Don't Sell It, Rent It | Gena on Credit, Mortgages and Building a Portfolio Get RE Episode 12

At 19, Gena met a realtor on a plane who agreed to meet her for coffee. Gena bought the coffee and a pastry. The realtor asked how much she could buy, heard the answer, picked up her briefcase, and walked out. Gena did not buy a house for another decade. In this episode of Get Real About Real Estate, Michelle Quaranta and Mark Riley sit down with Gena, who now works both sides of the transaction in Arizona as a mortgage professional and a licensed agent. She started in loss prevention at a credit card company, calling people about minimum payments while looking at their credit reports, and realized almost nobody understands how any of it works. That became the career: credit, then mortgage, then owning a mortgage company, and finally getting her real estate license in 14 days when a rule change made it possible to do both. The heart of this one is her approach to building a portfolio. Most agents will not tell you to keep the house you are in, because they get paid when you sell and again when you buy. Gena would rather you rent it out and buy the next one, which avoids the 20 percent down payment on an investment property and starts stacking doors. She calls it playing live Monopoly. She walks through a real example: a client with a 2.75 percent rate and 400,000 in equity who had no idea that was cash. Rent the house, pull a HELOC, clear the debt, buy the new build with the builder buying down the rate, and fund the husband's flight school. They closed. Also in this one: why credit is fixable like a broken arm, where to actually check your score and what the three bureaus are, why 850 is the ceiling and how rarely anyone hits it, what the move to a new scoring model may change, why she asks to see a partner's credit, and her book The Other F-Word, a 28-page breakdown of FICO available on Amazon. Get Real About Real Estate is hosted by Michelle Quaranta and Mark Riley. Filmed at Studio 77 Media. #RealEstate #CreditScore #FICO #Mortgage #GetRE #ArizonaRealEstate