Legal Traps Investor Keep Missing:Loan Docs,Insurance Gaps, & Cross Border Investing Risks Explained

Jasmine Daya (00:00)
There’s a couple of things. First of all, I love what I’m doing. It is so exciting to wake up every day and not know exactly what to expect. It’s a new story every day. It’s not mundane. And that’s what properties do, right? You just don’t know. Like, are the guests going to make it in through the Vrbo App? I don’t know. Or do we have a water issue? ⁓ which was last week. Or is the dock in Muskoka broken again?

what were they doing on the dock? So you never know. ⁓ but you know, there is a lot of stress that comes with it.

Michelle Tack (02:08)
Welcome. I’m Michelle Tack. I am the podcast leader for real estate pros and I have a great ⁓ presenter today or ⁓ that will talk to us about ⁓ legal, her law firm that touches real estate, ⁓ investing in the United States ⁓ as well as in Canada and just has a wealth of information. Welcome, Jasmine Daya if I pronounced your last name correctly.

Jasmine Daya (02:34)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Michelle.

Michelle Tack (02:37)
Thank you very much for ⁓ being here. We know it takes a a lot of effort to to show up and be of service. So I wanted to ask you for those that may not come from your world, can you describe your business? ⁓ businesses. I know that you have more than just one area, but you know, what you’re doing in real estate and in law and what markets you serve.

Jasmine Daya (02:57)
So I will describe my relevant to your audience businesses. ⁓ I am a lawyer, first of all, by profession. I was a litigator for 20 years at my Toronto law firm. And then I transitioned to work at Geraci LLP, which is based in Southern California. We provide private lender services. However,

Anthony Geraci, the founder of the firm who’s been doing private lending law for just as long as I was a litigator, ⁓ he and I are in a unique position to serve our clients because we’re also real estate investors and on both sides of the border, and in a wide variety of different types of ventures. So it provides us with that lens for our clients that we’re not just listening to them.

Try about foreclosure. We understand the pain and try foreclosure as fast as possible.

Michelle Tack (03:55)
That makes sense. Help me understand maybe examples of how you’ve used your own knowledge and experience of purchasing real estate investments and things that you want to make sure people understand about in terms of the law and lending that is really critical to the health.

of a transaction. can you talk a little bit about that?

Jasmine Daya (05:16)
Yes, I would love to because there’s something that when I came from Canada, I saw right away and I it’s from my background, but first and foremost you need solid loan documents. If you are just getting something from online, it’s not wrong necessarily, but they might not be ironclad. And if you don’t have a good loan document, then you could be SOL. So I want to make sure you have that, have an attorney review it, make sure that you are registered on title.

⁓ and you’re secured. So you’ve secured that up that loan to the property. However, here’s where my brain came in. And I saw right away that okay, so we have all these private lenders and they have these great loan documents, but who is paying attention to the property insurance? Especially in places like California, Texas, Florida, it’s becoming harder and harder to get.

Property insurance. And so if you have solid loan documents, but you have not paid attention to the property insurance, then if someone stops paying you and you come to us and we’re like, okay, you can foreclose. Well, what are you going to foreclose on if the house burned down? You’ll foreclose on a pile of ash if the insurer is not kicking in. And so I’m trying to advise our clients to let us look at these things and advise them accordingly because.

Once you’ve entered that loan and you’ve funded that deal, you can’t then go back and say, and by the way, I want you to get me better property insurance. That’s something you need to put in there before you fund the loan and make sure it gets done.

Michelle Tack (06:54)
That makes sense. In terms of running your operation efficiently and as smoothly as you can when it comes to law and real estate, how are you doing that? you haven’t you know you clearly have an investor profile yourself. ⁓ you counsel people through private lending and the law on that. You also have two different nations that have different law laws governing the purchase of real estate.

How are you able to make that work I wouldn’t say seamlessly, but you know, e efficiently together?

Jasmine Daya (07:32)
You forgot and two time zones. You know, California and it’s like I’ve already missed half the day in Toronto, you know. That’s right. Yeah. And then when I’m in Toronto, everyone, my staff in California, they get to work bombarded with like all this stuff because I’ve lived a day, you know. Yeah. ⁓ first of all, I wouldn’t say it’s ⁓ I’m running things efficiently or seamlessly. However, I’m running it. ⁓ I I think

Michelle Tack (07:34)
yeah, well that you know It’s easy, come on.

