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Why Lending Behavior Beats Real Estate Timing (Foreclosures Explained)

By January 9, 2026Real Estate Pros Show

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Show Summary

In this conversation, Robert Ferra, an experienced investor and lender, shares insights into the lending landscape, particularly in the context of market shifts and distressed properties. He emphasizes the importance of behavioral finance in lending, discusses strategies for engaging with distressed sellers, and highlights the unique approach of investing in debt rather than real estate. Robert also provides valuable advice for new investors and shares his thoughts on various real estate markets across the United States.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Robert Ferra (00:00)
    We don’t go after the house, number one. You know, the first thing that we want to do is to cure the loan. Because most folks do not want to, you know, they want to be the homeowner still, and they want to, you know, find a way to continue to get better, to get stronger. So we don’t offer to take the house. So most of our competition says, you know what, I’ll buy your house. What we say is, let me lend you the money that you need in order to stop the foreclosure.

    So, and then we’ll buy you the time that you need to become strong, six months, 12 months. If you pay on time, an FHA, you you can refinance.

    Dylan Silver (02:10)
    Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Robert Ferra is an investor and lender with decades of experience. You can find him online at latinloancap.com and across social media. Robert, welcome to the show.

    Robert Ferra (02:26)
    Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

    Dylan Silver (02:29)
    It’s great to have you on here. And I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking guests how they got into real estate, but you’re involved and you’ve been involved in so many different segments of real estate. I want to ask you, you know, do you have an area of real estate that you got into before you got into the lending side?

    Robert Ferra (02:47)
    No, I was an accountant before I was an accountant and I hated my life. I did not want to be an accountant anymore. I answer an ad, they say something on the lines where, you know, we’re looking for loan officer, bilingual loan officers and no experience necessary. Right. So I’m like, all right, no experience. Perfect. I got that and I’m bilingual. So, and then, I got into lending and since in 1991.

    Dylan Silver (03:11)
    So long, long time lender and of course lending has changed in the last handful of years, let alone since since 1991. You’ve seen of course the cycles. You’ve seen people come and go for folks that may be newer to the business. Any advice to folks about how to weather the storms of market shifts as a lender?

    Robert Ferra (03:35)
    Well, lending is about behavior. If you save and if you make more money than you spend, and if you know are responsible and you pay your debt, right? So even though things change, lenders still follow behavior. So it just just be good, be smart. Don’t buy something that you want before you are about to invest.

    Dylan Silver (04:00)
    Yeah.

    Robert Ferra (04:00)
    You

    know, don’t overspend yourself. You know, and just be smart. And lending and investing is about math, you know behavioral math. And if you can put the two and two together, you’re always going to make right decisions. You’re always going to buy. the times and all of that, because I lived through the Y2K and the dot com bubble and, you know, 2008 and all of that, right? But banks still follow behavior.

    banks still follow you know what you did in the past. Your behavior in the past is gonna determine the outcome of the future. So if you save money and if you are consistent at work and things of that nature, most likely that will continue and you’ll still be able to obtain financing.

    Dylan Silver (04:48)
    Now, when we talk about the lending space, especially right now, there does seem to be a lot of new products that are available. And then also there does seem to be a little bit of, I would say, shared space between the retail environment and the investor space with things like DSCR, right? Are you seeing this as as well? And then also, are you seeing more

    more people looking at investing because of these opportunities.

    Robert Ferra (06:04)
    Well…

    there’s a lot of possibilities, opportunities, just because of you know how we’re looking in the whole picture of America. And the way I invest, actually, I invest in debt. I don’t invest in real estate, but I invest in debt. Right now, there’s about 35,000 people losing their houses every month. So we reach out to them directly. we say, listen, you know

    What do wanna do? You wanna stay in your house or you want to go? Right, now if you wanna stay in your house, I provide them a loan that is just to cure the situation. And what we do at that point in time is we bring them current and now they have two loans and one of them is paying us. And if they don’t pay us, then we have the opportunity to go and take the house, right? We don’t want to do that, but we could, right? If they want to go,

    Dylan Silver (06:54)
    Yeah.

    Robert Ferra (06:57)
    That is when all of these great solutions like DSCR loans come in, right? We pick up the house from them, we cure them, they did the house over to us and we refinance them through some type of long-term ⁓ financing for a commercial property, even if it is a single family house.

    Dylan Silver (07:16)
    I want to get down into the weeds a little bit here, Robert, and talk about you know how you breach these conversations and then you know the scope of it. Like 35,000 homes across the country entering foreclosure is a huge number. And I’m in this space. This is where I really cut my teeth is in that distressed seller space, single family distressed seller space. As someone who’s investing in this space,

    Are you looking for someone who really has a foreclosure date coming up or are you looking for someone who’s like pre foreclosure and maybe before they have their 30 day date?

