How Self-Employed Buyers Qualify for a Mortgage Using Bank Statements

Michael Rosenblum (00:00)
You must be a sponge. You have an advantage over me, probably over you, Issa, certainly over people that are older than us, which is this new stuff that we’re getting thrown at every day. We’re struggling with it. We’re learning it, it’s coming the hard way, but we’re struggling with it.

If you have grown up with computers, if you’re now growing up with AI, growing up with social media, you are potentially that conduit from the generation behind you that you need to learn from to your generation. Use that. It’s leverage.

Issa Hanna (02:08)
Welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros Show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today I have Michael Rosenblum, a seasoned lender here to share his knowledge with us. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Rosenblum (02:18)
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Issa Hanna (02:20)
It’s a pleasure to have you. We were talking earlier. Very extensive knowledge in lending. Very—has, have a good eye for the future in lending. With that, though, you’re a lender. So can you kind of run down your day-to-days for our viewers at home?

Michael Rosenblum (02:35)
Sure. It’s funny, our day—or my day—is evolving. Back in the day, you spent more and more and more time on the phones. Mornings was reviewing your loans, reviewing the documents that are needed, what have you. And then later on, you ended up on the phones calling customers, calling real estate agents. It’s evolved a little bit.

Technology has absolutely taken over our business just like every other. We are working on AI, we are working on podcasts, we are working on postings, we are working on social media. It’s becoming as important a part of our prospecting and learning who our customers are as talking to real estate agents. I have an excellent team now behind me here at Edge. Processing is outstanding.

Loan outreach is outstanding. So I’m spending more and more time, what I want to be doing, quite frankly, on the marketing side. And then, obviously, a considerable part of my day is spent talking to clients. I do not outsource, nor do I funnel through clients into a, into a lead sheet. I want to talk to people. I want to know what their needs are, know what their concerns are, especially first-time home buyers. I want to know what they’re worried about.

Because that needs to be what I’m worried about.

Issa Hanna (03:47)
One hundred percent. As somebody who was a longtime real estate agent and had a lot of buyer clients, you wanna be accessible, especially to first-time home buyers. They wanna know they can get their loan guy on the phone, especially the loan guy, that you guys are the most important ones, and ask a question, even if it’s a silly question, you know?

Michael Rosenblum (04:06)
Most of my people, just like yours, have jobs. So that means you have to be available nights, weekends, whenever they’re not working. Because the—because, quite frankly, it’s a 24-hour job, within reason. I do tell people, if I’m on a date with my wife, I don’t wanna hear it. It can wait till after dinner.

Issa Hanna (04:26)
Definitely. And I love that you said it’s a 24-hour job because it really is. I mean, I’ve had people contact me Christmas Eve and holidays and the whole nine yards. So, and with that, we were talking earlier. One of your strengths, you said, are being able to identify products that fit your clients’ needs. So can you kind of go a little bit more in depth on that?

Michael Rosenblum (05:34)
I started in this business working with a bank and a direct lender. And I left them because it was very stifling. The nonconforming market for loans is, for some people say, up to thirty percent of the market. For seniors, reverse mortgages can be life-saving. For self-employed people, you need P&L loans, bank statement loans. You get the idea of what—there is so much product.

There’s so much opportunity in this field to find the right-size widget, to find the fit, to fit the right-size hole. And part of, part of the reason I joined Edge, we have over 180 individual lender investors that we can work with. My job is to find the right lender, the right opportunity for the right client. And I do think, I do think I’m good at it. I think I’m very good at it.

I mentioned earlier that I’m now doing reverse mortgages for seniors, and, and I got myself educated enough that I’m now doing reverse mortgage classes. It is just one of those things where, in my previous, you know, iteration working for a bank, that never would have been possible. Now it’s, it’s—I mean, it’s—and some of these things that we do, and first—for first-time home buyers, I could go into programs for them, and—

We have some programs that require zero down payment. It’s wonderful finding the right solution when it’s somebody’s home. There’s something about that that’s really special about being involved in this process. You know, as a real estate agent, the same thing, that you’re providing the service that provides the most important thing that we own, period.

Issa Hanna (07:10)
A hundred percent. And somebody as experienced as you, when you’ve got your bag of tricks, I call it, right, which is all these different loan products that you have access to, you get really good at being able to, to fit those holes. So I just wanna kinda point that out for sure.

Michael Rosenblum (07:24)
And that’s another reason I want to talk to my clients live, which is why I—why I wanna—when I—when we do—when I do an application, it could take time, but it’s important to dig. Just because somebody doesn’t have income doesn’t mean they can’t buy a house. Just because somebody doesn’t have savings doesn’t mean they can’t buy a house. There are way—there are lots of different ways to skin this so that it works. And when it works, it’s awesome.

