The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Secrets of the Secondary Mortgage Market: How Abby Shemesh Transformed Crisis into Opportunity

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Secrets of the Secondary Mortgage Market: How Abby Shemesh Transformed Crisis into Opportunity Amerinotexchange.com About the Guest(s): Abby Shemesh is the co-founder and managing partner of Amerinote Xchange LLC, and the CEO of Amerinote Capital Funding, LLC. With an extensive background in the secondary mortgage market since 1999, Abby carries a vast experience in handling high-volume and high-ticket mortgage portfolio purchases. His journey started in the primary mortgage market before transitioning to secondary markets in 2006, where he has excelled. Abby is an autodidact, having self-taught himself various business, material, and spiritual disciplines, marking a significant career with an emphasis on self-improvement and education. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show Podcast, host Chris Voss welcomes Abby Shemesh, a pioneer in the secondary mortgage market, to discuss his entrepreneurial journey and insights into mortgage trading. Abby, with his rich background, paints a vivid picture of how he navigated the tumultuous waters of the mortgage industry, especially during the 2008 financial crisis. Listeners can expect to learn about Abby's strategies for surviving economic downturns, the intricacies of mortgage trades, and the essential role of digital marketing in sustaining business growth. Abby Shemesh dives into the nuances of the mortgage buying and trading business, describing how Amerin Note Exchange serves both retail and institutional clients by providing liquidity in the mortgage market. He outlines the significance of digital marketing in his company's success, recounting his transition from traditional to digital strategies which fueled growth during challenging times. With a remarkably high closing ratio of 96%, Abby reveals the secret to successful mortgage trading while sharing personal anecdotes that highlight his resilience and entrepreneurial spirit. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for aspiring entrepreneurs and those interested in the mortgage industry. Key Takeaways: Surrounding Business Landscape: Abby explains how the secondary mortgage market thrives on providing liquidity, describing the roles banks and private lenders play. Entrepreneurial Resilience: Abby shares how his father's work ethic and his own determination enabled him to pivot successfully during the financial crisis. Importance of Digital Marketing: Digital marketing was crucial to Abby’s business survival and growth, even outperforming traditional marketing strategies. Unique Sales Proposition: The company’s approach includes options like partial loan purchases, which cater to unique financial needs of clients. Market Insights: Abby discusses how economic trends, like those in 2008, directly influence the mortgage market and its players. Notable Quotes: "We provide liquidity to the secondary mortgage market to keep the Ferris wheel going round and round." "We really take for granted in this country the ease in which one can go down that entrepreneurial journey." "It was the digital marketing that really supercharged our success." "The last thing we want is properties; we want the paper, not the bricks." "I learned a lot from my father's mistakes… his experiences."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,

that makes it official. Welcome to 16 Years of the Chris Voss Show. Please don't want there are ladies things that makes it official up in the city is the first box though with over 22 episodes Be sure to refer the show to your family friends and relatives if you don't You know Santa might not bring you what you want for Christmas by the way If you're watching this ten years from now on the YouTube channel, which just turned 18 today our Logged in about 1 a.m. last night finishing up some work and YouTube's, did you know you're 18 years old today?

I knew it was, I think, 2006. I think the memory's fading. The Alzheimer's kicking in, clearly. The podcast is 16 and then the YouTube is 18 years old. Just amazing that we've lived that long or that anyone cared to watch anything we do, but get more people to do it

go to goodreads.com fortress christmas linkedin.com fortress christmas christmas one the tiktokity and all those crazy places on the internet today an amazing young man on the show we're talking about his business and he's going to tell you about his entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey and we're going to get into it today we have ab Abhi Shamesh on the show. He is the co-founder and managing partner of Amerinote Exchange LLC and the CEO of Amerinote Capital Funding LLC. They're a fixed private income and secondary mortgage market space dealing in high volume and high ticket price mortgage portfolio purchases across the U S I wonder if he can, I wonder if he'll take my mobile home part.

