Have you ever wondered how you can invest in real estate without relying on banks, credit checks, or large down payments? What if you could own properties with just $100 down?
In the first part of our conversation with real estate investors and podcast hosts Jenn and Joe Delle Fave, we explore creative financing strategies that allow investors to acquire properties with minimal capital. Jenn and Joe share their extensive experience with seller financing, lease options, and subject-to deals, helping investors think outside the box to create win-win solutions without the need for traditional bank loans, large down payments, or perfect credit scores.
One of the standout strategies they discuss is the wraparound mortgage, a powerful tool in creative financing that lets investors “wrap” a new loan around an existing one. This technique offers more flexible terms and expands possibilities for property acquisition. Jenn and Joe provide real-world case studies, showcasing how these strategies have worked in their own breakthrough deals and giving listeners practical knowledge to start their own creative investing journey.
If you’re ready to rethink real estate investing, check out Jenn and Joe’s podcast, The Creative Finance Playbook.
Key Takeaways:
- 2:54 Meet Jenn and Joe – their journey from New York to full-time investors in Florida
- 4:20 What is creative financing, and how does it work?
- 7:10 The game-changing strategy that helped them buy properties without banks
- 9:12 How they secured a deal with just $100 down and 0% interest
Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll delve into more advanced strategies, including generating off-market leads through Facebook groups, managing risks and ethical responsibilities, and much more.
Connect with Jenn and Joe:
- Email Address: hattie@creativefinanceplaybook.com
- Website: www.creativefinanceplaybookcom
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CFPlaybook
Connect with Corwyn:
- Contact Number: 843-619-3005
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmelette/
Shoutout to our Sponsor: EXIT Realty Lowcountry Group
Do you want something more? More Meaningful Moments opportunities, deeper relationships and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you say YES, a career and real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for guiding people to one of the most important decisions they ever made, the purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative.
EXIT Realty has a revolutionary compensation model training and technology that provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call EXIT Realty Lowcountry group today at 843-619-3005 that is 843-619-3005 or visit https://exitlowcountry.com/joinexit and make your Exit today.
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/corwyn-j-melette/support
CORWYN:
Do you want something more? More meaningful moments, opportunities, deeper relationships, and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you said yes to any of that, a career in real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for. Guiding people through one of the most important decisions they ever made. The purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative. Exit Realty’s revolutionary compensation model, training, and technology provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call Exit Realty Lowcountry Group today at 843-619-3005, that’s 843-619-3005 or visit join.exitlowcountry.com and make your exit today.
Good morning, good morning, and great morning, guys. Welcome to another fabulous episode of Exit Strategies Radio Show. Hey, I am your host, Corwyn J. Melette, broker and owner of Exit Realty Low Country Group in beautiful North Charleston, South Carolina. If this is your first time listening to this show, you, sir or ma’am, are in for a treat because our mission is very simple. That is to empower our community through financial literacy and real estate education, guys. We are legacy building. That is what we do. Now, look, I love you. I got to tell you, I got to say thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you all the time because you guys have been amazing me and blowing my mind. For those who tune in to us faithfully from one end of our area to the other, you guys rock. For those who listen to us around the globe, thank you so much. Thank you so much for tuning in. Now, we’ve been having some amazing conversations. I am super duper stoked and excited because I guess today I am looking, I already got my pad and pen over here ready to start writing all these notes and stuff down because they are mind-blowing. I am talking about push your whole wig back. You got to push it back up front to get it back situated because they just rocked your entire cranium with the information and knowledge that they deliver. I am super stoked to have a fellow podcaster, a real estate investor, and this whole gamut and suite of extraordinaire in the real estate realm. I cannot wait. So, y’all want y’all to grab your flapjacks. I want y’all to go ahead and put them over to the side because y’all can’t eat right now. We don’t want to make you- overwhelm you. Put your fork down and write these notes. We got with us today Jenn and Joe Delafade. They are the Creative Finance Playbook Podcast hosts. They created this whole platform about how to creatively invest in real estate. Guys, welcome to the Existing Strategies Radio Show.
JENNA:
Wow. Thank you for the intro. It’s nice to be here.
JOE:
Oh, yeah.
CORWYN:
So, if you don’t mind, tell our listeners that high level who you are, what you do, and then let’s get into it.
JOE:
I’m Joe, my beautiful wife, Jenn. We didn’t start this way, but now we’re full-time real estate investors. We moved from upstate New York to now living in sunny Florida. We homeschooled our two kiddos, and we just love real estate. I fell in love with it way, way back when, which we’ll dive into. My gosh, we’ve got some really cool things to share with the audience. We even have some gifts to share. Get ready.