Issa Hanna (07:47)
Definitely, like, you know, just a little bit of experience I have. I know these self-employed people at home, your taxes, a depreciation on your taxes, that counts as income in a lot of cases for a lot of loans. So there’s a lot of stuff like that.

Michael Rosenblum (08:01)
And a lot of times, I can actually use the actual bank statements themselves. I don’t have to go into the taxes, or I don’t have to go into the P&L of a business, especially a new business. I have a client recently that has a startup. It’s a year and a half old. I was able to use twelve months of his recent bank statements to refinance his house, to plow the money back into the business, and it’s growing like crazy.

In another year or two, we’ll revisit the conversation because the business will be profitable and stable. But he needed an infusion. We got it for him.

Issa Hanna (08:31)
I love that. And then you’re still keeping up with him, and I love that you have his, his plan for the future. You didn’t just get that money, the commission check, do the one deal, and say, ‘Yeah, I’m done with this guy. Whatever happens, happens.’ You’ve got a plan for him. In return, you know, he’s gonna recommend you to everybody. And that’s how our business works. You know, when you deal with people the way Michael does, you get clients.

Michael Rosenblum (08:54)
It’s that—you made a really good point just now. It’s worth reiterating. You and I don’t have past clients. We just have clients.

Issa Hanna (09:00)
Exactly. Our clients will be our clients forever, right, if you do it the right way. So, man, you’re just oozing knowledge today to our young viewers. I love it. I wanna ask you, how’d you get into the loan business? I know you said you got into it five years ago. You’re doing beautiful numbers, and you know so much. So how’d you make that jump?

Michael Rosenblum (09:54)
My background is the food industry. I moved from New Jersey to Las Vegas. I was a partner in a food processing manufacturer, and our goal was to service the West Coast of the U.S. from that plant. We eventually sold it. I started another business processing fruits and vegetables, and then COVID hit. The casinos, when they closed, we closed. I was home for about two weeks, and my wife turned to me and said—

‘You have to figure something out or I’m gonna kill you.’ Jokingly, obviously, but I was miserable, for—I had—I’d never not worked since I was eighteen years old. So she actually said, ‘You’ve got all these friends that you have that are in lending. Why don’t you see if there’s room available on their teams? Everyone’s working from home anyway.’ And I got onto a loan team. It was consumer direct, so I was fielding calls.

Which is different than what I’m doing now, but I like to say every month in the real-life world of, of, of lending, like I am now, was a year. I mean, it was just call after call after call after call for about fourteen months. My first month—my first year—I did a hundred loans, which was, which was a very good production. And I was ready to kind of leave that and go into the more of the prospecting, entrepreneurial side, the broker side.

So that’s how I got in it. We eventually moved from Las Vegas to Colorado. We live outside Boulder now. We love it here. I’ve sort of built my network around me here for the last year and a half.

Issa Hanna (11:26)
I love that. And you said you’re out in Boulder now, and, and you’re bragging. You’re a CSU dad. So give us a little bit more about that.

Michael Rosenblum (11:34)
You can’t see the shirt, but my daughter—we moved here so that she could start freshman year here at Broomfield High in, in, in, in, in Broomfield, Colorado. She got into CU and CSU for colleges after four years, and decided, because Boulder is her backyard and she works at the North Boulder Rec Center, she decided she’s going to CSU. So she’s quite not home. Yeah. And we’re real proud of her. It’s a fantastic school.

One of the big reasons we moved was the Colorado school system for colleges is really extraordinary. So we’re really proud of her, and she’s gonna do great things.

Issa Hanna (12:08)
Definitely. Well, I mean, if she’s anything like her dad and, with what you said, the story you said about your wife, she’s anything like her parents, there’s no fear for her. She’s gonna take the world over.

Michael Rosenblum (12:17)
Yeah, she’s—she wants to be a forensic psychologist. Yeah, so she wants to be on crime scenes. Yeah.

Issa Hanna (12:20)
Wow.

She wants to help, and she’s interested, and takes a lot of, a lot of brains to be a forensic scientist. Good luck to her. I know she’ll achieve it. Like I said, just talking to you a little bit, I know she comes from really good stock. Colorado, to me, the most beautiful state in the country. So, great move. I love that. I love everything you just said.

Michael Rosenblum (12:43)
You know what, though? There’s things about Nevada I still miss, though. Besides friends, there’s an excitement to La—Las Vegas that I really enjoyed, especially when I was single. But, yeah, but it was time to move—to time to move closer to family. So we did it. Yeah.