Jasmine Daya (08:00)
There’s a couple of things. First of all, I love what I’m doing. It is so exciting to wake up every day and not know exactly what to expect. It’s a new story every day. It’s not mundane. And that’s what properties do, right? You just don’t know. Like, are the guests going to make it in through the Vrbo App? I don’t know. Or do we have a water issue? ⁓ which was last week. Or is the dock in Muskoka broken again?

what were they doing on the dock? So you never know. ⁓ but you know, there is a lot of stress that comes with it.

And I’m going to shamelessly plug my other business because this is really what has helped. ⁓ Anthony started a company called Move Your Business. And Move Your Business provides virtual employees. It’s offshore. And the tagline, and I help him run it now too, but ⁓ the tagline is

Higher, smarter, scale, faster. We pay individuals overseas about a quarter of what we pay Americans. Not because you know we don’t want Americans, we absolutely do. But we can’t afford to and make money if all of our staff are here because cost of living is higher here, obviously. And so

The people overseas, at first I was like, I don’t know if I can trust people. I don’t know. Do they speak English? Do they work on my time zone? All of this. And they are so appreciative of the job. They’ve been so wonderful. And I actually am able to have people answering the phones and people, you know, contacting a new housekeeper at one of my one of the areas of my properties today. And I’m like, because I need them today. But if I didn’t have all that extra staff due to affordability, I would be in big trouble.

Michelle Tack (10:25)
That makes sense to me. Let’s talk about a time where you had a challenge. Every operator I know, regardless of how many businesses they own around real estate, ⁓ have a have a time and place where a deal started going south on them or sideways. ⁓ and this is not uncommon. ⁓ but I am interested in, I think the audience would be interested in learning, you know.

if you were able to pivot quickly, recognize that and either rectify it and or ⁓ if you know, if you did, great, what’d you learn? And and if you weren’t, great, what’d you learn? Can you talk about an experience like that?

I’m trying to choose one. Just choose one, please.

Jasmine Daya (11:13)
I have so many, but I will say this. I look at life, I try to look at life with glass half full. And so I look at it like, well, it it’s not a mistake. A mistake is when you you make a mistake on an exam and you lose points, you know? But in life, I look at it like, okay, what did I learn from this? What ha what how have I grown from this experience? And so I would say the worst deal.

That I entered into was ⁓ the one partnership I had for real estate. And this is why I don’t do partners. I’ve already had ex-husbands. I don’t need more drama. But I have this partner that I don’t know why I decided when all my real estate is on my own, but she wooed me and I fell for it. And so ⁓ I entered into a partnership with her to buy a six-acre waterfront property in Treasure Beach, Jamaica. ⁓ wow.

It is stunning. It’s gorgeous and it does exist. I went there and saw it with my own eye. And I wasn’t so sure for a little while. ⁓ yeah, it’s it’s beautiful, but I realized immediately that we had a difference of opinion on how to run a business. ⁓ you know, I was handling the marketing and the paperwork, and she was gonna do operations because she took regular trips to Jamaica.

⁓ but when I asked her, okay, I need all the closing documents from the lawyer. I need to know where’s the insurance paperwork, where are all the bills? Where’s payroll? We have all these service providers. How are we paying them? what about source deductions in Jamaica? Do they have that? You know, I’m asking all the right questions and I’m getting no answers. Forget wrong answers, I’m getting no answers, which showed me that we were on two different wavelengths on how to operate.

And that causes a lot of stress because pulling information out of her. I, you know, at first I thought she was hiding information. And then I realized she just didn’t know the information, which worse. So ⁓ I am in a lawsuit there ⁓ with her because of breach of terms of our contract. And I can’t I just want my money back. And so far I’ve

Gotten a little fraction back. But I will not stop. I will continue this for year. I am lucky that I’m a lawyer and I did one really smart thing in our contract, which was I changed the law that applied to our contract to be Ontario law from Jamaica law. And so I am going through the Ontario courts and I’m running it myself. And I do have Jamaican lawyers on standby to enforce judgment once I get it, which hopefully will be this year.

