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Show Summary
The conversation explores the competitive dynamics between Texas and California, particularly in the real estate market. It highlights the investment strategies of Texans, including the trend of buying and holding properties and adding accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to increase value. The discussion also touches on the importance of learning from other markets and the collaborative spirit among real estate agents.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
VICTOR ORTIZ (00:00)
The groundskeeper there, he’d do repairs. He was like the handyman contractor on site. And we were like, you how do we work together? How do we put these skills together? I’m on the real estate side, you’re on the contractor side. And we’re like, screw this. We’ll just start creating our own inventory. We’re not gonna beg people to accept our offers anymore. Our clients, you know, they got burnt out trying to submit multiple offers, looking for two, three months at a time without any success. And it’s not that we’re terrible agents, it’s just…You can’t compete with $100,000 $200,000 over asking.
Dylan Silver (02:04)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a single family and residential investor in Southern California. Please welcome Victor Ortiz. Victor, welcome to the show.VICTOR ORTIZ (02:18)
How you doing, Dylan? Thank you for having me today.Dylan Silver (02:21)
It’s great to have you on here. ⁓ I’m doing well. I always like to start off at the top of these shows by asking guests how they got into the real estate space.VICTOR ORTIZ (02:32)
All right, yeah, let’s do it. What would you like to know?Where do we start?
Dylan Silver (02:40)
What was your entry point in? Did you have family? Did you have friends? Was it a Google search? How did you get into real estate?VICTOR ORTIZ (02:48)
You know, it’s a very funny question, but ⁓ I’m a first generation realtor pretty much, believe. So in the family, ⁓ I had an older brother that was in the lending game. ⁓ We’re talking, I’m going to take you back, ⁓ you know, quite, quite a bit. I’m going to age myself right now, but around 2005, ⁓ this really cool bank was expanding, you know, business was booming, refinances.you know, personal alliance accredited or whatnot, they were hiring emerging markets, you know, account executives. So I happened to stumble on the opportunity to work for a bank and that exposed me to the mortgage and lending side of things for the Hispanic and Latino community here in California, Southern California, and specifically here in the areas of Riverside County, San Bernardino and Los Angeles. ⁓ And through that,
Dylan Silver (03:43)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (03:46)
That’s kind of what paved the way for me to get my feet wet with the whole mortgage and eventually coming over to the real estate side. Once the market tanked in 2008, I ended up going to distressed markets, short sales, keeping folks in their homes or negotiating deed and lose or whatnot. A little bit of everything. So that we learned a hard way during those times and that’s kind of what pushed me towards the real estate side of things.Dylan Silver (04:03)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (04:15)
came over to, I took a break between 2012 and 2015 and I’ve been doing it since 2015. I got licensed and I’ve been on the real estate side. And yeah, it’s been an adventure. ⁓ know, every year is different.Dylan Silver (04:29)
I want to ask you about some of those pivots. know, I think really a hallmark of an effective real estate operator is being able to make these pivots, starting off in the lending space, mortgage space, right? ⁓ Conventional side, sounds like, you know, the pre 2008 crash, pre Dodd-Frank mortgage space seemed like the Wild Wild West. I’ve heard stories. It seems like there’s a lot of fast and free money and thenVICTOR ORTIZ (04:51)
Yeah, whole different world, yeah. Yeah.Dylan Silver (04:59)
Once that happened, you saw a big drop off. But you stayed in the real estate space. Did you, frankly, you think at any point in time, wow, this is kind of a disaster, maybe I gotta go look elsewhere? Or did you love real estate so much, you’re like, I’m gonna make this work, it might not be in mortgages right now, but let me see what else I can do.VICTOR ORTIZ (06:08)
Yeah, you know, we just we hit a wall. ⁓ I remember my my good friend that I grew up with at the time. He’s ⁓ he was also in the mortgage industry in the Valley, San Fernando Valley. And he’s like, ⁓ forget the banks. They’re closing doors. We’re still, you know, we’re thriving here. Come join us. The broker world. So I’m like, OK, I might consider that. And sure enough, I did that. And within a week or two, beautiful office space, you know, high, high rise, you know, building, you know, whatever.They shut their doors within two weeks that I made the move to them. ⁓ you know, nothing was safe at the moment. And it was like the Wild West just came to a complete halt. I got to experience, you know, well-established brokers losing their automobiles, losing their homes. I mean, it was just a very, very, you know, big eye-opener for us as just a reminder that we can have it all and it can all be gone tomorrow if we don’t make the right move.
Dylan Silver (06:43)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (07:06)
With that, ⁓Dylan Silver (07:06)
100 %I want to ask you about the getting into the realty side. And also you mentioned distress, the distress space. This is the space that I come from. I come from foreclosure, probate issues, divorce, death, ⁓ know, distress in the home, right? Borderline on the border. Right. And it sounds like you were involved in that space. What was that like?
