How Private Lending Helps Real Estate Investors Scale | Daniel Samandarov

Daniel Samandarov (00:00)
At some point in time, you have to jump from one lender to another because they don’t all do everything that’s small balance. Most lenders do one or two things and they just and they do them well. But there’s nothing to stop you from being able to do multiple things really, really well. And that’s why we build Blue Gate to be able to do all the things that a real estate investor could possibly want to get into, from resi to commercial.

Flipping to keeping all asset classes, we executed on a really, really high level. And that whole idea came to me because of my frustration with the current place lenders when I was building.

Meghan Escobar (01:09)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Real Estate Pros Podcast, hosted by Investor Fuel. I’m your host today, Meghan Escobar, and I have the pleasure of sitting down with a gentleman who is out here doing big things in the lending world. He goes by the name of Daniel Samandarov, and he is one of the founders of.

Blue Gate Capital. So we’re gonna talk about who his avatar is, what he’s doing, where he’s marketing his business and all the things. So I wanna thank you, Daniel, for coming on the show.

Daniel Samandarov (01:37)
Thanks for having me.

Meghan Escobar (01:38)
absolutely. And for those that might not be familiar with your name or what Blue Gate Capital is doing out here in the lending world.

Would you mind giving us the thirty thousand foot view of, what your focus is these days and what areas that you’re marketing in?

Daniel Samandarov (01:53)
Sure, I would love to.

Blue Gate Capital is a direct private lender that operates across almost every single state in America. We are a small balance agnostic private lender. That means that we’re looking to do residential real estate, investment purpose loans, and commercial real estate deals. We do everything from a bridge perspective, which means short duration loans, 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, as well as term loans, which are longer-term loans for cash flowing assets.

And again, it can be either a bridge loan with rehab, or it could be a term loan, a CMBS loan, a DSCR loan, whatever the customer needs. We have a full array of different types of products for different types of investors.

Meghan Escobar (02:33)
Nice. one thing that we talked about prior to getting on here was that you guys are pretty much operating throughout the nation. There’s a handful of states that you are not operating in. so wanna dive into that and maybe why you don’t.

Daniel Samandarov (02:48)
There’s a few states that we don’t operate in because the legislation for lenders is not good. Like take Minnesota, for example. It’s a really, really poor state for private lenders. There’s a lot of barriers, there’s a lot of issues. So most of the states that we do not operate in is because of laws that make it very difficult to operate for a national company like ours, and just kind of makes us not really want to operate in that state because it’s not very lender friendly.

Meghan Escobar (03:13)
Okay, that makes sense. And you guys been in the game for a little bit now, established in twenty nineteen.

Daniel Samandarov (03:18)
That’s correct, yes.

Meghan Escobar (03:19)
What are y what do you feel is the perfect avatar for you?

Daniel Samandarov (03:23)
perfect avatar for us.

Blue Gate Capital, when we’ve been building it over the last, seven, eight years, our idea was how can we service the real estate investor who starts off by doing his first fix and flip project where he doesn’t know anything and be able to help and guide them from the beginning and being able to help them when they are an institutional fix and flipper doing 10 a year. And now they’re past fix and flipping. They’ve graduated to ground up construction.

And now they’ve passed single family resie ground construction and they’ve gone into commercial multifamily renovations, construction. And now they’ve graduated that and they’ve gone into owning multifamily and commercial properties. So we’ve built our business and our platform to make sure that we can service real estate investors of all different types, all within that what we call small balance, all loans and properties under 10 million.

Meghan Escobar (04:15)
That’s amazing. I really love that. So it’s not like you’re just kind of lending to this individual and that’s the end of the relationship. It’s almost like you kind of take them under your wing from the start of their journey and really growing together. That’s awesome.

Daniel Samandarov (04:28)
75 to 85% of our business are is repeat clients who come back to us time and time again. we have investors who are Burr investors, buy, renovate, refinance, repeat, right? They’re investors who are going out into the market, they’re buying tons of property every month. They are buying with the fix and flip loan, and then they refinance out of the DSCR loan. And this repeat of customer is continuously happening. And it happens because.

