credit pro expert. His company mortgage credit pro based in rock wall specializes in credit repair, restoration and related services to help clients get financially ready for homeownership. Please welcome Wendell Cox. Wendell, welcome to the show.

Wendell Cox (01:35)
Thanks

Thanks Dylan. Nice to be here.

Dylan Silver (01:55)
I always like to start off at the top by asking folks, know, how did they get into the real estate space? How’d you get into the real estate space?

Wendell Cox (02:03)
Well, I first started out as a mortgage lender. I went through a really rough time in my life and needed a flexible job so I could be with my kids whenever I could. ⁓ Mortgages allowed me to have a flexible schedule where I could work from home and things like that. ⁓ Be able to clients when I wasn’t with my kids. I did that for about seven years. ⁓

To be quite honest, was sick and tired of underwriters determining my paycheck. So I wanted to do something where my efforts would be paid off. so ⁓ somebody taught me the credit ⁓ industry and it was easy transition because I literally, you know, I’ve been looking at credit reports the entire time I was in mortgage. And so was easy transition. I’m bilingual in Spanish. So

Dylan Silver (02:49)
was the guy. Yeah.

Wendell Cox (02:58)
⁓ we have a lot of our clients are, are, ⁓ know, Hispanic. so, I can explain everything in Spanish to them. ⁓ and so it just kind of was an easy fit. so things just evolved and, ⁓ I delivered results to the loan officers and realtors that would refer me. And so it just kept growing from there.

Dylan Silver (03:19)
Hold on, ¿tienes fluidez en español con ese apellido de Cox?

Wendell Cox (03:22)
⁓ No, yo

soy el gringo que habla español. Yeah. So…

Dylan Silver (03:27)
The same me, the same

me. How did you

Wendell Cox (03:32)
So we are Texans, my whole family, my mother’s side, my father’s side are from Texas, but my grandfather started a business in Mexico. So that’s where I was born. My brother did business in Mexico, hung out with all my friends, went to first communions, baptisms, everything. And so it’s just one of those things. So all the realtors that are referring Hispanic clients to me are saying, yeah, ⁓

Dylan Silver (03:56)
you have

Wendell Cox (04:02)
You know, yeah, he has a gringo name, but he speaks Spanish, promise.

Dylan Silver (04:08)
It’s interesting, right? Because I’m actually I mentioned this before happened on a podcast here. I’m going to be geo arbitrage and moving to Dominican Republic, which by all you have to know, I mean, I’m not moving to Punta Cana. I’m moving to Santo Domingo, Estes, right east of the capital. And so there you have to speak Spanish. And I tell this to people that.

Wendell Cox (04:17)
Right. Hey, you’re very much Spanish.

Dylan Silver (04:34)
process of learning another language and going to different place but learning another language changes your mind. I mean it really really does. You learned it from a young age right? But for me…

Wendell Cox (04:42)
Right. And the culture and it’s,

yeah, you’re going to be in a different out. You’re to be way outside your comfort zone. And so it’s going to be a process to adjust. mean, I, I even had to adjust whenever I would, ⁓ when I, whenever I had to, whenever I went back home to work in Mexico, it was like, ⁓ you know, about four or five months

to adjust even for me. mean, I was talking Spanish all the time. And in my mind, I

speak English and translate real fast to Spanish. But now that I do mortgages and mortgage terms and everything in Spanish, it’s very fluid.

Dylan Silver (06:10)
I want to ask you about going from the mortgage space to credit restoration, credit establishment, credit repair space. It seems to me that that is a very natural shift. And there’s probably, I would say, not enough people doing that because you have all the knowledge from the mortgage space, but also doing the service that people really need the most in order to qualify, right? Because you’re not going to qualify for the mortgage without the credit.

Wendell Cox (06:38)
Exactly. So, mean, so it was fairly easy. mean, even going from mortgage right into credit, still had a learning curve. It was a short one just because I had seen credit reports, but I still had to understand it, kind of know how things work and function just because again, it’s not just flipping some switches and out comes the magic bunny. I had to learn that it’s a process. ⁓

I have an easy time explaining to clients that we focus on the FICO score. The FICO score has five components and it’s like an algebraic formula. A plus B plus C plus D plus E equals X. And so if you, each of those five areas has a percentage of how it affects your credit. And so if we can, we focus on four of those five areas and fairly quickly the scoring.

by doing more things.

Dylan Silver (07:37)
I want to ask you

about helping folks, you know, in many cases after they may have been told, you you’re not going to qualify, right? I think this is sometimes how people end up realizing, hey, I need credit repairs. They go and maybe they go find a realtor first, which is how many people start. And then there may be realtor says, hey, you got to go get qualified. And then they can’t qualify. So now they’re thinking, well, what do I do at this point in time?

Do you have the relationships with the realtors where they’re referring folks to you? Do people find you independently from that? How are people coming across you and what is generally the initial conversation like?

Wendell Cox (08:19)
That’s a great question. Yeah, I mean, all my business is referral based. I, because I was in that mortgage world, I had the connections with the realtors, loan officers knew about me as well. And then just over time, as I deliver results on the credit side, other loan officers and realtors have been saying, Hey, this is the guy that can help your client and get them, get them ready. You know, so I tell people my goal is really not that they pay a monthly fee. My goal is a referral and

So far it’s worked, it’s a different way of looking at things. The typical credit repair company wants you to be paying a monthly fee as long as possible. My goal is a referral and I think it works better for me in that aspect because if I get the client back to them, to the realtor, to the loan officer quickly, they keep referring. So it’s better way of looking at it.

Dylan Silver (09:10)
Now,

I want to ask you about establishing versus repair. So for people who may have started like an LLC, for instance, right? And they’re looking at, well, I want to be purchasing something in my business name. Is that something that you can assist with or is that a totally different area of things?