Michelle Tack (13:55)
great. Can you talk about opportunities? We talked about some of the technology that you’re developing or things that you’re developing ⁓ that will help in the legalese and in terms of private lending, funding, et cetera. Can you talk to because I know you’re excited about it, ⁓ can you share a little bit of it ⁓ with the with the group?

Jasmine Daya (14:58)
people there’s a lot of people that are scared of technology because inherently a lot of people are scared of change. You know one thing and now you have to force yourself to learn another. I mean, I was that girl that held on to the BlackBerry for so long. Like I was a lucky person at my firm. I did not want to change. And now the iPhone is an extension of my arm. Like I can’t be without it, you know? ⁓ but I couldn’t get rid of that keyboard. And so I I remind myself of that when technology changes, of how much.

It can benefit your life. And so AI. A lot of people are nervous about AI. And ⁓ you know, there is some things to be nervous about. ⁓ there’s still hallucinated cases and things that you know you get out there, and lawyers have to be ⁓ very vigilant with that. But in terms of technology, I have embraced it and so has Anthony, and we have created new products for private lenders to better their lives so that they can do things on their own.

on their own time. Now he has done this before for loan documents, simple loan documents. You can do your own loan documents using our platform at like 3 a.m. You can’t get a lawyer on the phone, but you can do it yourself if that’s what you feel like doing. I don’t know. Maybe that’s your idea of fun. But it gives it provides private lenders with the power to do it on their own time. And it saves a lot of money because you don’t have to pay people to do it.

So we are doing this for ⁓ we’ve got automate, which is our loan document platform, and I’m building out something called Mitigate. So Mitigate does a complete ⁓ property insurance review. So you upload the policy, it does a review, it gives you a Geraci risk to risk score that I’ve created, and it creates the clauses that should be built in to automate loan docs. So that and it’s up to you if you want to incorporate them or not.

Michelle Tack (16:45)
Interesting.

Jasmine Daya (16:49)
But as I said, if you don’t incorporate that at the outset before you fund the deal, then you’re not going to get it done. And I’ll give you an example real fast. ⁓ my property, I had a lakefront property, I still do, in Muskoka. And I was going through TD insurance for my property insurance, and the private lender said, nope, we want you to go through one of these insurers. I still don’t know why. ⁓ but those other insurers cost a lot more.

And I think they just felt secured. And I I couldn’t say no because I I have no other lender to lose my deposit if I don’t if they don’t fund the deal within a few days. And so private lenders in Canada don’t seem as nervous to lose the deal because they know I have nowhere else to go. In the US, they seem a little nervous, like, no, I don’t want to ask them to do this. I’m like, we have nowhere else to go. That’s why they’re with you. So, you know, put what you want in there and

see if you can get it because it secures your position. Because I gave you that example of loan docs is only one part. You have to pay attention to the property insurance more and more and more these days. And so that’s one of the programs of a whole bunch of others that we’re coming up.

Michelle Tack (18:00)
Well, you’ve been an incredible ⁓ guest. I we really appreciate it. We’ve learned a lot, ⁓ Jasmine. ⁓ you know, so before we wrap up today, could you for those that are interested in maybe investing with you or what have you, ⁓ using your services, can you provide ⁓ the contact information that you would like them to reach out to ⁓ and spell it out if you don’t

Jasmine Daya (18:26)
Sure. So you can always go to our website, ⁓ geracillp.com which is g-e-r-a-c-i-l-l-p dot com. you can find me on LinkedIn. There’s my good profile over there, Jasmine Daya. ⁓ Geraci also has LinkedIn, good source of information for you. I believe a lot in education. ⁓ Anthony and I have both taught at the university level.

⁓ and I’ve always had a lot of students. So you always find a lot of literature there on our YouTube channel. We’ve got educational ⁓ information there too. So please check it out.

Michelle Tack (19:02)
You’ve been wonderful guests. Thank you, Jasmine, to our listeners today. ⁓ if you found this content of value, please continue to ⁓ check in as we have other operators as well on across a number of different topics. for those who have not subscribed, please do at your convenience. And again, Jasmine, thank you very much and good luck it in the future.