From Sales to Success: Brenden Rendo’s Journey in Real Estate

Dylan Silver (00:00.655)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have Brenden Rendo. Brenden is with the Homes in Orlando team and he’s here to help with 30 plus years of experience, provide expert guidance for buyers, sellers, and investors across central Florida. Brenden, welcome to the show.

Brenden Rendo (00:22.616)
Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Dylan Silver (00:24.823)
Absolutely, I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks how they got into the real estate space.

Brenden Rendo (00:30.91)
I was actually in medical sales and I was traveling the whole state. looking to buy my first home. The gentleman who did the financing needed help as a mortgage broker. Asked him what I had to do. He’s like, I’ll just, you know, need to pass this test and stuff like that. And he’s like, I can, I can feed you leads. So I’m like, okay. You know, cause I was getting a little tired of the traveling. was traveling a ton. And so I started off, I actually started off on the mortgage side.

Dylan Silver (00:56.293)
Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (01:01.134)
of the industry and was in that on that side until gosh about 2010, 2011. Went through the great recession. That’s why my head is so flat. I’m banging against the wall trying to get things done and then the gentleman who did my appraisals, my appraiser, we had a great relationship with had become the manager of a remax office in Winter Springs, Florida. He’s like come over to the

to the agent side, he’ll do great. So 2012 went, took my test and started working, started working with him, um, at RE-MAX.

Dylan Silver (01:41.849)
Now, for folks who may not have been in this space at that time, I tend to think that Florida during this recession period was like one of the peak areas of mayhem. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but from what I’ve heard from guests on the show, yeah.

Brenden Rendo (01:54.548)
my gosh, the foreclosures were unbelievable. If you look at Paloosia County, 50 % of the homes went into foreclosure. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (02:03.589)
50%. my gosh. So in the mortgage space at that time, was it a lot of people leaving the space or was it people coming into the space? What did it look like? Everyone was leaving.

Brenden Rendo (02:13.622)
No, no, everybody was leaving. Everybody was leaving you, but the problem was is you just, they had tightened so much, you couldn’t get anything approved. I mean, you just, it, and the guidelines would change. I had three condos approved, ready to close, and they changed the rules in the middle of the month and destroyed three deals. And I was at that point, I was like, I’m done. can’t, I can’t keep doing this.

Dylan Silver (02:23.514)
Really?

Dylan Silver (02:36.453)
I gotta go do something else. I mean going from that side to the agent side must be interesting because I’m a new agent and I’ve had people come to me and I guess Texas is one of the states where you can potentially do both. I don’t know how feasible that would be.

Brenden Rendo (02:51.756)
You can do both, you know, pretty much anywhere in the country. The only thing you have to be careful of is with FHA, they won’t let you do both sides of a transaction in an FHA. Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (03:01.751)
on an FHA. Did you find that you had a preference one over the other? If you could kind of pick, hey, this is the peak market for…

Brenden Rendo (03:10.346)
I prefer being the agent just because you’re the top dog. You mortgage, know, you were chasing a lot of realtors, stuff like that, where I, as an agent, you really dictate everything that goes on in the transaction. You hold things together more.

Dylan Silver (03:30.629)
Now when you went from the lending side to becoming an agent, I imagine this is kind of like a leg up on every other agent because now you’re going from…

Brenden Rendo (03:39.892)
yeah, the knowledge base is great because you know how to structure deals, you know, when the other lenders are throwing baloney at you. And you’re just like, no, that’s not the guideline. No, let’s try that again. Yeah. I’ve had more than one discussion with that over the years.

Dylan Silver (03:50.489)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (03:54.436)
Right.

When you became

Dylan Silver (04:01.567)
When you became an agent, Brenden, were you getting a lot of people who were relying on you as well to guide them when it came to the lending side, or did you really just make a distinct exit from that?

Brenden Rendo (04:12.296)
I would not, not really, but I was a safety check to make sure that what they were being told is correct. You know, if I felt like the age, the lender wasn’t being, ethical or, or straight up, I’d let them know. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (04:32.953)
Now we mentioned before hopping on here, Orlando being overcrowded and I said, no, you’re breaking my heart, Brenden, you’re breaking my heart. Cause I always tell people this, I’ve flown through Fort Lauderdale on my way back to Dallas a couple times and traveling abroad. I’m like, this is the nicest place I’ve ever been to. It’s February, the weather is nice, you know.