CORWYN:
Yeah. Hotdog. So, look here, creative financing. All right. So, we talk about that on occasion on this show, but it’s usually literally, it is literally a little bit of how the doctor would take a knife or take that little thing. They don’t even take a knife anymore. They take a little plastic thing and kind of rub across your skin, and they take that skin sample. That’s about as far as we go. No, we ain’t injuring nobody. We ain’t taking no layers off. So, let’s peel this thing here back a little bit further today. Tell us creative financing. Let’s define it as to what it means to you and how you employ it.
JOE:
Once we learned this strategy, it changed our whole world. It changed now we could buy properties for rentals or multifamily, single family. It didn’t matter. It worked on everything. And what creative finance is, it’s how to buy real estate without going to a bank, without having to get your credit checked. So, if you don’t have credit or you do, it doesn’t matter. Not even big down payments. Most of these houses that we’re buying this way are worth just $100 down. $100 down. And we’ve got some case studies that we’re going to share some examples of how this works and what to look for during today’s podcast.
CORWYN:
Look here. So, I just heard somebody at home say, oh, go get my pocketbook. So, guys, what put you on this path? I know you guys have moved, transitioned, eased yourself down the coast. So, essentially, you’ve changed and created a lifestyle with this. And we’re going to get to those case studies for our listeners, guys. We’re getting to it. But what was that first opportunity that you did this and you realized, wait a minute, hold on. We can make this happen this way. What was that for you?
JOE:
I grew up poor. I grew up broke, like stone cold broke. I never went to college. I had a job working at a car dealership. 2008, I was lucky enough to meet the love of my life. And I had my own house. Jenn had her own house. And back then, the market was taking a little bit of a dip. You hear the crash of Boeing. Deals were popping up. So, we were starting to look to get into real estate investing because I saw a lot of wealthy people who they all owned real estate. And I’m like, geez, there’s the kind of winning route. So, that’s what we wanted to do. And at first, we were looking at some junkers out in the suburbs, decent properties or decent neighborhoods, but just a really run down house. We were buying them with big discounts. We were renovating them, managing contractors while we were at work. It was a lot. And people do it. I didn’t really love to do that because you’re managing people for three, four months while they’re tearing up the house. We got to rent it, go to the bank, take our money out. And so, we did that process. And I didn’t even realize until Jenn said this yesterday, but the first house that we did, we bought it at the end of 2008. And it took us until 2012 to find the next deal, which is like three and a half years later. So, I knew that I wanted to retire from the car business and I wanted to do it before I was 90. But if we were going to buy a house every four years, I didn’t think that we were ever going to get there. And then we learned back in 2016, we get married, we have kids. Jenn walked away from teaching and I was refinancing out of one of our next properties. And the guy at the banks is Joe at 10 mortgages, we’re going to cut you off. So, you need to figure out something else to do. Felt super defeated. I was like, okay, this is never going to happen. I’m going to be working here until I’m 90, just what it is. And then I learned about what creative finance was, which was just how to buy properties without using the banks. And so, I’m like, I don’t have money like that to just go pay cash. But then I realized you don’t even need that either. And so, this is what made me fall down the rabbit hole. I watched, I learned, we even brought on somebody to help us with this. And so, the very first deal we did was the one that changed everything for us. I had a seller reach out to us, inherited his grandfather’s home. He lived an hour away, rented out to a coworker, and he didn’t want to be a landlord. It wasn’t really even his attentions. So, we wanted to sell it. This is the first house that we went to. It wasn’t a fixer upper. It was 10 minutes from our house. It was turnkey. It didn’t need anything. So, when he said, hey, I’m not giving you some like big discount. You’re not getting it for half off. It’s not a junker. I said, no problem. I could pay your price if you’re open to owner financing. You didn’t owe any money on it. And so, the neat thing about this was the most important thing to him was getting his price. I said, okay, I thank you. And he gave us a deal. That’s the funny part. He wasn’t even asking like some crazy amount. He gave us a deal. But what happened was what we did was I could pay the price. But what we did was we bought it with $100 down. He gave us a 0% mortgage. I didn’t have to pay any interest.
JENN:
He legit met the guy at McDonald’s and bought him a coffee and gave him $100. And I had to fight him over it. I was like, I don’t need it. And Joe was like, no, you need to take this money. Go take your wife out to dinner.
CORWYN:
Yeah. I love it. Look, he might’ve should’ve got a Big Mac, but that’s all.