Issa Hanna (12:57)
Yeah, family’s everything. I bet living in Vegas could be super exciting, just having the access to all that kind of entertainment and food in your backyard. I mean, yeah. No other city like it if you live—

Michael Rosenblum (13:07)
And now—and now the sports—it’s just, it’s just constantly evolving. Well, it’s a—look, Vegas is a toy. If you can be a grown-up and put your toys away when you’re done with them, you can have a fantastic experience in Vegas.

Issa Hanna (13:18)
I definitely agree with that a hundred percent. I wanna talk a little bit of future now. Five years down the line, where are we gonna see you? What are the plans?

Michael Rosenblum (14:07)
So I am in the process, and I’ve already started setting up loan classes, both live and online. My goal is to develop enough of a lead flow that I have my own mortgage team that—well, I do now—but that really continues to grow. I would like—well, look, I see that’s where my business going. It’s just a question of continuing to do what I’m doing.

And so I do—I’m doing a live reverse mortgage class for seniors once a month. And now I’m doing an online class for first-time home buyers once a month. And, and between the—and, and the idea is simple. Once you get lead flow, you have—you, you, you bring in people, you fill in gaps. Eventually, it’s gonna be too much for me to handle, so you build a team.

Issa Hanna (14:52)
Definitely. And I love how forward-thinking you are. You know, you’re already seeing the problems you might encounter scaling, and you’re like, you know what, this could be a problem. You’ve already got a solution in your mind. So you’re a great builder, is what that tells me. I love that. And then you also mentioned how you love what you do and you love what Edge Home Finance offers. And you touched on it a little bit. Can you go a little bit deeper into that and tell us—

Why is it you love doing loans? ‘Cause you’ve only been doing it for five years. So I know a lot of guys that get burned out in the field. You love it.

Michael Rosenblum (15:23)
So it—I—my background, like I talked about a little earlier, was food and food production. And, but at the end of the day, I was selling lettuce. I—it was, you know, it was not sexy, it was not—but it was meat and potatoes. But, you know, as long as that truck got there on time, we did our job. This is very different. When somebody chooses me to help them buy a house, for thirty days, I’m the most important person in their world.

That is a wonderful position for a salesperson to be in. It is rewarding. It is—pressure is pressure. It is a constant deadline, but it is a nice place to be as a job. And when somebody—last month, I closed a reverse mortgage for a woman who was going to lose her house, and she knew it. She was forty-two thousand dollars in debt, and she could not pay the mortgage—

And buy food and buy medicine. I fixed that.

That was awesome. Another, an—another client, I mentioned down payment assistance. They didn’t have the down pay—they didn’t have the money to buy a house at anywhere near twenty percent or ten percent. We got her—we got her into a house in Arizona, I’m also licensed there, for thirty-eight hundred dollars. It was an FHA, two hundred and thirty thousand dollar house, and she—thirty-eight hundred dollars out of pocket. First time—

Issa Hanna (16:18)
It’s fine.

Michael Rosenblum (16:41)
First time in her life that she has a place for her and her kids that’s hers. I mean, when she closed, she literally was crying.

Issa Hanna (16:48)
Definitely. And you’re talking about these deals, the emotion invested in these clients that you’re recalling. That’s why you want to deal with a guy like Michael in the game, because it’s not just about a commission check or a paycheck. He cares about his clients, and as somebody who built his business exactly the same way—

Michael Rosenblum (16:50)
Again, how—

Issa Hanna (17:08)
The most rewarding phone call we can get in our job is those people that call you with the gratitude because you did help them. You did change their lives. So I just wanted to stop you a little bit and point that out. You know, as somebody’s been in the game a while, you’re the guy to talk.

Michael Rosenblum (17:24)
You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a wonderful way to make a living, ’cause you know you’re making a difference.

Issa Hanna (17:31)
Hundred percent. And the money’s good. And the money’s good. So if you can deal with integrity, deal with honesty, deal in the best—the best for your client, you’re going to get a lot of clients, and in return, you’re going to live a really good life and make a lot of money. So you get rewarded handsomely for doing this.

Michael Rosenblum (17:48)
And that’s a great byproduct. Living the life you want to live on your own terms is a great byproduct of what we do.

Issa Hanna (17:53)
Yeah, exactly. The no nine-to-five. You’re responsible—you’re responsible for what you put in. I wanted to get your advice now for our younger viewers. A lot of people are just starting out. Maybe they’re new LOs, maybe they’re new Realtors, maybe they’re new investors, and they’re not able to establish—they don’t know where to start establishing their business relationships, growing their networks. So can you give them some advice on where to start?