Brenden Rendo (04:45.218)
Uh-huh.

Brenden Rendo (04:52.65)
It has changed so much and I moved down here in 96 and it’s just the population has just grown and grown and Everything’s just moved out. You know, hasn’t gone up. Everything’s just moved out. I’ve I four is just one big city now. I mean from Daytona to Saint Pete, it’s just really just one big city. Everything’s everything is blended together.

Dylan Silver (04:58.309)
Hell,

Dylan Silver (05:15.451)
1B city.

I’m my heart here, Brenden. I tell people that I see Florida, for whatever reason, I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but it definitely seems to be the case from the guests that I’ve had on the show, a hotbed of real estate entrepreneurs, whether their business is based in Florida or not. I just had a podcast today with a gentleman who does real estate wholesale in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but just moved his business down to Florida, Fort Myers, if I’m not mistaken, so that he could just be part of the vibe.

Brenden Rendo (05:48.61)
my gosh, Fort Myers is hurting right now. Big time. Yep. They, they went from the fastest growing, God, what the heck’s the city right above Fort Myers? Cape Coral, Cape Coral, that area went from being one of the fastest growing to the fastest equity loss in the country. Like within six months, people stopped moving.

Dylan Silver (05:53.807)
Really?

Dylan Silver (06:15.373)
What happened?

Brenden Rendo (06:18.798)
People stop moving. During COVID, we had this huge influx of people from Illinois, all over the place. Yeah, if you’re allowed to stay home, work from anywhere you want, where do you want to work? Yeah, you’re going to work in the sunshine. I mean, when I was in medical sales, that’s what I did. I was based here, but I flew around the country, up and down the East Coast. And there were a bunch of us who all knew each other Monday morning getting on the plane. But it was nice, you knew when you were coming back.

Dylan Silver (06:19.17)
no.

Dylan Silver (06:24.109)
Really?

Dylan Silver (06:28.037)
Hmm.

Dylan Silver (06:31.631)
but you’re

Dylan Silver (06:39.897)
Ryan.

Dylan Silver (06:48.741)
You

Brenden Rendo (06:48.822)
And like you said, January, February, like, Hey, I can go home and go golfing when I’m done, when I get home. but it stopped, it’s, it stopped. If you look at the population, growth that’s going on right now, it’s actually, the number of people moving in has, has dropped. think they said like 96%, somewhere in there.

Dylan Silver (06:56.655)
hell.

Dylan Silver (07:13.143)
So, man, this is breaking my heart. I’m very bullish on Florida. I love Florida. I love Florida because I travel abroad and also I go through there so often. I think I’ve been in the Miami area probably five times in the last year.

Brenden Rendo (07:25.262)
Yeah, what’s difficult is it grew so fast and the numbers exploded so much. It’s outpaced itself. You can’t do a 300 % increase in the prices of homes and expect to still get them. when, give you a perfect example, Veto Florida. I think the average income is $96,000 per family in a Veto Florida.

Dylan Silver (07:41.219)
Year over year. Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (07:54.252)
to buy a home there, the average home there, you gotta make $142,000.

The numbers in Florida just don’t make sense anymore. And that’s why you’ve seen the sales. I do a podcast, I my podcast every Thursday at 11 o’clock. And we go through the numbers. And the numbers in Orlando, the Orlando regional are just flat as can be. I we’ve got a million plus people in our area, and we’re averaging 400 sales a week. That’s it. That is it. Condos have dropped to 100.

Dylan Silver (08:04.101)
you

Brenden Rendo (08:30.956)
mean, you’ve condo markets actually probably lost about on average about 30 % worth of worth of their equity in the past year. If you’re in a condo here in this area, you’re you’re you’re regretting it right now.

Dylan Silver (08:37.826)
So we’re-

Dylan Silver (08:41.413)
Are sellers aware of this kind of downtrend or are they still thinking, well, my home’s in Florida. It’s got to be worth more than what it was a year and a half ago.