VICTOR ORTIZ (07:27)
the good stuff. Yeah, yeah,⁓ Well, remember, we’re coming in. ⁓ This is new to us at the time. We’re coming in from Bush administration and into the Obama administration era. And there was a lot of, you know, WTF going on. Nobody knew what was next. Banks are crashing. Mortgage companies are closing doors. We’re talking about countrywide, you all the big companies at the time. ⁓ Brokers are going to jail. It was real. It got really real. It got really ugly. ⁓ So at the time,
Dylan Silver (07:58)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (08:06)
⁓ You know, our clients that were perfect subprime targets at the time that purchased these bad loans or crazy mortgages, you know, prior to the crash, well, they came back to us and said, well, hey, I’m sitting on this million dollar home I can no longer afford. You know, my business has dried up. I need an exit strategy. So through that, we were like, okay, well, now we’re working for the banks. Now we’ve got to work against the banks in a way to, you know, save our clients and help them have an exit strategy.Bottom line, that’s kind of where our creative, you know, juices started flowing, you know, within myself and the brokerage that I was at at the time. ⁓ We went from originating mortgages to helping people, bailing people out pretty much. And that’s where we got creative. There was no ⁓ home affordable ⁓ programs from Obama yet. This is later on. Once, you know, he came into office where they rolled out all these modifications. We started pre-modification. There was no
Dylan Silver (08:49)
Wow.Yeah.
VICTOR ORTIZ (09:03)
⁓ There is no such thing. There is no conversations about it. We kind of just piece the information together and we put these proposals in place for the banks before they had loss mitigation departments or anything of that nature set up. So we started in a very early age.Dylan Silver (09:19)
So these were like creative,creative, I’m trying to, I’m grasping at words here, know, creative mortgage strategies, creative ways to help people either stay in their home or, yeah.
VICTOR ORTIZ (09:31)
Exit strategy.Correct. Modifications before there were, there was even such a department for it. We were, you know, pretty much like the guinea pigs at the time, trying to, you know, find a solution to keep people in their homes, you know, negotiate some type of forbearances, negotiate modifications that were sustainable, something that was going to hold for these families. They were already in bad financial situations, not just the mortgage alone. You got to remember the job markets dried up.
Dylan Silver (09:42)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (10:35)
I mean, everything from the landscaper to the local contractors lost a lot of work at the time. It was a crash. It was a big crash. yeah, we had to get creative and come up with these ideas to help our families. And truth be told, a lot of these families just didn’t need to have these properties to begin with. They bought too much just because there were introductory rates and arms and option arms and all this crazy stuff they should have never had.And unfortunately, and fortunately, we went through it, you so we can help them, you know, exit with some kind of grace, some kind of, you know, money in place for cash or keys or something at the time. Maybe it didn’t make sense. Yeah.
Dylan Silver (11:15)
Yeah.I want to pivot a bit here Victor and ask you about ⁓ the Wolf Homes that you’re currently involved in. And then also too, you you’ve been involved in several different asset classes and deal structures. Wolf Homes is involved in the investment side. Do you guys have a specific asset classes? It’s single family, fix and flip, ground up construction, a little bit of everything, small multifamily. What’s your niche?
VICTOR ORTIZ (11:25)
Yes.You know, right now we’ve been doing, well, roughly, I’ll tell you a little background about that. What kind of pushed me in that direction. We’re talking 2019, 2020, we saw what COVID did to the market. know, the market just got really crazy here in Southern California. People are getting outbid, 100,000, 200,000 over asking price on these homes. So it was hard to compete. So out of frustration, me and my brother, he used to work the grounds at the VA. was the, you know, the…
Dylan Silver (11:59)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (12:14)
The groundskeeper there, he’d do repairs. He was like the handyman contractor on site. And we were like, you how do we work together? How do we put these skills together? I’m on the real estate side, you’re on the contractor side. And we’re like, screw this. We’ll just start creating our own inventory. We’re not gonna beg people to accept our offers anymore. Our clients, you know, they got burnt out trying to submit multiple offers, looking for two, three months at a time without any success. And it’s not that we’re terrible agents, it’s just…You can’t compete with $100,000 $200,000 over asking.
So that’s kind of what made us pivot or go that direction. As far as Wolf Homes, I pretty much started Wolf Homes from the ground up with that idea that we would never beg for another offer or acceptance. And if we had to, it would be on our own inventory that we would be making decisions on with our own partners. So that’s kind of what pushed me that way. we’ve been a
Dylan Silver (12:47)
Right.Mmm.
