Private Lending Is Exploding: How Angelo Christian Built a Nationwide Real Estate Lending Fund

Angelo (00:00)
Yeah, I mean, obviously you saw that, you we have a new Fed share and that interest rates, you know, the projection is the next, you know, year or two that they’re going to go lower. My opinion is that in the real estate and finance is going to get stronger and stronger and hotter and hotter. This year alone, like we’re like what I’ve seen just in the market is like a 300 % increase in loan demand.

⁓ from last year. So this is like, this reminds me a lot 2026 of the year post COVID, like 2021 when gangbusters. And if you get rates down, three, 4 % again, I don’t know if we’ll get that low. ⁓ I think it’s gonna ⁓ get super, super busy, super hot.

Michelle Kesil (02:25)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Angelo Christian, who has created a nationwide private equity hedge fund. So excited to have you here today, Angelo.

Angelo (02:42)
Yeah, thank you, Michelle. I’m super excited that you reached out to us. I mean, I feel honored that you thought of me as someone to be on the show. So thank you so much.

Michelle Kesil (02:51)
Of course, let’s dive in. First off, for those not familiar with you and your work yet, can you share what your main focus is?

Angelo (02:58)
Yeah, so we’re, I mean, we’ve been lending for the last two decades. We’re nationwide, like you said, private equity fund. And basically what that means is that we offer lending for commercial, residential, ⁓ and private lending. So kind of give you some examples. We have one side of our business that does conventional loans. That’s for like owner occupied, know, non QM, DSCR, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA.

People that are trying to buy the house that they want to live in, down payment assistance, veterans, first time buyer, just like any other mortgage company. And then we have this whole other side that does our private lending commercial. That’s for like mixed use developments, very large deals could be hotels, restaurants, casinos, master plan communities, land development. So it’s everything in between. We’ve created a consortium. And the reason why

I know we’ll probably get into this is that a lot of mortgage companies are lenders. You know, they only usually have, you know, plain Jane vanilla or offer one, you know, specific product. And when I got into the industry, I just didn’t believe that that was the best strategic way. love Jeff Bezos thought process on, you know, once you capture a customer, know, keep them sticky, keep, them in your web and don’t let that customer leave. So

I mean, you could be helping a developer on a $20 million deal and he needs help with all of his clients to get the mortgages, right? Or he needs a mortgage. So why don’t you offer all of these services and don’t let that client leave. So that’s why we’ve set up this nationwide lending source, this hub, so that we can capture as much business as possible.

Michelle Kesil (04:40)
Yeah, amazing.

Angelo (04:41)
Hahaha!

Michelle Kesil (04:43)
What do you feel are some of the main keys that have allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Angelo (05:38)
Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. think, and I saw the CEO of Nvidia, you he said that I was reading one of his articles this morning that he said a lot of pain and suffering has allowed them to flourish. And I feel the same that it’s you, there’s a tremendous amount of commitment. And you know, like Elon Musk, for example, he says, you know,

You can’t get anything done unless you’re working 80 hours a week. And I do believe that. I know that that’s not what you probably want to hear or people want to hear, but it’s really the truth. mean, I was up, I went to bed last night at 1 a.m. got up at 4 30. know, so what, three and a half hours of sleep, four hours sleep, because there’s so much things that are running through your mind when you run a business and you got to be on top of it. Somebody’s got to be on top of that. And so, a significant.

tremendous amount of commitment to getting things done, having goals, inspiring your people that are with you. Obviously, utilizing the latest technology, whether that’s Claude or AI or Chat GPT, all that stuff’s cool, but you have to have the core fundamentals there with the right people, the right plan, the right strategy.

Michelle Kesil (06:51)
Yeah, absolutely. And what would you say have been some of the strategies or processes that have been most supportive for you?

Angelo (07:03)
well, I mean, I think that, there’s obviously utilizing technology has helped us out a lot. you know, implementing AI, when it, when AI first started to come out, ⁓ I wasn’t, I was a little slow to get involved with it. because I’m, you know, I’m old fashioned still. Like I grew up, I’m 44 years old, right? And, ⁓ I grew up at the time where there wasn’t a cell phone.

you got a beeper and you go meet your client face to face. There wasn’t texting, there wasn’t emailing. So I still believe in when you’re dealing with people, the eyes to eyes, the face to face communication and building your team. But having the right technology in place obviously will help streamline the process. The other thing is that I think creating a culture within your organization that inspires people and motivates them.

I’ve worked for companies where I first got started ⁓ that they manage by fear or intimidation. And I don’t believe that that’s the right way to manage people. I try to give people hope, give people positivity, encouragement. So to me, it stimulates more ⁓ positive productivity to everyone that’s involved. And then obviously, compensation incentive is very important. ⁓ You want to incentivize people.