I'm just going to have a mobile part. He has always been an auto dictatic. I don't dictate it. I might have some rounds of that, right? Auto didactic. Oh, that's right. Auto didactic. Self-taught fancy term for self-taught.

You and I, I, you know, I skipped college too, but I flunked second grade. That's the college joke on the show. He began his journey in 1999 in the primary mortgage market. That's when I was in there too. It was fun. Until 2008. He transitioned to the secondary market in 2006 and has been crushing it there ever since. His interests revolve around self-improvement education, both material and spiritual as well. It's good to have that balance. And welcome to the show. How are you, Abby? I'm very good, Chris. How about yourself? I am excellent. It's just wonderful to be here and be alive and to be above ground today. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the internets or the other dots, if you will? Sure. So our website lives at AmerinoteExchange.com. That's AmerinoteExchange.com.

The word exchange is only spelled with an X and there you'll find all of our services, which really kind of serve retail and institutional markets. Give us a 30,000 overview of what you do there. Sure. So we are simply put a, we buy and trade mortgage loans, right? You know, Wells Fargo or bank of America or Mr. And Mrs. Smith down the street will originate a mortgage. And typically, you know, most mortgage originators, most mortgage lenders, you know, it's like, it's like a conveyor belt, right? They'll go ahead and they'll crank out these mortgages, maybe a thousand, 2000,000 a year, whatever it may be for the larger outfits and the smaller ones,

just a couple of years perhaps. And typically, they don't hold those mortgages to term, right? So they'll go ahead and create those loans, and then they'll offload those loans to an investment firm like ours. And I'm sure a lot of people watching this have received a letter from Capital One or Chase saying, hey, hello, this is a letter letting you know that we sold your account to XYZ company. Please make your payments there. That's typically what we do. And really, we provide, in a nutshell, liquidity to the secondary mortgage market to keep the Ferris wheel going round and round. Wow. That way they can constantly issue new loans and all that sort of good stuff. So who are your clients? That's a good question. For the first,

oh God, from 2006 to probably 2012. So with six, seven years, our clients were literally Mr. And Mrs. Smith down the street that seller financed a property because they took back a mortgage loan. So they seller financed the equity in their property when they sold their house. And they got the down payment. They started collecting payments over maybe a 10, 15, 30-year loan period. And inside of year three, they realized that they don't want this money trickling in. They just want their money. They want to move to Florida. They want to move to Hawaii, whatever it is. They contact a company like us and we would buy their 100... I'm just using an example, their $100,000 loan for $95,000 today. So they don't have to wait 30 years to collect the 100 plus the interest. They definitely lose some interest

there, but what they gain is that financial freedom to move on with their financial goals and so forth. That's one customer base. And that's still about 65% of our customers, which is that retail private lender market. And then on the flip side of that, it's banks. It could be credit unions, banks, brand name banks, off brand name banks. We deal with pension funds, hedge funds, all of the Wall Street adjacent players. And these are mostly large tranches, large portfolios, large pools of mortgages that get traded either through us or purchased by us. Oh, wow. It says here you take loans from $25,000 up to $5 million on any one given loan. Yeah. So that's one loan amount, right? So we could typically now go higher than $5 million,

but just to give you an idea, in 2023, Amerinode Exchange transacted on about $257 million on one transaction broken up in six bite-sized portions we call them tranches so six tranches one bank 257 million you know we had to take that down in sections because of the capital market if some folks may recall in 23 you know inflation was going nuts the war in ukraine which you know was the catalyst to that inflation, was raging, still is kind of, but it was really ramping up. And that created a bottleneck in the capital market. So the banks that couldn't use government funds like the Bank Term Funding Program came to companies like us to alleviate that pressure. I noticed here you have a 96% closing ratio.