VICTOR ORTIZ (13:11)
You know, I’ve built a handful of successful investors and lately in the last couple of years, we’ve noticed a shift in that there’s more female entrepreneurs, know, shout out to them because they’re doing great. ⁓ You know that they are the risk takers nowadays. They’re the ones that have the capital. And I see kind of like a leveling as far as the playing field right there where you’re seeing a lot of a lot more female entrepreneurs coming on board. So with Wolf Homes LLC, I’ll tell you, you know, the quick and dirty.Dylan Silver (13:28)
Yep.VICTOR ORTIZ (13:41)
We help our clients build their corporations from the ground up. I’m talking new investors, seasoned investors, we’ll build out their corporations, connect them with the lines of credit, connect them with the contractors, whether they’re building, adding on, if it’s a traditional fix and flip. ⁓ We are a one-stop shop and we even have a wholesale division that provides the inventory as well. So that’s kind of what separates us a bit from the other guys in the area that’ll just sell you a listing. ⁓help you get financed for it, we’re gonna help you get your corporation articles, everything in place for you, and at the same time, we’re gonna help you build it out so you don’t have to search anywhere else for it. So I like to pride myself ⁓ with that. We’re pretty much a one-stop shop for new investors, like I said, whether you want a JV or have more seasoned investors that want to partner up, but our focus is mainly fix and flip in underserved areas right now. Affordability is king here in Southern California.
You can buy in LA for half a million or a million dollars, a two one, or you can buy somewhere in Riverside County, around half a million, a four bedroom, bath, whatever it is. So there is a big difference as far as the inventory goes. ⁓ So yeah, our focus right now is fix and flip. have just traditional SFRs. We have a lot of clients that are coming on board as well that buy, they like to buy and hold. They like to add an ADU to bring more value. So for those type of investors.
Dylan Silver (14:50)
Right.VICTOR ORTIZ (15:50)
So we have a little bit of everything and now soon, know, God willing, we’ll be going into our development phase. We just launched our Wolf Homes construction, ⁓ know, our S-Corp for that. So we’ll be developing in the near future, most likely starting, you know, ADU second, third units, ⁓ but going into the multifamily eventually.Dylan Silver (16:00)
Nice.It does seem like there’s a lot of opportunity with ADUs in SoCal. I’ve heard about this. I guess the gearing up for what is it the World Cup? Is that right? That’s coming out there. And so there’s a lot of
VICTOR ORTIZ (16:18)
Yeah.You know, yeah,
there’s a lot of good stuff that’s always happening. I just think at the end of day, people are more attracted to the weather here. You know, as crazy as California seems to be. But, you know, at the end of the day, affordability, it just comes down to it. Everybody wants to live in L.A., but, you know, not everybody can pay to play. So you have to look at the outskirts of L.A.
Dylan Silver (16:39)
name of the game.I want to ask you about the vertical integration for your work with the investors. you’ve got the wholesale, so you’re able to find them deals on off market, right? You’re also able to guide them, consult with them in some degree. Once a deal is done, what’s your contact with them like? Is that the end of the transaction? Are you in some cases doing management for them, property management? What’s the deal cycle like?
VICTOR ORTIZ (17:13)
Yeah, so you know, I like to focus on what I do best and we outsource the rest, right? So property management is not my strength. ⁓ I always refer them to a third party company and make sure their license bonded, insured, and they’ll take care of you. With reputable companies here in the area, almost always they already have their systems in place of who’s going to be doing the property management. That’s fine. You know, that’s not my forte. But at the end of the day, ⁓ my goal is to build relationships, long-term relationships. have…some of my investors that I’ve been working with over five years, we have now four or five active corporations in my family alone, from my partner to my brother, my sister-in-law, everybody’s kind of doing it in the family. ⁓ that’s kind of, that’s what I look to build, long-term relationships. And I’ve had people that come in with good intentions, they learn me and burn me and they take off with the knowledge and take it somewhere else. And that’s okay too, it’s a compliment.
Dylan Silver (17:57)
Yeah.VICTOR ORTIZ (18:10)
⁓ Although it gets under my skin once in a while, but you know, it’s business. You’re not always gonna, you know, ⁓ keep those relationships thriving, unfortunately. you know, some people are meant to stay and some people are meant to just come into your life and do their own thing.Dylan Silver (18:20)
Yeah.to go.
We are coming up on time here, Victor. Where can folks go if they’re in SoCal? They would like your feedback on maybe a deal that they have or they’d like to reach out to you about a deal that you may have or how can folks get in contact with you?
VICTOR ORTIZ (18:40)
You know what? We’re big on Instagram. We learned that websites are like, you know, a thing of the past. Nobody really visits them unless, you know, some other stuff. But ⁓ other than that, our Instagram is pretty active. You know, ⁓ it’s @wolfhomes.socal. You can find us there as our handle. ⁓ I’m an open book. You know, if there’s ever anything I can provide as far as here in the Southern California market, ⁓ or even if it’s something that I need to learn outside of state, you know, I’m all for it.We traveled to Dallas once a year for Tom Ferry and things of that nature to network. I just came back from an AI training, not training, a conference for Blueprint in Las Vegas earlier ⁓ last month. And I mean, we’re always learning. We’re always seeking new ideas. So you got to innovate or you’re going to die in this industry. You have to stay. ⁓
Yeah, innovator diet, that’s just what it is. have to stay, you know, you can’t get comfortable. And we love to work with people from all, you know, any areas, anything that we need to know and learn or exchange ideas, I’m here for it.
Dylan Silver (19:50)
Victor, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.VICTOR ORTIZ (19:53)
No problem, brother. Thank you for having me. Hope to work with you soon.