JOE:
Yeah. And I was so worried and nervous, but it was the easiest thing ever. Because when you found a motivated seller, he was so thrilled with the deal. I was thrilled too. $100 down, no banks, no credit check, no W-2s, no nada. $100, we paid three or 4,000 in closing costs. And now we own a turnkey house out in the suburbs with no interest, a $500 a month payment. Now, we pay taxes and insurance on top of that. But that was where I felt no joke. I felt like I was the caveman that discovered fire. I’m like, does everybody else know about this? Or is this just something that I figured out? And obviously, I wasn’t the first, but I felt like-
JENN:
It was so much easier than doing any of that crazy refinancing and rehabbing and all of that. It was almost too simple. We were like, there’s got to be something. And there really wasn’t. It was just, we were helping somebody else out and everybody won\
CORWYN:
So that is the thing that people, we talk about this kind of stuff, but everybody gets to this, if you will, I’m going to call it tradition, but it’s really a typical, maybe more so than traditional. It’s a typical mindset of, I got to go get a mortgage. I got to go do this. So I got to have this cash or this, that, and the third. And instead of seeking out a way to meet people and create the deal, just recently did something, got to have something going very similar to what you just said. And I just made an offer on something else similar. But so let’s get into the case studies because you guys have been doing this now for how many years?
JENN AND JOE:
A total over 20, but this creative finance- Creative since 2017.
CORWYN:
Yeah. So essentially the last several years, you have been really focused on these types of opportunities. So let’s pick one, pick a situation, case study, if you will. And let’s break this thing down. And for our listeners, guys, look, I’m pretty sure most of y’all, if y’all was to break your leg, some of y’all may be a doctor. So maybe you may treat yourself. Maybe you do open your leg up and do surgery. Who knows? I don’t know. However, do not, if you don’t do that, do, matter of fact, if you ain’t a mechanic, I’m pretty sure you ain’t dropping an engine in your front yard. So look, let’s not jump into this. Let’s make sure we talk to somebody for our listeners because we don’t want y’all to get hurt out there, drop the transmission on your foot or something, break a toe, and then you got to go to the hospital. We don’t want you to do that. So Jenn, Joe, let’s get into it. Give us a case study. Let’s get it.
JOE:
Ooh, which one? So I think, okay, we could even talk about the last deal that we just closed a week and a half, almost two weeks ago, was the seller, his name is Derek. And Derek has his house in Florida. It is two years old. It is turnkey. It’s a 2022 build. Okay. Beautiful. Now, beautiful, beautiful neighborhood, nice house, right? So we always think of, is buying real estate, is it obtainable for everybody? Well, here’s the situation with Derek. He got his job transferred from Florida to Texas. He was already in Texas, already made the move. His wife was back in Florida packing up the last of his stuff. He says, we really don’t have any equity in the house because they just bought it. He’s like, I don’t have time to list it on the market. And if I pay commissions and closing costs and it’s going to be sitting for a little bit, I don’t have time like that. So he reached out to us and what we did was we bought that house and the way we structured, now he had a mortgage on it. And this was a game changer for us. I didn’t know that you could do this, that you can actually buy a house, close on it, take ownership of it, but the loan stays in the seller’s name. So I can get a 4% interest rate, which he had instead of paying 7% today, because that was the difference of a cash flowing. That difference of 4% compared to 7% was a $500 difference. And the $500 is the cashflow. So this is what made that deal work. Because if I paid his price and went to the bank and finance it, there’d be no cashflow, wouldn’t make a sense. But on this situation, he said, Joe, give me $12,000 down, which is a lot more than I typically do. Most of these houses we’re buying with like a hundred bucks down, maybe like a thousand or two to help them move. But this one, it was gorgeous. Like no, didn’t need a thing. So we did give him the $12,000 down plus some closing costs. So for $20,000 out of pocket, I get to own a two-year-old house in Florida with no banks, 4% rate. It’s got the solar panels on top. This thing is just absolutely beautiful turnkey. And I know this is the exit strategy radio show. So my favorite exit strategy with that is we actually work with a lease option, rent to own buyers. So the person who’s going to move into that house is going to give us $20,000, $30,000 to move in. And then we give them time to rent until they’re able to qualify for a mortgage later on. And when they do, they get to eventually buy it. That really changed up our strategy too, because in some of these situations, guys, we’re actually getting paid to buy the house, which just blew my mind. And so now I could buy rentals and I don’t have to have a W-2 job because four and a half years ago, I walked away from my job. I haven’t had a company paycheck from a job, which J-O-B stands for just over broke. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or don’t make. So once I found out we could do this, I was like, holy cow, the sky is the limit.