Do you guys deal with just a paper then, a quality paper credit? No, that's a little bit of a hack there. So 96% closing ratio doesn't necessarily mean that we're buying every single loan. 96% of the loans, let's just say nine out of 10 loans that come across our desk, we can buy in some form or fashion. It may not mean that we can buy the entire loan at once. In the private space, there's something called a partial purchase. So you have a full purchase, which means we buy the whole loan, you assign the whole loan to us, you move on with your financial goals, we move on with the loan. There's also something referred to as a partial purchase. And this is on the retail side only. So banks don't necessarily deal in this section. But a partial purchase

option would be if you have 27 years left to collect on a mortgage, you collected the first three, now you got 27 on a 30 year left. And we make an offer in 27 years, the seller's, nah, it's too low. I don't like it. I go, okay, Mr. Seller or team would say, okay, Mr. and Mrs. Seller, we can buy a bite sized portion of that loan. So we can buy the next seven years of payments for a much higher percentage. And then on seven years and one month down the road, everything and I mean, everything will then revert back to you principal interest. It all happens automatically. And it happens on our dime and that's called a partial and that's that if if memory serves a little bit before my time but that

type of option has been around since the 70s when it you know which kind of originated in the carter administration with the inflation then and the whole that's when the seller finance market really blew up after you know world war ii of course, the only way to buy a house back then, pre-World War II, was seller financing. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Yeah. Crazy, yeah. Times have really changed. Times change. Times change and everybody has fun with it. So tell us about your entrepreneurial journey. How did you get down this road? Did you have influences from your parents when you grew up or family yeah that's a good question you know my father came here first generation so first generation on my mother on my father's side and third generation second generation on my mother's side and my father

came here as an electrician he was an electrician when he originally excuse me immigrated from germany by way of the middle east and he got here, he immediately started working for an electrical contractor as an apprentice. And not too there, not so long after he started his own business and really, you know, we really take for granted in this country, the best country in the world, in my opinion, the ease in which one can go down that entrepreneurial journey and i we were just in another country in europe as a matter of fact a couple weeks back and you know i said to my wife it's just not america i mean no dig on europe i love it the food's great coffee's great but it's just not food's great believe it or not in some parts anyway i was not in london i just i was not in england but I will say that it was, it was a, you know,

I learned a lot as far as, you know, kind of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps from my father and watching my father's, you know, work his own business. You know, he wasn't the best at it, meaning in the sense that he was very good at being an electrician. He wasn't very great at like setting up SEP IRAs and, you know, payroll and, you know, all this stuff. And I learned a lot from his mistakes, I guess you can say, if you want to call them his experiences. Payroll? Are we supposed to pay people around here?

Are we supposed to be paying you guys? Give me goodwill checks. But so did you identify that early on where you're like, I don't think he understands the money part maybe? Yes, very early on. It was very, very apparent. My family grew up in a very middle-class area section, northeast Philadelphia. So the greater northeast of Philadelphia was a very blue-collar area. We had a lot of police and firefighters on our street. Blue collar, very blue collar.

And everyone around us had, for instance, a lot of my friends growing up, their parents got them new cars when they turned 16. We didn't have that. We had to go out and buy our own vehicles. So everyone had the brand new nissan maxima which drove me crazy and i had a 1977 monte carlo with a two-tone not by design door on it you know in a sense it was a mismatched color basically is what i'm saying it you know wasn't sexy my brother and my sister both put themselves through college on their own dime and you know that's that's how we grew up was by the bootstraps yeah it was definitely by the bootstraps i drove a monte carlo i mean this wasn't out of high school

my parents were poor but later i worked at a dealership and drove the monte carlo 454 ss oh my god what a what year was it i don't know whatever that when it, when it first came out. And then they did a truck, the 450SS. Which, whatever that 450SS, 1987? It's a great engine. It's a great engine. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's amazing. If you wanted to pass somebody on the highway, you were on a two-lane highway,

you wanted to do that passing that you do in real life, you would just get ready to go, and you'd just punch that gas, move to the left, and you would be around them in seconds. That's right. Yeah. Actually, we lived in, and I can kind of get into this. We were nomads, my wife and I, in the mid-2000s, riding around the country in a motorhome, and we had a 454 underneath the hood. Easy to work on because I was very familiar with it because my neighbor had a Corvette. Was the Corvette had the 454?

