Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Selling Greenville your favorite real estate podcast here in Greenville South Carolina I'm your host as always Stan McCune Realtor right here in Greenville and you can find all of my contact information in the show notes if you need to reach out to me for any of your real estate needs and please if you enjoy this content just a little subscribe button hit a little like button you wanna leave a comment any of those good things that helps to support the show and just helps me to realize that there's people actually out there watching and listening if you leave a comment by the way I'll try to respond to it so I'd appreciate if you guys could do all of those things and use me as your realtor that's the only other thing that's why my contact is in the show notes so please do that if you don't mind today we've got a different kind of episode this is not going to be a Greenville specific episode but we've talked a lot over the years about real estate investing obviously there's been a lot of money over the years that has flown into the Greenville Spartanburg Anderson market now even Lawrence and Pickens counties are starting to see it as well investor money in this area we've talked a lot about investing in real estate over the years and so today I have the privilege of interviewing Ben Stef who is a loan officer with Funding Freedom and he you know what one thing that I really try to do when I'm interviewing people is I usually won't have people on this show unless I have worked with them in some capacity in the in the past cause otherwise I might be giving you a lousy recommendation Ben is someone that I have worked with I recently closed on a home equity line of credit on an Airbnb property so not an owner occupied property something I've been turned down by other lenders many many times for and so and actually Ben reached out to me originally to come on the show and I was like well I gave the disclaimer that I'll do that with people that that I've not worked with and then I ended up working with them so now he gets to come on the show so anyway all that said Ben welcome to the show hey thank you for having me Stan appreciate it absolutely so the loan product that I got was a home equity line of credit on a rental property an Airbnb specifically it was a DSCR style loan if you don't know what that is look it up I don't have time maybe Ben can explain some of that I don't want to take steal his thunder but it was a very smooth process it was very easy they gave me great loan to value options I felt like the rates were competitive for a DSCR loan and so I was just I was very happy so Ben I'm just I'm gonna kind of open it up to you where what specifics about this product does the general public need to know and why is it so unique so when people think home equity line of credit they think of their house typically right and it's never in history there's never really been a line of credit option for a rental property especially an Airbnb and especially if it's held in an LLC or an entity right and so recently we've saw this just at a high level that this was I think a huge thing that was lacking amongst investors and so I was able to spearhead and be one of the beta testers for this product and so we've launched it since then and it's really grown to be what it is now and what you tried stand when you when you did it and I think what people need to know is that a line of credit on your rental property without showing tax returns and traditional income if even if you write off all your income if you show no money on paper and you just have rents right coming in these lines of credit were developed for you right they're developed to help you and I think lines of credit are so powerful right now versus just taking cash out and I'll explain I can get into why I think right now there's just so much demand for this because and if I'm rambling too much tell me but no you're fine we have since Covid what happened was everybody refinanced their mortgages and they were between 2 to 3% right and so what happened after Covid was value started to go up of course right if you bought in 2018 2019 you kind of got lucky right cause you bought before the increase and so everybody's values went up we have a ton of equity right now which is also why I think the market won't crash because our loan to values are actually not as high as they were in 2008 yeah there's no foreclosures yeah and foreclosures as well and we're not highly you know we're not overleveraged anyway but what's really effective about this is that all these guys built up equity right or they bought properties and now they quit their jobs or they don't have traditional income or they just don't fit the box that the banks want them to be in for a traditional line of credit not only that but like the product virtually doesn't exist for investment properties they were actually built by the way for farmers that's actually how they were developed for primary like owner occupied homes that's how they started right that's number one okay number two loan officers don't make a lot of money on these HELOC’s okay I'm gonna say it again loan officers do not make a lot of money on these HELOC’s there's a reason why they're not marketing it they're not talking about it right because they get paid like a hundred bucks to fund the deal right it could