CORWYN:
I’m loving it. I’m loving it. I’m over here literally about to get goosebumps, guys. So what I just heard you say in there, and you didn’t say this specifically, but my question is, I’m assuming that you’re doing a subject two on the purchase?
JOE:
Very similar. We actually buy with a wraparound mortgage, which is similar to subject two. There’s just some small differences, but pretty much where I’m able to buy it, close on it, take ownership of it, but the loan stays in the seller’s name.
CORWYN:
Yeah, a wraparound. I love it. Oh my gosh. So this kind of hits some of those talking points, so one of your talking points is escaping, if you will, the golden coffin. What’s the golden coffin?
JOE:
That’s the job. That’s the job, right?
JENN:
It was his security blanket. I was a stay-at-home mom with two kids, and he was providing that steady income, and he just kept going up the corporate ladder, getting his raises, and I was like, no, you’re going the wrong way. I just knew that if could go full-time, the sky’s truly the limit. You can create as much wealth as possible, and when COVID hit, that’s exactly what happened. New York state shut down. He didn’t end up going back, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is happening. Here we go, and he was able to escape. Otherwise, I don’t know when he would have officially walked away, if he would have.
CORWYN:
I had a similar conversation here very recently. Sometimes things happen that completely change the trajectory, if you will, of your life, where you intended to go, where you thought you were. Let me phrase it. Not necessarily where you thought you were going, but how you got there. Let me put it that way, and that, for you, sounds like it was one of those defining moments that when these things happen, okay, what I have inside of me kicks in, and so we just circumvent, and we go a different route to get to where we’re looking to be, which is financially free. That is amazing, and kudos to you both for staying the course on that. Entrepreneurship is hard. You guys buy deals and do these deals everywhere. What do you guys focus at?
JENN:
We have done nationwide, but we really have our honey holes, I guess. I love upstate New York, so Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse area. Those suburban homes are really great, especially with our lease option exit strategy. We really have it honed in on why, even though it’s not a super landlord-friendly state, we know how to work it up there, so we do really well. I love Pennsylvania. We do have some properties here in Florida. Cash flow can be tight, so like Joe was mentioning, you really got to make sure your numbers are really good, and we also look at the Carolinas. That’s always a great place.
JOE:
Love the Carolina, even Ohio. We’ve done deals in North Pole, Alaska, down to Florida. It works everywhere, but yeah. All these places in between, but then you find out, okay, I really love certain places, and there are certain places, my gosh, you just fall in love with them. The Carolinas, love them, and especially you guys are right in Charleston, which is one of our favorite places to always come and spend some time, and got all the restaurants and the history. It’s just a great place. I’m always looking for deals there too.
CORWYN:
What I just heard you say, so if you ask somebody in Charleston where everybody’s coming from, everybody say Ohio. Everybody moving here is coming from Ohio. The reality is that is not the case. They’re coming from a bunch of other places in Ohio. But what I caught, and it was very funny, is obviously you must be the person that’s buying their house in Ohio state to move here.
JOE:
That’s what happens. Actually, in upstate New York, most of the folks leaving upstate New York were like, why are you selling? I’m moving down south.
JENN:
It was like one after another in 2020, and I was like, are we missing the boat here? Once I got everybody down here for a one-month work from anywhere, it was hook, line, and sinker, and we ended up moving down here.
CORWYN:
I won’t say, one of the things I always tell people that came out of COVID is the reality as well as the ability to work from anywhere. That was both one of the greatest finds, but also one of the worst things that could ever happen because now people can live and work, quote-unquote, where they want to more so than living where they need to work, and that’s a game changer. That drove costs up in a lot of markets that are desirable, such as Charleston, because you have an influx of people. We have people that moved here from New York with 200-plus-a-year salaries. Their income can afford a lot more, so it drives pricing up. But not to get too far off of this topic today, I want to make sure, so we, for lack of a better way to put it, and I talked about this a little earlier, so I’m going to use this reference again because when I said it, it was the first time I ever said it in my life, and it was funny. Some people like to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In my opinion, most logical people start with the peanut butter. That’s the thickest thing to get down, and then they get the jelly right, and they put it all together. But there are some people, I know there’s got to be some people, that like their jelly first. I think I’m a jelly first person. Interesting. So there you go. Now I’m eating somebody that’s jelly first. So with that thought process, because we don’t talk about, if you will, the good side, which is the upside of everything, which is the opportunities and what you can create and what you can do with it, and I love that case study. You put 12 in, and the person you bring in behind you to quote-unquote take you out brings 30 in, which puts you 18 to the good to begin with. That’s amazing.