Brenden Rendo (08:48.142)
They there some are some some are denying it You know, know that you see the headlines but the headlines are so misleading because You know like the one that came out with today. Oh, you know national home prices are up 4 % Like well, doesn’t matter what’s happening nationally Real estate is local real estate is always local. It’s it’s where you’re at and Florida really for the past 12 months

Dylan Silver (08:57.423)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:08.943)
nationally now, you know.

Brenden Rendo (09:18.242)
has been completely flat. You know, there’s no growth. We’ve actually lost probably about 2 % in single-family homes, but condos, I’d honestly say we’re probably 25 to 30 % loss in equity. I looked at a house for a gentleman who fortunately looks like he’s going in for closure because his HOA fees jumped to $850 a month. A month for a 200…

Dylan Silver (09:37.957)
Mm.

Dylan Silver (09:43.361)
A month? What in the world?

Brenden Rendo (09:47.182)
He bought it for 260 and I could barely make it, I’m sitting there going, on a good day, if we catch the right person, we’re maybe 180, maybe 180. But then you think about your pool of buyers, who wants to pay $850 a month for an HOA on a $200,000 condo?

Dylan Silver (10:07.577)
month in HOA.

There better be some nice amenities in going on in there.

Brenden Rendo (10:13.196)
Yeah. Yeah. And you just, just, it’s, those types of things that just, it doesn’t make sense. And there’s things have got to be, got to be fixed. You know, they, just expanded to one law for the, for the HOAs. I don’t, I think it’s too late. I think they should have looked at it more, more realistically when they, when they made the law changes because of the, the one that fell down. Because they,

Dylan Silver (10:17.221)
Is that common?

Brenden Rendo (10:42.178)
basically tripled everybody’s HOA because of the requirements of that law.

Dylan Silver (10:47.525)
So this sounds like a very common thing. mean, in Texas we have lots of HOAs here. I’m from New Jersey originally, so I was not used to seeing so many homes and communities and so many new builds and so many HOAs. Now there’s an HOA everywhere in Texas, right? But I wasn’t aware that, I mean, $800 in HOA fees is astronomical. I didn’t know that that existed anywhere except for a super high lux.

Brenden Rendo (10:54.04)
Okay.

Brenden Rendo (10:59.363)
Yep.

Brenden Rendo (11:09.838)
Oh yeah. Pretty much for the condo market here in Florida, when they changed the law about two years ago because of one fell down, what had happened is all this deferred maintenance had taken place. The HOA just kept deferring it, kept deferring it, kept deferring it. You know, there was no one overseeing to make sure that things were being done correctly. So now they have to go in and get engineering reports on any building over three stories high. So all these buildings…

Now I have these engineering reports that say they’ve got two, three, $4 million worth of deferred maintenance. And these poor HOAs have had to go out triple the HOA fee plus come in with special assessments. I know people who’ve gotten special assessments here in Altamont Springs from anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 in a special assessment. It’s like, oh, it’s…

Dylan Silver (12:02.105)
This is mind blowing. basically they, because they kicked the can down the curb and the previous people were not paying into it, the current occupants are just kind of stuck. Holy smoke.

Brenden Rendo (12:07.661)
Mm-hmm.

Brenden Rendo (12:12.43)
They’re stuck. They’re stuck. you know, that’s, I really think the foreclosures in the the counter market are going to increase. I mean, we’ve we’re

We’re almost 5,000 condos on the market right now. There’s 5,000. There’s actually, we just broke 9,000 for homes, which is very high, but there’s 5,000 condos. Normally it’s about 20 % of the number of the houses for sale are condos for sale.

Dylan Silver (12:31.205)
5,000?

Dylan Silver (12:38.553)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:48.463)
Now it’s like 50.

Brenden Rendo (12:48.652)
We’re sitting at over 50%, roughly about 60%, know, 60 % of number of houses for sale.

Dylan Silver (12:53.081)
Man, I mean, that’s a bubble.