be a 1 million dollar HELOC it like almost doesn't matter so because they don't get paid as much right they don't talk about it and so when you and that's how I was trained when I got trained and I got my license stand and before really he looks came onto the scene they were still kind of around but we were always trained to like talk down to lines of credit and not and always push the cash out refinance cause that's how we got paid right it's like no forget it pay off the first mortgage let's just do a regular cash out loan and for the listeners here and for Stanley as you guys as you know the problem with that is if you have a low rate on the mortgage that you don't wanna lose and also you don't want all the money coming to you and then after you spend it you can't use it again what do you do you're kind of stuck yeah and that's why lines of credit are so effective I know I'm kind of giving you a long answer but that's a great answer well and I'll just I'll just chime in that you know I for those that aren't as experienced and that are maybe like trying to comprehend all this and I I've actually discovered that cash out refi can sometimes be a foreign concept to some people some people don't know that that exists so you know let's say that you owe $200,000 on a five on a property worth 500,000 you could refi that you and basically you know probably get a loan for up to 400,000 and that would basically then you'd get paid roughly $200,000 there it wouldn't quite be that but you would get paid basically the difference between the loan that's being paid off and the amount that you're getting for the next loan and so you go to closing you receive money at closing which is great but you just redid all your terms if you had a 2% rate you just refinanced at 6% your rate your rate just tripled and your mortgage payment more than tripled most likely because you're also having a higher principal so a home equity line of credit you maintain you keep your loan that you already have on the property 2 three 4 whatever percent and now you just have a second loan on top of that that you can use and what nobody and what nobody's talking about right now is that when it comes to refinancing there's three reasons people refinance either you lower the rate you shorten the term or you take cash out when people hear refinance they think it means one thing or the other they hear refinance they think oh it's me taking equity out or it's oh it's me paying down the getting a lower rate it's like no there's actually different types of refinances right and believe it or not a he lock is actually considered it's actually a refinance technically like in our world right not to the consumers I don't say that cause it just confuses yeah but those are the three reasons and so you hit the nail on the head a cash out refinancing we do it a lot especially with DSCR loans which I can break down in a second but cash out refinancing is extremely effective especially with the Ber method but it's just nice to have a second option if you don't wanna pay off the loan instead you wanna have a loan come behind it as a second lien that keeps the first mortgage intact and so we're doing that a lot right now for investors I think one of the if for anyone listening if you guys wanna implement the Ber method we're using this a lot for as well for properties that you let's say buy you do value adds rehabs right and you add a bedrooms bathroom you adjust the floor plan whatever the value add was done when you do that to a property and now you're ready to take cash out what's really great about HELOC's is you only need 3 months seasoning right so you need to own the property for 3 months to then take the HELOC on it for this product I have another one that can do it faster but it just depends but in general three months is the rule and so with that you can use a line of credit to take equity out pay off the hard money lender if you need to the only downside is it doesn't pick up on the new value sometimes you have to be wary of that but in general it's great because you can use the he lock money even I'm kind of rambling here but even on a primary residence so a lot of guys what they're doing now is they have equity built up in the primary that they refinance during Covid right like most people and they wanna start doing the birth method or they wanna start investing in real estate right like if that's you whoever's listening to this like try this strategy you can go up to 85% loan to value so like let's say you have a house that's paid off let's say it's 100 k for simple math it's worth 100 k you can get up to $85,000 on your primary residence as a line of credit and you can take that money and actually use it as a down payment for a another rental or an Airbnb or a bur right whatever the case might be and so it's really effective to use it to start investing once you have capital and for those kind of unfamiliar with the bird method we've talked about on the show but buy rehab refinance rent or you might put the rent before the refinance depending on but roughly that's a strategy that a lot of investors use if they're okay with debt some investors are anti debt which I respect but if you're not this is the way that that's a that's a method that a lot of investors will use make a cash purchase and then make the cash rehab or maybe a hard money and then rent it out and then