The main thing in any business, and even in your business, is service, right? You have to bring value and great service to your clients. I always tell some of my salespeople: if a customer is going to sh rate shop you over a tenth of a basis point, a twentieth of a basis point, in the grand scheme of things, in a short-term loan or in a long-term loan, these are pennies, dollars on loan amounts. So do you want to have

a Toyota service and experience or do you want a Mercedes-Benz service and experience for a little bit, maybe sometimes more? listen, there’s huge multinational companies out there. But try to get your rep on the phone. Try to speak to someone, try to get a direct answer quickly. It’s going to be very, very difficult for you. I promise that.

Meghan Escobar (05:33)
I love that. So Blue Gate Capital is really still in touch with the human connection.

Daniel Samandarov (05:38)
We operate completely differently than most of the companies that s maybe some of your viewers have used in the past. Okay. each investor or each borrower or broker, if you’re a loan broker, has one dedicated account executive or loan officer or associate at the company. That’s gonna be your main point of contact. And you’re gonna have get all of your answers from one person. If you need something to be figured out or solved for you call your

Associate, you call your AE, and they will get back to you with the correct answers. And you’re not gonna have to speak to three different departments to figure out one answer.

Meghan Escobar (06:11)
It’s sound pretty solid. And also not an easy thing to navigate through, especially in this climate. So what do you feel like it is that, keeps that passion going for you guys?

Daniel Samandarov (06:21)
we’re on a mandate and a mission to do, one to two billion dollars in total funding per year. So until we hit that number, we’re very, very aggressively focused on scaling. And one of the most important things that we’re attributing to our success is we’re only bringing on loan officers and account executives with five plus years of experience. If you go up to our LinkedIn and you check out our team and you check out the loan officers and you click

each person’s individual, even from a processing level or executive team, you’ll see that everyone has been in our industry for five to seven plus years and brings a plethora of experience, knowledge, their own ideas to us at Blue Gate and are helping us evolve as the industry evolves.

Meghan Escobar (07:01)
That’s awesome. It really is. And one thing I always like to bring into the show is We live in a highlight world, right? We were just talking about some guy, the way he promotes himself on social media is a little bit silly and maybe a bit aggressive. But at the end of the day, we see the success highlights. We don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes of what it took to get from A to B, right? So

You’ve got some skin in the game, Daniel. You’ve been in the industry for quite a bit, so I’m sure there’s been a moment where things got pretty real at one point. Maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that you guys had to pivot really fast. Do you mind sharing one of those moments for you guys that kind of sticks

Daniel Samandarov (07:38)
Yeah, in the beginning, and for the first few years, just like in any business, the market changes, capital markets change, your investor base changes, and there’s been numerous times, especially since COVID happened, and then post COVID. So at first you were in COVID a huge the compression of interest rates became super super cheap, then overnight.

Interest rates skyrocket. How what does that affect us? we also just because we have a debt fund and we have investors’ capital, we also work with banks for warehouse lines. But interest rates skyrocket overnight, and now your warehouse line costs you 30% more because it’s attached to the five-year treasury and that’s jumping up and down, or it’s attached to the Wall Street Journal prime rate. That completely changes your business overnight, and you have to.

Quickly, quickly make pivots, adjustments, change your pricing, change your rates. Yeah. And this has already happened in our industry two times now, where we’ve seen not a sharp compression of rates most recently, but a compression of rates, a large increase, compression of rates. And now as you see, the Fed is increasing again with all the political pressures around the world and again increase in rates. Yeah.

Meghan Escobar (09:27)
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I think it’s really important for folks to kind of see that it’s not always a win, right? Sometimes you have to take some losses, sometimes you gotta fall flat on your face. But the difference is in the difference between somebody who is here in the game for long term commitment versus I just wanna make a transaction and then I’m out, So I think that speaks volume about

you and the way that you position yourself as a leader in this industry. So thanks for sharing that. definitely the kind of stuff that people don’t talk about enough. So talk to us a little bit about what the next focus is for Blue Gate Capital. Where are you looking to go next?