So paying them well. I don’t mind to pay people above the average, our compensation plan, the people that we pay is higher than the industry average. Because the average tenure of our employees is seven years at my company. So we don’t have this high turnover thing. We want to take care of the people. We want them to be happy. So ⁓ these are the things that have helped me. And I didn’t know all this stuff in the beginning. Trust me.

When we first started the business, was very hard to keep people, to train them. The training is critical. You have to train people the right way. But ⁓ we’ve learned this just from never giving up and having that mindset, keep getting better, keep optimizing.

Michelle Kesil (09:42)
Yeah, absolutely. And what are like your typical clients? Who are you mostly serving?

Angelo (09:50)
I mean, you know, like, like we have these three different divisions or go ever conventional. have a commercial or private. I’m mainly me personally, cause I’m still originating and working with clients. It’s a, you know, a real estate developer, a real estate entrepreneur, someone that like example, like I was telling you earlier, we’re doing, a $400 million, it’s like 291 units in Miramar beach, Florida.

ground of construction, developer bought the land for 20 million, got it entitled and now he’s building these condos. That’s the most of the clients that I’m dealing with or, you know, could be ultra high net worth. Like we have a, we have a private label through our treasury management, people that want to buy like high end real estate. So, like we have one in Fort Lauderdale that was working on this morning. the property is worth 35 million. He’s refinancing it for 17 million. I have one in La Jolla, California, like

He’s buying a hundred million dollar home and he’s putting 50 % down. He’s a large trader with Bitcoin. So that’s the kind of clients I deal with, but we have all different types of loans that we offer. Like we have our residential lending. Someone that’s the first time buyer, you know, they want to buy a $300,000 house and they want down payment assistance. So we have that whole thing going. And then, you know, if it’s a commercial loan, like somebody that wants to buy a hotel.

or they want to build a CRE, it’s a strip center, you know? So it just, like when we get a deal in, if it makes sense, we’re gonna do it, right? And to us, meaning if it makes sense, is it have the credit or the collateral, you know, or the character of the individual, the sponsorship. So if we see any of those things that work,

because we’re a private fund, we’re not selling these loans off to the secondary market. We can make a decision if we want to do this loan or not. So gives us that agility and to be dynamic in what we do with the lending that we decide to do. It’s our discretion, right? But the loan has to make sense. Like if it’s the right equity, the right LTV, the right sponsorship, then we’ll do it.

Michelle Kesil (12:04)
Absolutely. And where do you see the market shifting right now?

Angelo (12:10)
Yeah, I mean, obviously you saw that, you we have a new Fed share and that interest rates, you know, the projection is the next, you know, year or two that they’re going to go lower. My opinion is that in the real estate and finance is going to get stronger and stronger and hotter and hotter. This year alone, like we’re like what I’ve seen just in the market is like a 300 % increase in loan demand.

⁓ from last year. So this is like, this reminds me a lot 2026 of the year post COVID, like 2021 when gangbusters. And if you get rates down, three, 4 % again, I don’t know if we’ll get that low. ⁓ I think it’s gonna ⁓ get super, super busy, super hot.

Now, obviously the concern with that is real estate prices are already at all time highs.

I, know, usually when demand, you know, it’s higher and higher that pushes the values up. So that’s the only long, long-term concern I have is that, you I mean, I can give you an example, like some of the properties that, that we’ve invested in, you know, in the last five years, they probably doubled. And that, is somewhat concerning. I don’t, I’m not a, I don’t know. have like a Warren Buffett old school mentality. And when you see stuff doubling in five years, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of.

I’m not saying that I’m not grateful for that, but it’s a little. It’s concerning because the ⁓ risk is to the downside at that point in my opinion. You know, I mean, if you’re already at all time highs. You know you have more risk to the upside or more risk to the downside. You know that’s kind of the you know, so that’s that’s that’s the little my only concern.

Michelle Kesil (13:55)
Yeah, absolutely. And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?

Angelo (14:02)
really the, right now we like working with, bigger projects and bigger deals. And, we didn’t, we, we got into the business. was on residential consumer lending, you know, 20 years ago. And we’re now focused more on doing the private commercial lending, large deals. and then,

building more of a relationship with our client. And, you for example, if you’re, I was mentioning some of the, some of our clients that we work with, if they are a developer, a builder, and they have, you know, 20,000 acres and they’re doing 10,000 homes a year, that to me is a better client or someone to work on with than just doing an individual consumer loan, you know? And just to be, just to be, you know, frank, and of course we have people that

and our team that will work on that. what I’m getting at is that spending more time on, you know, focusing on bigger projects. And then, you know, the we also like the the ultra luxury. Like we like dealing with those type of clientels that are ⁓ doing these big homes. I mean, you know, it’s pretty, pretty interesting dealing with the people that are able to afford those type of homes. You know, they’re

But we like doing that and it’s making sense for us. So we want to go deeper into those spaces.