eventually refinance after the rehab is complete yeah we're now yeah the close that's like the closest thing to no money down like I hate saying that cause there's no such thing as no money down unless you're raising money and unless you know whatever seller financing but there is kind of that hack I guess if you wanna call it where you leverage a he lock you leverage your equity and you use that as a down payment and then use the hard money lender to fund the rest right the rest of the 80% or whatever and you fund that 20% down payment and then that's how it's like yeah now you're buying properties without spending a dime of your own money yeah right it can happen that way but you're just leveraging 2 2 assets at the same time no for sure so what about like multi unit properties yeah so this works so this he lock program is up to four units they I have a lot of people that ask about commercial lines of credit like five to 10 unit buildings 20 unit buildings I don't have anything right now on the market that exists for that we're trying it's just really hard cause it's commercial but up to up to four unit properties you guys got a duplex triplex quadplex you can actually use this line of credit yeah it's got to be yeah but it's got to be all those units have to be in the same structure like yes yeah correct yeah cause yeah otherwise it would be a commercial functionally a commercial property so if I can ask you a personal question cause you eluted to that these aren't big money makers so what is the incentive for you to go on a show like this and advertise this so I believe in helping people especially investors cause my heart goes out to investors I wanna help you guys for the sake of helping you not just pursuing a paycheck which I've hoped Stan when you got the he lock that's the sense you got from us and working with this product is that like we genuinely care now of course I still get paid I still get paid a percentage but yeah it's not a lot my hope is long term to develop a relationship where when the investor is ready to use this money to whether it be hard to get hard money financing cause we do that or DSCR loans where you can purchase a rental property with no income verification or debt verification at all DSCR basically just let lets you buy a rental as long as the rental income covers the property you're good to go so it's a really simple loan for investors and some limited financing as long as you have 20% down guys you could buy as many as you want so that's what I mean by DSCR and so if the long term plan is hey let's give you the money you go spend it and then we work together on buying the next rental the next flip or whatever the case might be right that's kind of that's the hope that makes sense long term I don't want to just be a one and done like I have a lot of investors now I have all I already have their information they're just like Ben hey here's a property we found here and here's my statement and then we go that's it like I don't need to we don't need to talk for an hour you don't need to send me a bunch of docs it's like I already have your information I just duplicate the file and we just start you know do you include does that include the rehab costs and all of that or is that just the property purchase yeah so for my flippers it's just hey send me the scope of work who's the GC you're using is it the same guy okay great send me the scope of work what's the purchase price give me the contract right like those are the basics I already have credit score application you know same thing for DSCR if you're ready to buy a rental property hey I just need to see updated I need to see updated statements right so bank statements where's the money coming from I already have your credit report if we need to get a new credit report no problem but it's so seamless now because investors are really busy like you guys are busy we're busy we're constantly running around we're getting a million spam calls a million emails like there's just too much going on in this noisy world and so I think it helps to have someone in your corner that's just like I already have all your information you just got to give me the address and then we just go sure and then you're like hey send me the numbers what's you know I wanna do 20% down compare it to 25% down what's the you know what's the rate okay cool if I do a three year pre payment penalty instead of a five let's compare that okay great I want this one and then we go so it's really it it's a seamless and effective way of doing real estate and if it if it sounds too good to be true I actually when you first described it to me I was like there's no way this sounds too good to be true and I mean until I got the money I continued to have that mindset because I've been over promised by investor friendly lenders before you did not over promise so I'll just share real quick my experience with the audience so I mean basically you were just like hey go to this link and it's going to ask you for your address it's gonna pull your credit and it's gonna it's gonna look at your income through the plaid third party verification app and I did that it took 10 15 20 minutes something like that and it immediately like spit out like basically a valuation that was great not had no issues with the valuation it spit out income numbers that were great via plaid I'm not exactly sure how all that