Daniel Samandarov (10:04)
So we spent a tremendous amount of time and money building our own proprietary technology. And we have an amazing broker portal for our broker wholesale TPO channel. And we have an amazing client portal for direct retail customers. the next place that we’re looking to get to is really to average out around a billion dollars per year in funding, like I mentioned. And with the

Help of all these new tools and technology that we’ve built to make the process very, very seamless. Plus, we we’re coming off straight off a rather large capital raise. So we have a lot of dry powder that we’re looking to put on the street. And we’re really looking for good deals and good markets with good borrowers. And like we were talking about, Meghan, we are very, very dynamic, right? If you’re a borrower that’s an institutional grade borrower and

You’re getting one point with an eight in front of it, and you have 10 plus experience as excellent credit. We can fund you, maybe even do better, give you better service, give you quicker draws. If you’re a first-time investor and you’ve never done a flip before, but and you have great credit, we can still give you 90% on your purchase, 100% of the rehab budget, and still be in a very great rate. We also help people who are in trouble and who need bailouts. I had a

Conversation a few days ago with someone who told me, Daniel, in my business I took a cash advance, they screwed me. I wasn’t paying my mortgage. I was taking money from the property and having to bring it to the business. Now I missed a few payments. I’m in default. The bank is calling my loan due. What am I supposed to do? Yeah. The guy’s a pretty good guy, has solid financials, has a good business. He made a mistake. His bank is for closing on him and almost no lender will touch him.

we do these bailout loans for people on real estate and give them another chance, another day to live or to fight another day, as I say. be super happy with the rate and the leverage. But if we can help you get out of a situation, we can do that. We also work with a lot of developers and builders out there who do a lot of projects.

During these turbulent times that we just discussed, people got caught in them. They couldn’t sell a property or they got a pre-foreclosure or there was a bankruptcy. We work with developers and builders who have BKs and FCs on their credit report and background. We understand just because you had a blemish on your credit report doesn’t mean that you’re a bad investor or that you’re a bad builder. So we’ll work with these people as well.

a lot of the times what we’ve truly believe right now in ground up construction, the value that all over the country people are going to get for building ground up rather than doing a fix and flip, the different product. You can build a smaller ground up product and sell it for a higher price per square foot than a larger, newly renovated fix and flip project. So we’re doing a lot of first time ground up construction builders that have no experience building ground up.

We do those things as well.

Meghan Escobar (13:32)
Nice. and so it sounds like you’re predominantly focused on like commercial real estate. Is that safe to say, or is are you doing residential as well?

Daniel Samandarov (13:40)
No, we’re doing a lot of residential and a lot of commercial. Our business right now is split. So for us, residential is single FAM, one to four units, duplex, troplex, quadruplex, the and PUDs. A PUD is a planned urban development. So it could be a 20 unit, 30 unit single family or townhouse development, and we’ll do this in stages, right? And then on the commercial side, we have multifamily.

Commercial mixed use warehouse light industrial flex retail mixed use is like for us retail with offices on top or it could be retail or offices multifamily.

Meghan Escobar (14:16)
Ton

of those going up down here in southwest Florida.

Daniel Samandarov (14:19)
We’re seeing a tremendous amount of deals coming from our commercial side. And on the commercial side, which is really cool, we have basically two different options for our customers. We have a no doc option, true commercial, no doc, no tax returns, no bank statements. We just look at the appraised value of the asset and look at sales comps. And if the asset is strong and it’s good, we’re gonna lend against it with no docs.

Right. Right. And then we also have a full doc option, it’s called C MBS full doc, CMBS light dock. And that’s for all properties, 10 units plus multifamily.

Meghan Escobar (14:53)
I love that. Wow. So you guys are really out here trying to help people. So I think that’s incredible. as a private lender, like you said, there’s some big companies out there that they’re not gonna give you these opportunities and options. And so, if somebody’s in a tight snitch situation and they have the

responsibility maybe of like that they they’re gonna pay it back, like you’re willing to help them out.

Daniel Samandarov (15:16)
Look, we’re we we’re looking at every deal with a logical set of eyes. Yeah. Yes, we have a credit box, yes, we have guidelines. Yeah. But we’re also looking at it the deal holistically. And is this deal a good deal? And is there an exit for us as a lender? Because no matter what, even if we securitize the paper and sell it off into to capital markets into the secondaries, if shit hits the fan and it goes bad and we made a mistake, it’s still our responsibility. We have to buy it back, right? Or if we keep it on the balance sheet.

And something happens, responsible. we wanna do as much good business as possible, right? If a deal doesn’t make sense, most likely we’re not gonna ever fund it. If a borrower comes to us and says, Hey, I have this great fix and flip project, this great ground of construction project, but they’re not making any profit, what’s the point of doing that deal? Right.