Yeah. And a great engine. Simple to work on, more or less. Yeah. Compared to what's now. Jesus, wow. Yeah, dude. You need a computer.

Yes, sir. So how'd you get in the mortgage business then? It's funny. I was in, man, out of high school, like in autos, I was kind of bouncing around, but I've always dealt, my superpower has always been interfacing with people, right? So that really kind of morphed into sales. But I was in the automotive, I was selling cars in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania in the mid nineties and early to mid nineties. And, you know, I just, I sold a car to a guy, he was telling me what he was doing with real estate, a couple years, you know, that piqued my interest. And then a couple

years later, especially after the Clinton and Gingrich paired up to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which put a firewall between commercial and investment banking and they that's what roosevelt put into place they removed that firewall which then created the environment for the pump you know the mortgage pump in the early 2000s which they were just hiring any of they here here's a mirror sir breathe on it if it fogs, you can be a mortgage broker, basically. It was that way. Yeah. I got recruited by a company and the rest was history. I started as a junior loan officer. And I was like, I'm not going to be doing this forever. And it was kind of true. We used to have, believe it or not, so we used to have banks come to our shop and say, hey, what kind of loans do you have?

This is our new loan product. You need this credit score, this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And our new Bear Stearns accounts of Bear Stearns not around anymore because they collapsed in the great financial crisis of 2008. But pre 2000, it was like 2004 Bear Stearns account rep came in and said, Hey, this is so-and-so. She's going to be your new rep. I'm going over to acquisitions. And I said, what do you mean acquisitions? And then he broke me down on what that was. And that right there is like the light bulb went off. And the reason why is because I was already entrenched in mortgages, but it was so competitive, man. It was so competitive. The acquisition side was like tumbleweeds, right? So there was, it was so not competitive. And I just, I was like, this is what I want to do. And there was less,

there was a lower barrier to entry as far as an investor. And you're not competing with banks. You're not, you know, competing with other multimillion dollar companies. And that's what started me on that journey to the secondary mortgage market. And I mean, it used to be the wild west where anybody could be a mortgage broker. And then over the time, I became a mortgage broker in 1993. Yeah. I started their part place mortgage. And it was kind of like anybody could be one. Like I was really surprised how easy it was for us to get in the business. You know, we were, we had a big courier company and we were doing all these mortgage deliveries and like, there seems to be money here.

And so, yeah, I was really surprised they let us in. But how did you survive the 2008 crisis? Was that just more retail than, tell us about that. I'm kind of curious. That was, so I, you know, I said this on a previous podcast about a year ago, it's still the best analogy. So it was like the Forrest Gump scene in the shipping. You remember Forrest Gump, the movie, there was a shipping, excuse me, the hurricane blew through the bayou and destroyed all of the shipping boats and Forrest Gump was the only one, the little guy was the only one left standing. It's kind of similar to that, right? What happened was we started in 2006 with development of site, development of user experience, you know, how to, you know, raising capital where, you know, all of that stuff. And that kind of progressed upward through, you know, we started getting lift in the late 2006, early 2007. And we were kind of doing

really trending really well. 2008 happened, didn't really happen till the end of September. And we didn't really feel it until February of 2009. But 2009, I did not close any deal. We had leads, we had a lot of leads, we had a lot lot of offers no one was saying yes to an offer from february of 2009 to september of september of 2010 was like yeah it was a big dry spell somewhere i could be mistaken somewhere in about a year year and a half of just very little business we we were doing i was also working because we had a maranote and I was also doing affiliate marketing, which is internet website. You know, I was supplementing because I knew a lot about marketing.