works because it did not match what my tax return said but it was better because I'm self employed I get that number as low as possible so I was very happy that wasn't looking at my tax returns and then it was just a matter of just waiting for underwriting no appraisal no inspections no photos I mean it was like I didn't have to provide any of my anything from Airbnb I didn't have to provide anything for my property manager my property manager doesn't even know what happened so kind of amazed I mean this it's the it takes a lot to amaze me in real estate I've been investing for close to 15 years been a realtor for 10 years and that amazed me I'm not gonna lie yeah and I appreciate that like that is amongst many of the feedback that we've got Stan and that's the whole reason why it was built that way where it's just so easy you're not bothering your tenants you're not freaking them out cause an appraiser now has to visit yeah their units right or their unit if you if you do have if it's a single family or whatever and if it's Airbnb it's vacant you know if at the time depending on the how the guest bookings but you get the point like it's just so easy I've never in my entire career I've been doing this for six years now and it's like yeah you know I look like I'm 15 on camera so it's like you got to do what I did cause people told me that and so I had to grow out facial hair I actually can't stand facial hair so I don't know we'll see about that but the thing is in my career I've never seen an easier way in my entire life to take out money on a property like it we have some investor stand now cause the rule is with this he lock you have to wait every 45 days to use it again on any property that you want and so I have investors that have done it already a couple times they know the system so well they already know what it's gonna ask cause it's the same exact way every time now if your property's in a trust or if you have a different LLC it's like yeah OK slightly different documentation or sure if you have something against you on Title a judgment yeah like okay that changes things but for the most part it's the same and so I have these guys look at their money like within six seven days like that's how fast it just moves now cause they just know the process and so yeah but yeah I'm glad to hear that you had such a good experience because I think there's so many investors I cannot tell you Stan how many guys call me and they're like I wish I knew about this sooner and before I did all these other deals you know yeah what kind what kind of rates and I know nobody lenders don't like me to ask questions like this but it's a question that people listening are going to have yeah so if you don't want to answer that's fine or if you feel like you can't but like what kind of rates are you seeing or any of these loan programs pick one that you feel like is a safe loan I'll give a I'll give a range guys and at the time of this recording of course we're in the month of June so of 2026 so yeah this is probably not gonna air until July so things might change okay so yeah who knows but I but I still wanna help the best way that I can and before I even answer that too one thing to preface guys is that remember it's a line of credit it's not a 30 year fixed mortgage so a lot of people sometimes expect HELOC rates to be the same as 30 year fixed mortgages and they're actually not it's apples and oranges remember these lenders only make money on the interest and on the balance you have active right it's like a credit card if you don't carry a balance month to month you don't pay interest month to month right a HELOC is kind of similar right if you don't have a balance then guess what you're not paying interest right there's no active payments every single month and so keep that in mind too but for these rates they're anywhere from 7% to I wanna say 11% right now depending on investment property credit score is it an LLC like what's your situation right so the algorithm puts all the data together which by the way guys you can check via a soft check actually in the beginning you don't even have to pull credit you can literally just kind of window shop and just see hey I got a couple rentals what is this system gonna offer me right and it'll tell you right it'll tell you hey I'll give you 100 k for this property or hey I'll give you 300 k right we just had a guy that closed a 500,000 dollar he lock he was ecstatic but the point that I'm making is that the rates are anywhere from 7 to 11% actually stand after you just closed your Helix we just rolled out variable options so the rates are typically fixed guys just so you know cause this confuses a lot of people just because it's a fixed rate doesn't mean it's not a line of credit you can have a line of credit and still be a fixed rate it's sort of a hybrid model that we've built so it's a hybrid where it's still a line of credit you draw and pay back as you go and the rates are fixed so they're flat so they don't change month to month there's no ceiling there's no floor we just rolled out though a variable option if you do want variable rates that adjust with the market you can select that as well but of course it's subject to change month to month and then one more important thing too is you have a four month draw period usually with these so four years you can draw on the money guys as many times as