Meghan Escobar (16:03)
There’s gotta be some leverage right on both ends.

Daniel Samandarov (16:05)
Well, it has to make sense for them. If it doesn’t make sense for them, the story doesn’t make sense. Right. So okay, then you’re building it or you’re doing this project to keep it as a cash flowing property. but wait, the cash flowing property also the cash flow doesn’t make sense. So why would you keep it? You just have to make sure that the customers and our borrowers are doing good deals that make sense.

Meghan Escobar (16:22)
Yeah, absolutely. Run the numbers, right? Numbers don’t lie.

Daniel Samandarov (16:25)
Numbers never lie.

Meghan Escobar (16:26)
They never lie. That is the one thing that I always live by. So that’s really awesome stuff, man. And a lot of our listeners, like I said, they’re either very early on in their journey looking on looking to see where they fit into the real estate world, or they’ve been in the game for a long time and they’re looking for the next best opportunity or looking to level up. And so

One thing that I always like to bring into context here on these shows is like building relationships. And the reason for that is t often our success is influenced by who we surround ourselves with, right? Like I don’t know if you’ve ever had a mentor or anybody that you look up to when you got into the entrepreneurship or into this world, but like when it comes to growing your network, Daniel, what do you think has made the biggest difference for you being in certain rooms, shaking certain hands?

Daniel Samandarov (17:11)
man, I can tell you from raising capital side, networking is extremely, extremely important. Yeah. You have to be in every room with people who are like-minded and trying to do the same thing that you are or have already done it. That’s actually more important to find the rooms where people are already successful and have already achieved. luckily enough for me in my life,

I was born into an entrepreneurial family. We my father was a business owner from a very young age. He’s actually an immigrant from the former USSR. And he had a huge company from a very young age, sold that company. We went into real estate. And I’ve kind of been around real estate and learned real estate, since I’m a 10-year-old kid, going around to different projects, different properties that we own, learning from the bottom up. And the funny thing is, believe it or not.

because of networking and because of people, that’s how I started my first business, which was before lending. And this was before everyone thought that they’re an rental arbitrage Airbnb King. me and a few other people in Manhattan, we were the real Airbnb kings in 2010, 2011. We were the real rental arbitrage kings of New York. And shout out Max Beckman.

Millennial Realty. And at one point, Meghan, we had in Manhattan, because of special connections and networking that we did to meet landlords. It was not illegal back then. In 2010, 2011, 12, if you come to a landlord and you told them, Hey, I want to rent your apartment and I’m going to s sublease it to vacation residents and to corporate housing people, they were very okay with you taking a lease and you being upfront and honest. And we went to all these events, we met all these landlords.

Totally fine. And we grew to like sixty units in New York operating my company and my friend’s company. He had over like two hundred. But then when all of the legislation from the hotels started, piling up, piling up, and people were getting in trouble, we didn’t want to get in trouble. We very quickly just closed down the business one unit at a time. We told the landlords, Hey, we don’t want to get you guys in trouble.

The city started giving out crazy fines. And it’s the business economics wouldn’t make sense. If you get a fine, that fine would knock out, 70% of your entire profit in that apartment. And that’s how I started developing and building real estate. and then ultimately, I started developing for two years. And by the end of 18, I said to myself, Wow, there’s been so many deals.

Where I thought we’re gonna make a shit ton of money and we end up breaking even. And then there were deals where I thought, hey, we’re gonna lose money. This is not looking good. And then we make a bunch of money. And then of course you have all of your run-of-the-mill deals where exactly what you underwrote is exactly what had happened. But one part of the business that I always was keeping a very close eye on was the financing aspect, right? I needed financing. And because I saw how financing was working for my own deals.

That’s when I re said to myself, okay, there’s something that can be done better here as a lender. And I want to go and try to solve that problem for fellow people like myself who were getting into the business and who are now in the business. And I’ll give you an example of it.

At some point in time, you have to jump from one lender to another because they don’t all do everything that’s small balance. Most lenders do one or two things and they just and they do them well. But there’s nothing to stop you from being able to do multiple things really, really well. And that’s why we build Blue Gate to be able to do all the things that a real estate investor could possibly want to get into, from resi to commercial.