That's how we got, we had to market ourselves in the mortgage business to supplement. So I could kind of, you know, kind of compete with the other group that I was working with. And then I took those tactics that I learned and I applied it to the note business. And then when I saw the writing on the wall, we started promoting financial products, credit. My wife and I did a 80-page credit repair booklet. We were selling that, leaning into our knowledge base, setting up blogs, setting up, you know, using pay-per-click when it was really early on and really worked out well. I was even doing like how to get six pack abs, you know, like someone else's product on clickbank.com, but that's how we kind of,

yeah. You remember? Yeah. I was, yeah, I was doing the same thing. Yeah. But it was pretty, it was crazy, but it was pretty, pretty successful. I mean, you know, we, we, we moderate success. And then, you know, in the middle of 2000, we, you know, I signed up a deal in July of 2010. It didn't close until September, early September of 2010. And from there on, it just, it was just like gangbusters, you know, haven't really looked back, really didn't pay attention to our affiliate marketing enterprise at that point. Cause it was, I was like, one of these things are going to pop, you know what I mean? Either we're going to be doing one or the other or both. And we just went with the wind, you know, we were, we were doing two, like an AB test almost. And you know, cause they're both very interesting to me. And you know, it turns out that the secondary mortgage market is great, the financial aspects and the investment aspects.

But to get that off the ground, you need that marketing aspect. And the reason that we succeeded and thrived through that period of time was because we were using digital marketing. Now, if you remember back in the 2000s, Google really came on the scene in 99. They didn't start the paid advertising to 2004-ish. It didn't really... Facebook, 2004, they didn't do any paid advertising until after their IPO in 2012. So it was really in their infancy as far as digital marketing. And we really were leaning into it because I was just taking what I learned from affiliate marketing and applying it to the note business. No one was doing that.

And that's what really supercharged our success until our competitors right around 2013, 2014 started kind of catching up and bigger money started pouring in and really competing with us in the industry. I shouldn't say us in general. We're not the biggest out there, but we're most certainly one of the more older ones for sure. Congratulations on surviving that shit show. It was a shit show. Crazy time. You know, we got, I mean, like most mortgage brokers, we got wiped out because just everything disappeared. And I did consulting for banks for a while i'll never forget excuse me one of the banks i consulted for was in santa monica and i believe it was was the first

santa monica bank of something like that but it was it was like an old ass bank 100 plus years old in in santa monica and i believe it's folded or it's it's been bought out but i remember i was in their office as we were hanging up in the management room area and they came in they got we just got another bag of jingle mail and i was like what the fuck is jingle mill you know what jingle mill is no i have no idea you don't yeah we just got another bag of jingle mail and this is this is in 2008 2009 in full full crisis mode and and they go yeah we just got a bag of jingle melon and i'm like what the fuck is jingle mail they go you haven't heard you haven't heard about jingle mail and i'm like no and you know and and they go they go we have so many people that are just saying, fuck it, and throwing their keys in the mail to us and telling us it's your home now.

Have fun with it. When the post office brings the bags, it jingles because there's so many freaking keys. That's crazy. Yeah. And I lived up in. I was going to say, they called it a strategic default. That was the technical term, strategic default. It's kind of crazy.

Yeah. And then I lived in Vegas at the time, and I'd flown down to there. But in Vegas, I lived up in the far northwest in an area that they'd just rapidly just been splashing up homes. Is that Henderson? No, Henderson was the complete opposite. If you jumped all the way over the valley, you'd hit both places. Up in the northwest, the streets became a ghost town, and about one out of every four homes had someone in them.

So I would go walk the dogs, and people would come to my house and hang out, and they'd be like how come in the middle of the day there's all these crickets chirping and i'm like that's not crickets chirping those are the fire alarm batteries that have gone out wow crazy street that's crazy i do vegas got hit hard by i'll never forget stopped in cal, California, San Bernardino, California, Las Vegas, and Miami, Florida were ground zero in the sections of the countries, in their respective sections of the country. And the one state, one primary state, I mean, Nebraska was fine, Idaho and all the Dakotas, they were all fine. But Texas didn't feel a thing from it. It was the crazy. So I'll never forget that.