Brenden Rendo (12:57.25)
Yeah. Yeah. that’s, well, that’s, that’s why you’re seeing, I’ve got one client, she’s in a resort community, you know, and her and I talked numerous times. I kept trying to get her as well. She was a certain price. had a couple offers. said, no, I want this. I’m like, Deidre, sell this thing. I’m telling you, sell it, sell it now. She’s still going to make good money. Well, she delayed it. Now I actually talked to her. got to talk to her today. I put it back on the market.

Dylan Silver (13:07.331)
Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (13:25.23)
after she took it off for a while. And she’s like, what do think I’m gonna get for it? I’m like, oh, maybe 180. She’s like, what? If we had done it a year ago or a year and a half ago when I had suggested, she probably would have gotten 240.

Dylan Silver (13:38.223)
Did you see that coming into play here with the HOAs? Man, there’s a lot going on out there.

Brenden Rendo (13:40.238)
Oh, you could see it. You know, you could see it a mile away. You could see it a mile away. Yep. Yeah, it was easy. It’s it’s it’s math. It’s it’s really when it comes down to a lot of stuff, it’s math. It’s just like the people, the people who said that nobody saw the crash coming of 2007, 2008. Bologna. Bologna. was math. It was it was all math. I mean, when I was doing the loans, you know, you’re sitting there, you know, people

Dylan Silver (13:57.103)
Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (14:09.07)
I wouldn’t do them, I know everybody else would do them, is they would do these stated income loans for 100 % financing with a 580 credit score. And I had people who were working at McDonald’s want me to state that they made $60,000 a year. I’m like, no, no.

Dylan Silver (14:24.165)
Brenden, old were you at the time when you were seeing that? So 2007, 2006, and you’re in the mortgage space. How old were you when you were seeing these mortgages go down?

Brenden Rendo (14:31.822)
Oh gosh, I’m 58 right now, so 20 years ago. So I was 38. Yeah, been 30s.

Dylan Silver (14:37.273)
so mid-30s. So you’re seeing this and is anyone, is anyone like, is it just business as normal or are people saying like, hey, things are kinda.

Brenden Rendo (14:46.24)
Yeah, because people get caught up and they stop looking at the basics. That’s always the hardest part. mean, it’s no different than what we’re going through now economically. When you look at the basics, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense. You know, I got into a discussion with a group the other day that, you everyone’s like, you know, we’ll be back down to 6 % with interest rates, you know, by the end of the year. No, you’re not. No.

Dylan Silver (14:59.705)
Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (15:14.614)
No, I’ll say that with 100 % confidence. No, you’re not. There’s too many things going on that are going, that will not allow the yields on bonds to decrease. Main one is government spending. You you can’t continue to spend this, spend an additional two and a half or two billion dollars a year. No one wants our bonds to begin with. I don’t know if you follow the bond market, but look what’s going on in Japan in the past two weeks.

Japan’s 30 and 40 year bond have shot through the roof. They’re up over 4%. And this can cause a huge problem here in America because they’re the largest bond holder of US treasury debt right now. Well, they may have to start selling off their treasury debt to repatriate money to get their yields to come back down. Well, that happens. What do you do? You’re now flooding the market.

Dylan Silver (15:49.061)
Hmm.

Brenden Rendo (16:12.706)
with our treasury bonds. What’s it do to treasury bonds? Forces the yields up because people want more money for them to buy them.

Dylan Silver (16:21.561)
which creates higher rates.

Brenden Rendo (16:23.084)
which creates higher rates. I mean, if it goes bad, it’s gonna go bad and it’s gonna hurt a lot. mean, we’ll be sitting at eight and a half, nine percent. If Japan does not figure out how to correct this, it’s gonna cause a lot.

Dylan Silver (16:43.129)
You know, when I hear and discuss these topics, one of the things that I hearken back to, and I’ve talked about this with family members, with friends, with a couple people here locally, is this idea of what is the middle class person working for, right? And so most people, most younger people, I’m 31, right? So I can speak for people my age and maybe younger.

Brenden Rendo (17:05.645)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (17:09.669)
where most of us are not looking at vacations and buying rental properties. This is very uncommon way of thinking. We’re just trying to get by. And I think, you know.