    Robert Ferra (07:56)
    We like to work with pre-foreclosure, but what happened is like folks believe that they still gonna have some kind of miracle gonna happen for them. And by the time that they react, a lot of the times is when they have 10 days to go before share of sale or whatever the case is, right? So, you know, they think that they’re gonna get a modification and they think that the attorney is gonna help them out. And they think that, you know, the family can come, you know, and do something for them.

    Dylan Silver (08:12)
    That’s true.

    Robert Ferra (08:25)
    And when they see that the bank is not helping them out and the legal team is not helping them out and nobody comes in and says, here, here’s $50,000. Then they react to our marketing. call us, we, you know, and we can, we, you know, we can move very fast. you know, finding out things today, like title and values and things of that nature doesn’t take very long. So we able to find out, you know, if, they’re helpful, you know, um,

    mortgageable in the future or what happened, what’s the circumstantial, it’s a behavior. How did they end up in there? And we had to make a decision in like two days. And then that’s how we go about it.

    Dylan Silver (09:03)
    Yeah.

    when you to your points, you know, it’s it’s tough to to explain to someone the severity of their situation until it’s like right in front of their face. And then at that point, they have no other option but to look at it. Otherwise, they’re going to get, you know, evicted from their home. They’re going to have a sheriff show up on their house and have to leave. Right. But when we talk about that that timeline, right. So they have a foreclosure date set. Now you’re competing and I’ve

    this is what I’ve done. So I know how difficult this is. Now you’re competing with everyone else who’s also reaching out to them. How do you differentiate yourself? And then then also what advice and feedback do you have folks who may be newer to the game and reaching out to those folks in a similar situation?

    Robert Ferra (09:48)
    Cut.

    We don’t go after the house, number one. You know, the first thing that we want to do is to cure the loan. Because most folks do not want to, you know, they want to be the homeowner still, and they want to, you know, find a way to continue to get better, to get stronger. So we don’t offer to take the house. So most of our competition says, you know what, I’ll buy your house. What we say is, let me lend you the money that you need in order to stop the foreclosure.

    So, and then we’ll buy you the time that you need to become strong, six months, 12 months. If you pay on time, an FHA, you you can refinance.

    Obviously there’s qualifications, right? But potentially you can refinance, right? Now, if they don’t pay us, then we’ll say, okay, let’s talk about this, right? We don’t go after the house automatically. We try to continue to help them.

    This is why I get an insane amount of opportunities and people saying yes to what I present. And they complain about the competition, say, everybody wants my house. I don’t want to give up my house.

    Dylan Silver (10:59)
    Yeah,

    when when when you’re going in from that, hey, how can we help standpoint? I’m imagining that

    these people are behind, they can’t get back up immediately. Is it typically six months? Is it a year? Is it it case by case with every person?

    Robert Ferra (11:53)
    Typically, the loans that we give them is 18 to 24 months. So we give up. Yeah, because that will give you enough time for you to become mortgageable again, to get a loan again, to show behavior, to show patterns, right? Because that’s what lending is. Lending is, you know, how we’re doing right now. Are you going to be able to maintain it? So when we lend them, we, and by the way, obviously we have

    Dylan Silver (12:00)
    18 years, yeah.

    Robert Ferra (12:23)
    licenses to do residential lending. So every six months we stay on top of them. We call them and say, listen, know, can you, you know, did you get a better job? Did you get a paid increase? You know, what happened? You know, so on and so forth, right? And if the answer is no, then you have two choices. Sell the house to the open market. Keep all the equity that you’ve been saving for many years or you’ve been building for many years or sell it to us.

    you know, sell it to us and you know, we’ll give you some money and or we let you stay there as a tenant, help you out, you know, get you strong again, give you the ability to buy it back and so on and so forth. This is why my negotiations is so easy with a lot of these folks because I don’t go after, hey, listen, you’re about to fall apart, give me your house and you know, I don’t do it that way.

    Dylan Silver (13:03)
    Yeah.

    There’s not a tremendous number of people going about it the way that you’re doing it. I’ve spoken to across however many podcasts that I’ve done. I’ve spoken to one other person who’s focused on keeping people in the home and it’s difficult to do, right? This is why most of the time people are going cash offer. But because you’re a lender, you have a different lens with which you view the situation. Do you think there will be more lenders like yourself and folks getting involved to try to keep people in the home or?

    Are there factors that make that so difficult that there’s really not too much competition in that space?

    Robert Ferra (13:49)
    Well, I come from a lending mindset. And by the way, I’m not all that interested in the real estate. I’m more interested in the liquidity. I’m more interested in, you know because obviously when we lend money, we create a margin. Like you would with a regular loan, you put points and you charge things and so on and so forth. So we do all of that. Then we sell these notes. We don’t even keep the notes, we sell them to investors.

