Once you become a lender and you're looking for people to purchase your property, how do you find the buyer? How do you make it look affordable? How do you know which rules and regulations to follow? An RMLO or a residential mortgage loan originator will do just that. Learn from Sarah Montes who is the President of Texas Pride Lending on why you need an RMLO. Joining Keith Baker, Sarah explains how an RMLO guides the lender on the payment process. Listen in today on how Texas Pride helps lenders in this regard.

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Guiding The Lender: Sarah Montes On RMLOs

I would like to thank you for sharing your time with me as well as your consideration. If you're seeking practical tips and advice on how to increase wealth without cheap banks or unpredictable Wall Street through private mortgage lending, then you are in the right place. If you want to learn from my mistakes so that you can both avoid and profit from them, then pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink because this show is for you. This episode has been more than four years in the making. It has got a bit of a story behind it.

Before we get to that, I want to encourage you to join the Private Lender Podcast Group. It is a public group, but I personally vet the applicants to ensure that it truly remains a group of just us private lenders. After years of empty threats and promises, the Private Lender Academy is finally launching in July 2021. You have the opportunity to get in when the doors open as a founding member, which means you won't be charged full price and you'll receive founder pricing on additional courses in the future. Go to PrivateLenderAcademy.com for more info. Click on that Apply Now, fill out some information, tell us a little bit about yourself, and you'll be on the list for the founding member.

It is time to get down to the brass tacks of this episode. It's when my best borrower switched his business model from buying and converting into owner-financing notes using private lender money as the underlying lien. He streamlined his business and went more into a wholesaling model, which means he didn't need a private lender. He also went into a small apartment complex, which was way above what I had to offer. He did me a favor and introduced me to his friend, Landon Rothstein, who has been on the show. I initially was Landon's private lender before coming as his partner in Asset REI in 2017.

At that time, Landon was a student of Mitch Stephen. He was looking to use my money as a first position and then wrap it with seller financing with an additional lien. He explained that we would use an originator to keep everything legal and above board. Since this came from Landon, I was skeptical and decided to investigate things myself. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Landon wasn't BS-ing me. He was indeed accurate, right, and correct. Before we put an owner-occupant inside a house with my money providing the lien, we used Texas Pride Lending, which took the end buyers' application, financial information, records, and everything that a bank or loan officer would take. They confirmed that the borrower could reasonably be expected to make the mortgage payments based on their finances, how the note was structured and the length of the note. It would be reasonable for the borrower to be expected to make these under the federal guidelines, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

It was during this process when I met our guest, Sarah Montes. She took care of everything and made the process extremely easy for me as a lender. If I had a question in the morning or afternoon, it was answered with the package, documents, or whatever was requested. The lender is quick and customer service-oriented for me. After I started this show, I begged her to come on the show and talk about Dodd-Frank. Why do we need RMLOs? Why do we need a loan to be originated? Our schedules never aligned. I hadn't reached out to her for over a year. I sent an email, "How are you doing? Here's a link to my recording schedule. I still want to get you on. I would love to interview you."

[caption id="attachment_3145" align="aligncenter" width="600"] PLP 132 | RMLO Lending RMLO Lending: The main thing the RMLO does is to make sure that the buyer can afford the payment of the lender.[/caption]

She booked it and replied almost immediately. That was the universe or God's way of telling me, "The time wasn't right before, but the time is now." Speaking of that, the time is now for you to pay attention. If you've ever thought about having your first mortgage wrapped or you're an investor looking to utilize seller financing as an exit strategy, which I suggest you do, then you need to read and take notes because Sarah is about to educate all of us. She takes a complicated federal law and breaks it down to where somebody like me can understand it easily. Without any further yip-yap from me, let's go ahead and get to the interview with Sarah Montes of Texas Pride Lending.

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I have a very special guest for you. This is the first RMLO on the show and only so far and for a good reason, you're about to find out why. Please help me welcome Sarah Montes to the show. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

A little background with everyone. I've gone on ad nauseam about my foray into lending and into owner finance with my partner, Landon. That's how I was introduced to Sarah. Landon was using her Texas Pride Lending for RMLO. What is RMLO?

It stands for Real Estate Mortgage Loan Originator. That's what we're doing. We're originating the loan on your behalf, the private lender/owner finance. We've been doing originations for Landon for years. Thanks, Landon, for introducing us.

I always tell people never to loan to an owner-occupant because it's no longer a business loan at that point. Now, you're in the consumer world. There are a lot of protections that are in place for the consumer and some obstacles to do business with them that we have to comply with. If you are going to loan to an owner-occupant, or in this case, my loan is going to be wrapped to the owner finance model like Mitch Stephen and Landon use, then it has to go through the RMLO process. People ask me, "Why do I want to go through the RMLO process? It's an extra step and cost." I like to twist a quote from Chuck D and tell them that, “The reasons are several and all of them are federal." I'm going to let you go into that part of it, why we need the RMLO, and all that fun stuff. The floor is yours.

[bctt tweet="Your debt-to-income needs to be at least 50% to buy a house." username=""]

If you're going to be loaning to the consumer, to the end buyer, if you're an investor, you're going to do your fix-and-flip or whatever you're going to do to a part of that property. Once it's finished, you're going to be a lender. You're going to lend money to a person to purchase this property. If you're acting as a lender, you have to follow the rules as a typical lender like the banks would because now, you're acting as a bank. That's where the rules and regulations come in. It's to make sure that you're following all the guidelines and not taking advantage of the buyer.

They put some guidelines in place in 2014. The guidelines are good because they are pertaining to a small creditor. We have guidelines for the big banks and then for the little people like us that are going to do a few a year. We're going to be lending under $1 million. What we need to do is make sure the main thing on Dodd-Frank rules and regulations is to make sure that the buyer can afford that payment. That's where we come in. The RMLO will gather all of the proof of income. The lender, seller, and RMLO, we're not putting that buyer in a situation where they're not going to make that payment. It's going to be common sense underwriting. Does this person, after he pays his car payment and credit card bills, is he still going to have enough money after paying his house payment to live?

It's all the whole DTI, Debt-To-Income ratio, but I want to say it’s common sense underwriting because we're not looking at their credit. We're not doing any of that like a bank. The main thing is the ability to repay that loan. That's one. The reason why also that you use an RMLO is because if you ever have to foreclose on that person, if they default and you go to court, you want to be able to say, "I checked the financials. I had a third-party RMLO check their financials to make sure that they could afford this payment." If you don't do that, they can come back to court and say, "I couldn't afford that payment and they still gave me that loan."

If that happens and the judge on their side, then you would have to pa...