Flipping to keeping all asset classes, we executed on a really, really high level. And that whole idea came to me because of my frustration with the current place lenders when I was building. And I still build large multifamily for myself. Mostly with banks now, but it’s still a pain. I’ll tell you.

Meghan Escobar (20:58)
I bet. Well, thanks. I thank you for sharing that. I think it’s super important for people to understand, like, you got a network, and it and I think more so today because of AI and social media and it’s kind of like swept under the rug a little bit, especially for new oncoming like entrepreneurs. They don’t understand

Any business you’re in is a freaking people business, especially real estate. you gotta shake hands. You gotta get to know the right people. And like you said, something that was so super important was like get with people that have already done what you’re trying to do. That is so freaking important. So solid advice. Yeah.

Daniel Samandarov (21:36)
if I could give like suggestion to the viewers and you’re trying to get into real estate and you’re in a localized market, I would go and find probably on social media the biggest realtor in your local market that you want to operate in. Go find this person, find their team, get in with them, go to their open houses, meet to meet with them, talk to them, tell them what they what you want to do. Like you said, Meghan, it’s extremely

personable business, you have to be shaking hands with people because real estate is, bricks, right? it’s in the reality world now that we have so much AI and social. it’s in reality. So these realtors who have control of all the deals, if you want to get into the business, you need to get in good with the realtor who’s going to be looking for those good properties for you. Because if you’re new to this, you don’t have the eye and the training and the underwriting to look at a deal online on Zillow and kind of figure out what’s good, what’s bad.

There’s so many thin moments, so many details that a early-on investor can miss that a very, very experienced realtor can advise you against and say, Hey, like all the things you pointed out are really smart, but you missed X, Y, and Z. there’s a train track behind that forest, or hey, there’s a creek there which makes this a flood zone, or hey, this blocks, the comps are not as good as the block two blocks over and there’s stuff.

Over there for sale. So they really hold the keys to localized investing for you.

Meghan Escobar (23:01)
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for sharing that. I definitely think the people in the audience will take some value from that. So make sure you jot get your pens and papers out, guys. Like he’s dropping gems over here. So I appreciate it so much. And before we wrap things up here, like if someone wanted to connect with you, Daniel, collab with you, partner with you, or even like could use your services. you’re doing amazing things out here. What would be the best way for someone to connect with you? I know

You mentioned you’re just getting on social media platforms, so is there a Instagram or a LinkedIn or a phone number?

Daniel Samandarov (23:33)
Yeah, sure. if anyone has any questions or needs any help with any financing for any of your deals, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Daniel Samandarov. You can find me. Our company has a huge LinkedIn page. You that’ll also help give you a little bit more context about who we are. We have over 50 people in our company, and you can meet the whole team right there. You can also email me, Daniel, at Blue Gatecap.com. And if you’re more of a texter and you want to send me a text.

3059709000. Feel free to shoot me a text or a call with any questions. It all starts with a conversation, guys. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. All questions are good questions. I’m opening to answering anything. I hope some people will reach out.

Meghan Escobar (24:14)
That’s awesome. Thank you so much. And we’ll make sure to provide all of that information down below so that way you don’t have to, pause, rewind, go back or Google.

Daniel Samandarov (24:23)
also any brokers. By brokers, loan brokers, ISOs, independent sales organizations, TPOs, or people in our private lending space wholesale channels. Please click the link below. There’s a link specifically for brokers to sign up to work with us. We provide a white labeled service for brokers. So you keep your customers.

And we just want to have the relationship with you, the brokers.

Meghan Escobar (24:44)
Amazing. Yeah, we’ll definitely put all that information below for you guys. So just tap the links and connect with Daniel straight away. So I really appreciate your time, your story, and more importantly, your perspective and the way that you position yourself as a professional in your industry. I think it’s amazing that’s the stuff that you’re doing out here and the services that you’re providing for, people who might not be able to go elsewhere. So I think it’s great. Thank you for taking the time to be here with us today on Investor Fuel.

Daniel Samandarov (25:10)
Thanks, Meghan.

Meghan Escobar (25:11)
Absolutely. And for those of you that are listening and tuning in, if you got any value from this, please be sure to hit like and subscribe. We’ve got more conversations coming in with operators just like Daniel, who are out here building real businesses with real people in real time. We’ll see you on the next episode.