    You know that way we keep the liquidity going. And if we have to pick up the property, we prefer to either sell it back to the investor, the note, or sell it to the open market right away if we have to.

    Dylan Silver (15:10)
    Now, when that happens, I’m imagining there’s multiple processes here. So you’ve got the note portion of it, but then you’ve got, hey, this person isn’t making their payments, we’ve got to go find an investor or open market. do you have teams within teams that handle each segment of it? Because I’m imagining that’s a separate process.

    Robert Ferra (15:28)
    Yeah. Well,

    there’s a lot of things that you have to, know, legal steps you have to take. So, you know, we have, we have the full representation on the legal side and then we have investors all over the country. I teach Latinos how to think, how to think like investors, how to think like banks and so on and so forth. Right? So, and additionally, there’s a lot of investors outside of America that would like to invest in America.

    So a lot of my investors are from Argentina and Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, obviously all over the country in here. Right? So a lot of folks, it’s not that hard to sell it to investors, particularly because this house, when I lend them, I always make sure that they have a minimum of 30 % equity. the max that I do is a combined of CLTB of 70.

    Dylan Silver (15:58)
    Yeah.

    Okay.

    Robert Ferra (16:26)
    I don’t go past that. So even when there’s default and things of that nature, the deal still makes a lot of sense. And that’s, and that’s lending.

    Dylan Silver (16:35)
    I want to pivot a bit here and then ask you and there may be there may be nothing folks in this situation can do but if folks had you know an arm rate loan they took it out five years ago or less right and now their rates have gone up and they can’t afford to stay in their home to folks in this situation with newer homes or close to brand new homes have any options if you know they’re in a know breakeven or negative equity position.

    Robert Ferra (17:06)
    Well, yeah, but potentially when we look at that, right? So if the LTV is too high or there’s no equity or, then we look at the rate. We look at, know, what are you paying? What’s the fair market value of that property if I was to take it and rent it, right? And how long would it take me to, to be able to flip it or what are the cases, right?

    doesn’t need money to flip you know it. Is the LTV too high because of the conditions of the property? Right? So yeah, we look at a lot of different things.

    Dylan Silver (17:44)
    Now, you’re in Fort Lauderdale, beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was telling you, I love Fort Lauderdale. I’m a huge fan. I’m there like five times a year. One of my favorite places in the country. But I’m also licensed in Texas. And so when I think of some of my favorite places to look at real estate, I’m looking at deals in the Carolinas, in Florida, in Texas, in Alabama. When you’re looking at distressed debt,

    assets. Are you looking in those same markets? Are you also looking in other areas? You know, we both lived in New Jersey, for instance, do ever look at deals in New Jersey?

    Robert Ferra (18:20)
    South Jersey, yes. I like South Jersey, West Jersey, not so much Bergen County or Hudson County. Taxes are too high and things of that nature, right? So if they don’t pay, it becomes a little tougher for me to maintain the payments or whatever the case is. But Texas is fantastic. Central, North Florida, we like it a lot. The Carolinas, the Midwest, some of the South, like Tennessee and Virginia, we like it.

    because I’ve lived in so many years in Jersey, I still want to help folks in Jersey. So we do something in Jersey. So there’s a lot of laws and regulations by state. So we just gotta make sure that the states that are, that allowed me to help and allowed me to do these things without too much regulation, that’s where the states that we’ll go after. know, and cause a lot of the state, when you lend money,

    Dylan Silver (18:48)
    Yeah, me too.

    Robert Ferra (19:09)
    You have to go either by a contract or what the state allows you to lend it to, right? And cost and ⁓ rates and stipulations and things of that nature. So we look at that into those things, but Texas is fantastic. Florida is very, very good. It’s probably like one and two. Then the Carolinas, we like Virginia, we like in the Midwest and some of the South. We like Denver. I mean, we like Colorado. like, so a lot of the,

    Like California, we don’t like very much. And even though there’s an insane amount of opportunities, don’t like it. The state, you know, the regulations of the state and the cost of the real estate and the taxes and things, you know, they’re very expensive. So it doesn’t make sense for Nevada. Doesn’t make sense. See, there’s just like, you know, one good town for like a better, you know, so.

    Dylan Silver (19:38)
    Yeah.

    Thank

    Yeah,

    it can be cost prohibitive. I hear you there. We are coming up on time here though, Robert. Any new projects that you’re working on or how can our audience reach out to you and your team?

    Robert Ferra (20:04)
    Well, the best way to get to me is through my cell phone. I answer every call. I’m always busy, therefore I’m always available. You know So my number is 9546146316. And then the company says, Latin Loan Capital for you know normal fix or flip loans, bridge loans, and things of that nature, and save by Ness for folks that want to either find out more about

    saving houses, investing in debt and things like that.

    Dylan Silver (20:32)
    Robert, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for coming on the show.

    Robert Ferra (20:35)
    thank you. very kind.

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