Brenden Rendo (17:19.726)
It’s not just yourself, it’s everyone. It’s everyone these days. I consider myself a successful real estate agent. I make a great living. I do very well, but my wife and I were just discussing today that, my gosh, my car insurance in the past two years has gone up over $100 a month. And I haven’t done anything. Then our home insurance in Florida, holy cow.

We had a $1,200 increase in home insurance in the past year. We didn’t do anything. They just increased it. So you’re looking at what you’re making. I’m making as much or little bit more, but it’s everything because of the cost of everything, it’s just, it’s popping up. It’s frustrating.

Dylan Silver (18:14.273)
It is frustrating. One of the things that I talk about, and not everyone can do this, so before I say this I want to caveat with this, is I like to travel. I got a passport two years ago and it kind of changed my life with some of the best money that I’ve ever spent. They lost it in the mail. They lost the passport in the mail. So I had to get it twice and drive to Houston to get it, but we ended up getting it.

Brenden Rendo (18:29.239)
Hahaha

Dylan Silver (18:35.691)
And since I’ve been traveling and seeing other languages, seeing just developing countries, right? I’m recognizing that a lot of these things that I really thought I needed here would really be considered luxuries in a lot of other places. And so as I’m hosting this podcast and I’m a newly licensed agent, but I’ve been wholesaling for the last two years. Part of me in the back of my head is thinking like, how do I do this remotely? How do I do it? So maybe 50 % of my time is in the U S and maybe 50 % of some of these other places where I

Brenden Rendo (18:47.32)
Mm-hmm.

Brenden Rendo (18:56.206)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (19:05.655)
rent you know a beachfront place

Brenden Rendo (19:06.872)
Yeah, friend of mine from high school just moved to the Philippines.

Dylan Silver (19:11.555)
That’s a move.

Brenden Rendo (19:12.974)
I mean, it made sense. It’s like, Mike, holy cow. mean, the house he built is a nice, house, gorgeous house, not too far off off the ocean. And I think he paid under $100,000 for the thing. The cost of living there is nothing. Absolutely nothing. You know, so it’s like, OK, why not? Why not move over there? Take my retirement. You know, I can live like an absolute king. You know, it’s just…

Dylan Silver (19:27.971)
Yeah.

Nothing.

Dylan Silver (19:41.039)
King.

Brenden Rendo (19:43.214)
It’s frustrating because you look, one of the arguments we have going on right now, state of Florida is governor Santus wants to do away with property taxes, which I’m all for. It’s like, if I’m, if I’ve paid for my house, why do I have to keep paying for it? And there’s so many people, I mean, that I follow tax liens. There’s so many people who have lost their properties because of stupid tax liens.

Dylan Silver (19:55.109)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (20:00.901)
paying for it.

Dylan Silver (20:10.369)
so many.

Brenden Rendo (20:11.31)
And even though we have a Homestead program here where it can’t go up any more than 3 % a year, well, 3 % over 10 years is a 30 % increase.

Dylan Silver (20:22.649)
Yep. That’s how people are losing their homes. I mean, I see it every month.

Brenden Rendo (20:25.646)
Yeah, it’s like, you know, there’s, different, different arguments, different ways. think you can look at it, but you know, when you get people who are fixed income, 65 years old, you know, maybe you do, maybe you do say, okay, we’re, we’re going to do away with your property taxes. Problem is, is then you get, you get the young people saying, I’m paying and why aren’t they paying? It’s because they paid. They paid, you know, you do it right. Guess what? You won’t have to pay either. So, I mean, that’s

Dylan Silver (20:48.261)
They paid. They did.

Brenden Rendo (20:55.53)
I did my podcast last week. I kind of hit the roof because I just I’m frustrated when I look and see how things are going. I happen to be more conservative and I’m not happy because Doge came in. Doge provided five hundred seven hundred billion dollars worth of cost savings. Why isn’t that long yet? Why isn’t that law yet? And then they come out with this budget.

Dylan Silver (21:17.402)
Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (21:22.52)
this big beautiful bill which is big but it’s not beautiful and they didn’t cut they’re spending just as they’re spending more

Dylan Silver (21:32.109)
I did see that in the news this morning. was a notification on my phone.