Wendell Cox (09:28)
No,

mean credit in general works the same way, whether it’s for a mortgage or for a loan, know, personal or business works a little bit different, but we do know how that works. And so we can help folks with the business side as well. So if it’s an investor and establishing, they want to have really good personal credit because again, the business side of credit is looking at your personal credit.

Um, to determine what they approve and what they don’t approve. So very, very just for the basic, uh, premise so that people can understand because it, because this is true for both business and personal. All the credit score is, is a way for a bank to determine in 15 seconds how you pay your bills. That’s all it

How do you pay your bills? Do you pay them on time? Do you not pay them on time? Because that will be reflected in the credit score.

And so they look at your personal because that tells them how you pay your bills. And so if your credit score, the business side typically wants a six 80 or higher, that, basically means that 68 % of the time you’re paying your bills on time. And that’s the minimum risk that they’re willing to take. So I hope that was as clear as possible and I’m not confused, but that’s the.

Dylan Silver (11:22)
No, yeah.

I think a lot of

folks may not realize that they have potentially more purchasing power than they’re aware of with just a few tweaks. And so I remember, I’m 31 now, but I remember being 22 and thinking, man, I’ve got great credit. Why can’t I buy X, Y, and Z? And realizing that there’s really more, it’s more nuanced than this. And I wish I would have run into you back then, you know, cause that would be interesting. I’d probably have a couple.

⁓ properties in my name or else you that that i own when folks are maybe on the younger side and looking at establishing their their credit and it might not be the same process right because they might not have you know that the mortgages in the the car loans and what have you would they still be able to reach out to you to it to see a what can i do to get you know maybe ⁓ approved for a rental property or something like this

Wendell Cox (12:23)
I mean, uh, I guess I’m going to do, I’m going to try and do a, uh, a video series sometime. want to get a officer in realtor to do this with me, but to find me, you know, find a duplex, find me a triplex and find me a fourplex because we can basically say, Hey, if you’re young, you’re in the perfect stage to get nine doors in a two year timeframe, you know? And so

By having at least three credit cards in your name that you’re paying well on time set to auto pay so that you don’t have any late payments, you can very quickly get to a 680, 700 credit score in six months with perfect payment if you have never established a credit card. So get three credit cards, pay them on time, and we can help you get those credit cards if you need help getting them. But get those credit cards, get your credit up.

You can have an auto loan. can not have an auto loan. Doesn’t matter. ⁓ it does having an auto loan will impact that to income ratio, but it’s no big deal. You can then as a personal residence, purchase a duplex and get down payment assistance through the state of Texas. So now you live on one side and rent the other side out. And this may be a little challenging to do, but if you work at it, you can’t get it, you know, so you’re in that house.

in that duplex for six months as a personal residence. And then you can go to the next triplex that you find and have that be your, your personal residence. You put 5 % down or three and a half percent down, but typically it’s going to be better for you to put 5 % down and get a conventional loan. now you can rent the side of the duplex that you’re leaving and that rent.

goes against your mortgage that you are paying. So it reduces your debt to income ratio. And now you get a triplex and it’s a personal residence, the side that you live in and you’re running the other two places. And then six months later a year, now you go to your fourplex and now you have nine doors.

Dylan Silver (14:34)
Holy cow. I almost want to do like a reality television show in this. Like you drop, you drop, don’t know, 10 people together and say, hey, go, you’ve got two years with no real estate investing or business scaling to get nine doors and see what happens. ⁓ But I want to ask you about your business versus other.

Wendell Cox (14:36)
And you live in one of the doors at the four blocks and you have the other door.

Dylan Silver (15:01)
credit repair, restoration, establishment, because this is the first time that I’ve

heard about someone doing something so encompassing, because you do the business, you do the personal, you’re also talking about, in this case, duplexes and triplexes. You also do for folks who are not just needing credit repair, but also establishment. And then also before we hopped onto the podcast here, you talked about consolidation and ⁓ other areas. I would say this is probably

⁓ fairly uncommon, no, to find someone who does all of these things in the same room.

Wendell Cox (16:17)
Yeah, it just comes with being in lending and real estate for the seven years before and now in credit. so just kind of really being exposed to the different areas and helping people what they need and just being a part of their lives and their journey and whether it’s to home ownership or through investing and to building business credit. But it can be achieved. It just depends on what your needs are.

and we creatively help you get there. ⁓ You can take somebody that has no business credit at all. If their personal credit is dinged, we can help them restore that. So that it gets to the 680 mark. ⁓ And then while we’re working on the credit, we can establish kind of like your Dun & Bradstreet number and a bunch of other things in order to get the…

unsecured business funding that you need so that you don’t have to put up collateral and work on that. If somebody has a 680 or higher and they have four credit cards with high limits and not a lot of inquiries in the past six months, you can get between 150 to $250,000 in what’s called credit card stacking at 0 % interest. So you just leverage that.

that capital to go acquire investment properties or buy one and fix it up and all that good stuff. And then runs and repeat. So there’s a lot of options out there. The business credit side can be fairly easy. You just have to have your personal side in a good spot.

Dylan Silver (17:56)
familiar with with some of that yeah

buttoned up, ⁓ Wendell, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they’d like to reach out to you, or if they maybe have credit questions of their own?

Wendell Cox (18:17)
Sure, it’s mortgagecreditpro.com is the website. On there is my phone number, which is 469-500-5906. You can Google Mortgage Credit Pro Rockwall and you’ll see the reviews that people have left. And get in touch with me there on the Google listing type thing as well.

Dylan Silver (18:38)
Wendell,

thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Wendell Cox (18:42)
Thanks, Dalen. I appreciate it very much. Hope this brings value to people that are listening.