you want there's no draw fees and then after those four years the payments just resume like normal or you just make payments like normal like a normal he lock or I'm sorry a normal mortgage and you can select the term 20 years 30 years what is what is the reason for that four year draw period I'm curious about the logic behind that I think a lot of Helix in the past sometimes would be like 10 years like they'd be pretty long for a draw period and they were pretty aggressive and but the problem was that the process of getting them was longer so what we did was we kind of built it to where it's easier to get but the draw period is shorter if that makes sense the good news is you could pay it off with another he lock right like you could replace it if you want sure and start over start another he lock for 4 years right doesn't matter but that's for our main Helix product the one that you use Stan that that's just what they established it at and you know that that's what it's been since day one so I don't know if they'll you know change it or adjust it but yeah now when you said that you can't do commercial properties how does the system be with it being so automated how does it detect if a property is commercial or not yeah so it has we have some third party vendors that we're synced up with and so I don't wanna get too technical cause it's gonna get confusing yeah sure I was just curious yeah there's so they have we have through an automated valuation model the AVM which is just like this fancy tech that was developed to help establish the values of the properties the bedrooms and bathrooms the square footage the rental valuations right and then amongst that it also tries to look at zoning where it's like hey what's the property zoned as now is it perfect no we had one time a single family home it was a we had a duplex but it came up as a single family home and then we actually needed be but here's the thing the system is smart enough to know like hey we're not confident in this value so sometimes that'll happen with you we did I don't think it happened where we need to get a drive by appraisal but sometimes we need to get an appraisal but it's like it's a quick like we call it drive by appraisal where they're not coming into the property right and so the reason for that is when they when the system is like hey we're not so confident on this score or on this property or on this value I should say we need someone to go in and just boots on the ground really quick check and so sometimes the system will default to that option as well but yeah it'll try its best to look at what is it like zoned out okay for like number yeah gotcha okay that makes sense I didn't know if people could maybe get sneaky maybe they got a property that that is kind of kind of ambiguous I mean you could try like it doesn't hurt I always tell people I'm like hey try it like if you got a 4 unit but it's got like two illegal units so it's technically like a 6 right like hey it if it's legally zoned and it's set up as a 4 it's a four right like the system doesn't know it's a 6 or that you rent it out as a 6 right now if we do a regular refinance or a DSCR loan where the appraiser comes in and he's got to go through all the units now we're gonna have problem yeah yeah you're not with this program yeah right but with this one it's kind of nice cause it's like hey actually you know try it doesn't it's not gonna pull your credit five times it's just hey soft check does it work and then you'll get a yes or no right away that's why I love this so much because it's so I'll say the downside to it is that you can't fight the system it's kind of like gospel whatever it says that's what it is you can't like disagree or agree doesn't matter if it thinks it's your property's worth 100 k but you think it's worth 400 I'm sorry that's not like it's not like AI that that'll come back and say no oh yes you're right actually I oh yeah no we use a lot of AI components to it but yeah that is one of the things that it's important to mention guys like if you disagree with it we'll have to use a different he lock product this one that Stan use and when we're talking about is not built for that it's very it's kind of automated however the beauty of it is if it hey if it gives us money and it tells us it's worth more than we thought or whatever then that's it that's what it is and you get to go and fund and get your money right so yeah it's really it's cool for that too yeah fantastic yeah few other quick questions here and then I'll let you go cause I know you're a busy person you're I mean you if you reach out to my podcast I'm sure you're reaching out to a lot of podcasts and you should because it's such a unique product that you're offering yeah we really want to get the word out yeah so as far as like let's talk about hard money real quick yep so what sort of loan to values are you doing for that in terms of like rehabs are you doing 100% on the rehab explain all that real quick yeah so they're always for anyone that doesn't know hard money is just basically quick funds that we give you to buy a property and then also to rehab it right so it sounds kind of bad but it's not really like it's not that you know it's not like a whatever shark loan what do they call it oh yeah and shark lending kind of thing yeah it's like okay but the point the to answer your question so hard money