Michael Rosenblum (18:17)
Sure. Two things. The first one is you must be a sponge. You have an advantage over me, probably over you, Issa, certainly over people that are older than us, which is this new stuff that we’re getting thrown at every day. You know, we’re struggling with it. We’re learning it, it’s coming the hard way, but we’re struggling with it.

If you have grown up with computers, if you’re now growing up with AI, growing up with social media, you are potentially that conduit from the generation behind you that you need to learn from to your generation. It’s leverage.

The second piece is be a good partner. And what I mean by that is any good relationship—

It works because one person or both people are ready to give more than fifty percent without worrying about it, without being concerned that it’s not even. When you meet somebody, offer to help. And offer to help without immediate quid pro quo. I try to do a lot of things for Realtors, like offer AVMs, the automated valuation models that we have.

I—I do social media postings for listings. I do a lot of things without expecting or asking for anything in return. I feel like at some point somebody says, ‘All right, why am I not working with this guy? He’s actually trying to help me for nothing.’

And it’s genuine. I’ve done things for people and not gotten loans and not gotten compensation for it. I’ve never had it be a problem. I’ve never had it hurt me to give more than I get. Go into it that way, but then don’t be afraid to ask for the business too.

Issa Hanna (20:02)
Exactly.

Michael Rosenblum (20:07)
It’s a fine line, but if people see you’re genuine and want to be helpful and want to be there, they’ll work with you. But it’s gotta be genuine, and like I said, a lot of the stuff that you guys, young people, take for granted, like social media, our generation struggles with. Use that.

Issa Hanna (20:26)
Yeah, embrace tech, you guys. Much like Realtor.com and Zillow and all these real estate websites didn’t exist when—twenty, thirty years ago, they weren’t as predominant. We embrace them. So now it’s your turn. AI, all this new tech coming out, you guys need to embrace it because it’s going to help you in your field. I love that. I love that advice you’re giving them. And also, it’s not what—

They can do for you when you first meet them. It’s what you can do for them. You want their business. You need to show them that you can help them. You don’t expect anything in return. One of those days, that phone will call, and they’ll be like, ‘Hey, Michael,’ or, ‘Hey, Issa, I want to throw this deal your way,’ and boom. It could take years, but keep it pushing, ’cause that’s how you establish these relationships. You grow your networks. Everybody has a brother, sister, cousin—

That needs a loan, that needs a house. So, you know, you do good for that guy, you’re gonna get the brother, sister, cousin. So one deal will get you—it’s like a seed that you plant. You can grow a tree out of every deal that you plant. I want to also now give you the floor, Michael, since I’m gonna put my stamp of approval on you and say Michael’s one of the best loan officers I’ve talked to, that I’ve brought on the show. Very honest—

Holds himself to integrity, cares about his clients, and knowledgeable on all the products. So, Michael, I want to give you the floor. How could people reach you?

Michael Rosenblum (21:50)
So, obviously, phone still works. Email, texting, or social media, obviously. DM me anytime. The thing I would love to leave is what we basically talked about earlier. If you’re running into difficulty, if you’ve got clients, or you are looking for an opportunity to buy a house, or you know somebody who is—

And they’re running into roadblocks, I’m the kind of person that you might want to call. You just don’t know what somebody else can do for you when they’re in the position like we are at Edge as a broker. I can do a lot of interesting things that the banks can’t, and then I will do a lot of interesting things that other brokers won’t.

To me, hard loans are kind of a calling card. They are—they’re tough, but they earn you credibility. Like I said, it’s—you just—it’s rewarding. It’s rewarding when somebody comes to me and says, ‘This guy couldn’t help me. Can you help me?’ And sometimes, and more often than you realize, we can.

Issa Hanna (22:57)
Mm-hmm. Definitely, if you know your products and you know the guidelines, a lot of people fit those boxes. It’s just people are not used to dealing with anything outside of W-2 income, or—that’s right—that kind of stuff. So, like I said, a guy like Michael can really, really help you, especially if you’re on the self-employed side. You’re a senior, you’re not that conventional W-2 employee. And, and if you are a W-2 employee, they’ll slam-dunk your loan.

Michael Rosenblum (23:24)
And we can close those in as little as ten days now.

Issa Hanna (23:28)
My goodness. And someone who’s dealt with your company for my personal loan, for my personal home, Edge Home Finance, I can attest to the speed and the operational value that you get with Edge Home Finance, one hundred percent. Michael, it was an honor having you on the show. I wanted an invitation for you to come back.

Michael Rosenblum (23:29)
Who wants?

Thank you.

Thank you. I enjoyed it immensely, Issa. Thank you.

Issa Hanna (23:51)
Thank you so much. And to our viewers at home, if you enjoyed my conversation with Michael and want to see more just like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that can bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry. Until next time, the Real Estate Pros are out.