Brenden Rendo (21:33.998)
And that pisses I’ll tell you, hey, President Trump pisses me off. That’s not what I asked for. What I asked for is come in, cut and cut it. You know, just cut it. You see how much waster is. mean, it’s unbelievable. So, and I look at my kids, got four kids. One’s going to be 30, 27.

26, 27 and twin 16 year olds. And it’s like, you look at all this debt and you can’t, rates will never come down as long as we have this debt. They won’t, they’ll never come back down to what they were. I mean, we’ve got 28 and a half trillion dollars that has to be refinanced in the next two years. Okay, that was, that was put out, I think the average,

Dylan Silver (22:16.324)
Yeah. Yeah, I won’t.

Brenden Rendo (22:32.878)
I had a graph on it. think the average was 2.13 % was the average interest on that 20, $28 trillion refinancing it. Now we’re going to be jumping to roughly 4.3. We’re doubling the payment on that. We’re over a trillion dollars right now in interest payments. Get nothing, nothing for it. That’s why we just got downright downgraded by Moody’s again. Why I took them so long. have no clue.

Dylan Silver (22:46.437)
How cool.

Dylan Silver (22:58.063)
We did.

You know what I mean?

Brenden Rendo (23:02.54)
So it’s it’s one of those, no one has, no one has the guts. And it’s because they’re politicians, you know, they’re more worried about getting re-elected every two years and standing up and saying, no, okay, maybe I do get kicked out, but at least for the two years I was there, I stood my ground.

Dylan Silver (23:20.517)
It’s tough to get people to cut back. It is tough. It is tough. You know, there’s got it. There’s got some level of Ever been people are living on them

Brenden Rendo (23:24.044)
Yeah, we’re I mean, credit card credit card debt is higher than we’re over a trillion dollars in credit card debt trillion dollars in student loan debt. You know, credit card, what are the late payments or highs they’ve been in in over, I think, 15 years. So you just look at all this stuff and it’s like. You know, people are you think it’s going to crash? Yeah, when it does, it’s going to it’s it’s going to be a big one.

Dylan Silver (23:53.733)
Brenden, we are coming up on time here. It really flew by. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Brenden Rendo (23:53.859)
Yeah.

Brenden Rendo (24:01.358)
Um, you can visit my website, uh, homes in Orlando dot for sale. Um, can visit me there, call me directly 407-616-9019. Uh, and you can always email me Brenden at homes in Orlando dot for sale. Always here to help. You know, I, I’ve always prided myself on my knowledge base and knowing the market, knowing how, knowing how to negotiate properly. Cause that, as you can tell, I’m kind of a data guy.

Kind of a geek. And a lot of times it just, when you’re, when you’re negotiating, you need the more data you have, the better off you are at negotiating. Because if you know, Hey, they owe this much. I mean, one of the first things you got to do when, when you’re looking at, you know, putting an offer in is go find out how much do they owe on the house, do a reverse amortization. It’s like, okay, so they should be, everything’s right. They should be sitting about here. Okay. So we know we’ve got this much room. We know, Hey,

been on the market for 100 days. So this is their pattern of their price cuts. And you can truly get a feel of exactly where you go. And the other thing is, right now, I teach my clients, don’t be afraid to walk away from a deal. There’s three this year that we we walked within two days, got phone calls back. well, yeah, that’s nice, but that was the price two days ago.

Dylan Silver (25:17.945)
Yep.

Dylan Silver (25:24.591)
What does it offer?

Brenden Rendo (25:31.21)
And it’s just the way the market is right now, we may very well be the only people walking into that house.

Dylan Silver (25:38.873)
Yep, same thing out here.

Brenden Rendo (25:40.14)
And that’s way you gotta approach it. And the more data you have, the better off you can negotiate with the people. Because unfortunately a lot of agents just aren’t educated.

Dylan Silver (25:52.163)
No, from the investment standpoint, I’m completely there with you. Brenden, thank you so much for coming on the show today, for chopping it up with us about Florida and the current state of things. Thank you for coming on the show here today.

Brenden Rendo (25:58.471)
thank you.

Brenden Rendo (26:04.184)
Well, thank you. I enjoyed it. I’ll have to do it again sometime.