Michelle Kesil (16:06)
Yeah, definitely. And are there any goals or opportunities that you’re specifically looking forward to for this year?

Angelo (16:17)
Take a vacation. Turn off my phone. Yeah, that’s about it right now. it’s the thing that I want to build better systems, have those in place. ⁓ You know, it’s one thing, you know, I don’t know if you ever experienced this, Michelle, like you’re attracted to an offer.

Michelle Kesil (16:19)
Hehehehe

That’s deserved.

Angelo (16:44)
You know, it looked really good and you want to get involved in it. But then the experience wasn’t, didn’t meet your expectations. Have you ever been through that before? Okay. So like, like, you know, for example, one of the things that we need to work on better as a company is giving our customer a better experience. You know, it’s great. We have all this stuff, but if it’s taking too long or the response times are not where I think they need to be, or the customer is not happy. ⁓

Michelle Kesil (16:53)
Yeah.

Angelo (17:13)
you know, or they’re not, they’re ever giving us a six instead of a 10. That’s where I’m most concerned with right now is taking care of the experience and making sure that that’s, you know, optimal, you know, and I think that’s where we need to work on more as a group.

Michelle Kesil (17:32)
Yeah, absolutely. And what have been some obstacles or challenges that you’ve overcome in your career and like what have been some of those takeaways?

Angelo (17:43)
Ooh, that’s a good one. I mean, one of the, one of the big ones when we first started was when we tried to grow the business and, retaining employees and team building. I had more of a, aggressive approach in my, when I was in my twenties and thirties and, and it didn’t work. I mean, it backfired. mean, pretty much shows, you know, very militant.

And, you know, I would call my team on Sunday and say, you know, or Saturday, hey, where are at with this? And, you they’re supposed to have the weekend off. And they’re like, hey, man, Sunday at three o’clock, man, you want to talk about work? I was like, yeah, I need to know where we’re at. What are you doing? And it just didn’t work. People like, hey, I don’t want to work for, you know, a militant, you know, aggressive person like that. So I lost a lot of good people, a lot of good people.

And I didn’t realize that I was blaming them instead of blaming myself. And so I studied a lot on how to build culture, develop teams from reading some of the top books that are out there, like How to Win Friends, Influence People, ⁓ how Google, Amazon, how they built their business, and just adopting and modeling those principles, those philosophies. ⁓

you know, Walmart, Costco, you know, the type of way that with ⁓ treating people, compensation, and then, you know, the leadership fostering, like I said, you know, positivity, encouragement, excitement, passion, ⁓ changing that about 10 years ago. And then so that was a big thing that ⁓ that we had to overcome. And then obviously,

The other thing is that I think it’s important ⁓ that historically I was more like a lone wolf and more introverted probably 20 years ago. And what I learned is that, and you always hear this a lot too, that in life it’s either who you know or what you know. And I think it’s a combination of both. And I didn’t really put myself out there until about 15 years ago to start networking with people and go into all these meetups, all these events.

⁓ There is value in that, you know, and you should put yourself out there if you want to. ⁓ If that’s your objective is to grow because you won’t in this space, probably, I don’t know, maybe any space, ⁓ you know, you won’t get to the top or whatever that is in your quantitative value doing it alone. You know, so you need to have, you know, people…

For example, you found me some way and you reached out to me. That’s how it was supposed to work. someone’s going to watch this video and get value. so, yeah, mean, think whoever’s watching this, go to those real estate networking events. Go to that AI technology training. Go to that thing in Vegas. mean, looking back, I should have been doing a lot more.

And if you want to, and I mean, again, it depends on what you value. Some people don’t value this. I mean, that’s fine. But if that’s what you want to do, I think you’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone and go and do these things. So yeah, those are probably two of the biggest things for me.

Michelle Kesil (21:10)
Yeah, absolutely. Those are important. Thank you so much for sharing.

Angelo (21:14)
Yeah.

Michelle Kesil (21:14)
Well, before we begin to wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, and learn more about what you’re up to, where can people find you?

Angelo (21:22)
Yeah, I mean, so we’re all over on social media. Obviously we have our podcast, Real Estate Insider, that’s on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok. Just Angelo Christian mortgage. can just type that in social media. Everything will pop up. And then our website is officialangelochristian.com. And then like we, we actually still talk to our customers. It’s not an AI bot. So you can call us or text us at 832-431-6331. We are open seven days a week.

So if people wanna call, talk or meet up, we have offices all over the country that can meet physically in our Texas office or Florida or California if they wanna come meet in person. So there’s a lot of ways to connect.

Michelle Kesil (22:04)
Well, your time and your story. Thank you so much for being here.

Angelo (22:06)
Of of

course, and pleasure of the pleasure is mine. Thank you.

Michelle Kesil (22:11)
And for those listeners tuning in, you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Angelo who are building real businesses and we’ll see you on the next episode.

Angelo (22:25)
Thank you, Michelle.