lending and we have across the board 100% rehab for all the all the products right so we will fully fund your construction project as long as of course it makes sense you know you're not spending I don't know 100 k on paint right so they do look at that but the way it works is we've just now released for this year 100% financing for both purchase and rehab which is wow absolutely insane the caveat to that is you have to have at least 30 deals in your entire lifetime experience either rehabbing developing and holding or flipping if I can show the underwriters an Excel sheet of 30 addresses that you've bought and that you've rehabbed right even if you haven't sold them you can get 100% financing you just pay closing cost would a would a duplex count as one or two a duplex would count as one it would count as one yeah so it's one per property per parcel right OK so this program is great for the experienced investors guys if you're not experienced you're kind of new the down payment is all based on your experience and credit score I would want to say but you can the max usually is 20% down loan to cost so if I'm buying 100,000 dollar house and my rehab budget is 1/5 is 50 so 150,000 is my loan to cost so 20% down is 30 k plus closing cost right so for those listening starts at 20% we'll fully fund the rehab and then you can go as low as 5% down or even zero if you have extensive experience it works in bracket stand so if you're like if you're if you've done five flips in your lifetime then your down payment might go down to like 15% right or maybe 10 if you've done 15 flips then yeah you can probably go down to like 5 or 10% down so you get the point like the more you do the less you put down because we see your experience and your and you and you do this often so yeah absolutely what about real quick on the on the you know hold side the DSCR or non DSCR you know hold property side what is there anything unique that you're doing besides the ease of the process with regard to that what's great is because I'm kind of a one stop shop stat stand like I don't want to toot my own horn and like be egotistical but I really think it's well you're on here for a reason yeah I guess what's great is we because I have multiple stages and products that like satisfy each stage like it's just one stop hey we help you start to finish right and we'll give discounts of course cause you're going to the same guy for multiple things but what we'll do is a hard money guys just because you're using money to rehab doesn't mean you have to sell we speak in terms of fixing flipping and hard money loans generally are 12 month loans so they are short term but you can pay off the loan pay off the hard money lender and do a cash out refinance with a DSCR loan to pay off that loan and then and then have a tenant in there so let me back up so what I mean is let's say you buy a single family house guys you put 20% down or whatever we give you money to do construction you complete construction you're all done you're ready to rent so you have two exit strategies guys either you rent out the property and you refinance it or you sell it right so those are the two ways you can get your money problem with selling of course you get capital gains tax and all these other things unless you do a 1031 if you don't want to sell you can then just do a DSCR refinance DSCR does not look at personal income no tax returns it doesn't look at how much money you personally make it looks at what I love about it is even if the property is vacant you can still use a DSCR loan you don't have to have it rented out now that's preferred but if the property's vacant we can use market rents and so with the DSCR loan we'll come in we'll do a 30 year fixed mortgage on it that's what the DSCR is third year fixed mortgage if you have enough equity and the appraiser thinks it's valuable enough to where there's equity then you can possibly take cash out and go on to the next deal or at least pay off that 12 month loan that you got cause hard money loans are short term short term absolutely so those are the two primary exit strategies my investors are using and we'll help with the hard money and we'll help with the DSCR so it's really it's really fast absolutely well I think I think that's all the time that we have that was all fantastic for those listening I will put Ben's information in the show notes Ben I'll connect with you after the show to make sure I put exactly the correct information in there is there anything that you wanted to say that we didn't get to nope the last thing I would just say Stan is guys there there's a lot to cover and everyone's situation is different so the best way is just at the time this recording I have it open to the public I don't know for how much longer but you can book a call directly with me on my calendar or you guys can shoot me an email and so my YouTube channel is Funding Freedom or my website is Funding freedom.net so if you guys look me up my information's on there you can go ahead and apply or reach out email book a call whatever the case might be and we can help you out yeah absolutely well Ben thank you so much that was Ben Stef with Funding Freedom thank you all for listening or watching my contact information Ben's contact information is in the show notes if you like this content please like rate review subscribe and I'll talk to you guys again next time!