I'll never forget that. Yeah, it was so insane. And what was the other thing that was funny about that time? And then we started having the break-ins for the squatters started moving into the homes. And it was crazy. And there were just so many homes they could move into. In fact, when I moved to California, squatters broke into my home. They saw the garbage cans out front with crap in them.

It was clear I had moved. But yeah, it was an insane time. But it was kind of nice, actually, walking around and stuff. But you just walk around. I'd walk around my dogs around the streets, and it would just be like a ghost town. That's creepy. Very creepy. It's almost like a zombie sort of apocalypse.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. I was lucky. We actually, I sold my home in Utah, moved down with three investors, three including me, to invest in mortgages and buy houses in Vegas because it was just going crazy. And they would have a line out the front door of the model home of the subdivision and people

were sleeping overnight. And every three or five, I can't remember if it was three or five now, but it was every three to five people who bought, they would keep increasing the price every ten thousand ten thousand up i mean you had people buying homes that were a thousand dollars a month over what the market would pay to rent them wow and they were just doing on those you know the no no down yep you know no interest no yeah, yeah. It's crazy. And it was crazy. I mean, we would do that. My mortgage company wouldn't do loans.

I was like, we're going to end up buying this. And so I moved to Vegas with my investors. And this was like the peak of the market. And I started interviewing realtors and going to lunch with them. And one of them said to me, she goes, this is going to pop. This is a bubble. I was like, what? And she showed me the history of how nine 11 had caused a, everyone to pull back there. Everyone expected recession. They pulled back their building permits and all the plans they had and put them on hold for several years. And it created this inventory hole that was moving through the system and she goes see the co inventory is catching up to demand and it's going to over hit they go that's

when the bubble's going to pop and it's now and it was crazy because i was like i was like shit but fortunately i sold my house so i was i was like renting when we came down we rented some mansion and then and then and then thankfully you know us as investors we didn't go into it and i just i came home to my people and went it's gonna blow wow gonna blow what do you remember what when this was i don't know what exactly it was but i think it was within the next six months that the collapse started or right here so it had to be 2008 right yeah when it when things melted down september 15 2008 yeah it was it was crazy but i think it was i think it was a couple years before that she showed it to me and it was it was the peak i don't know it might have been 2007 yeah no there was yeah there was smoke in the air

yeah yeah there was smoke in the air. Yeah, there was. And, you know, there's people writing blogs. You know, some of the real estate agents were going, is there going to be a broke pop here? So people listening to this, who are your clients and how can they reach out? I see you can get a quote, what you buy, get in touch, things like that. Sure. So our clients, you know, just to kind of describe again, are folks that have sold their house or inherited a mortgage that they're now collecting payments on that they don't want anything to do with for whatever reason whatsoever. I mean, it could be an spelled with an X,.com.

Any top right-hand side of any page, you're going to see get a quote. You click on that. It's a very simple questionnaire. Maybe 10, 12 questions, but four of them are personal, like name, address, excuse me, name, email, first, last name.

You hit submit, and then our staff, our trade desk, we'll get on that immediately. And it's typically about two business days to get a quote and typically about three, three and a half weeks to get the money thereafter. But it's very, very similar to the same type of process that occurs if one were to walk into a bank and borrow money for a piece of real estate. The only difference is that you're not under the microscope it's the actual property value that is the title clear you know what the dot you know the documentation and really that's it oh wow yeah pretty simple probably all the stuff filled out remember remember that thing where they they hadn't even filled out or are they fake signatures and shit on yeah oh yeah yeah Yeah. And that's, that's, there's still, we just, it's so funny you mentioned that

just real quick. We just received a $90 million portfolio that the guy wanted to sell for, you know, 18 million is a portfolio of second liens all originated between 2004 and 2007. And 60% of it was that. And we're, you know, there there's, there's actually companies out there that, that will buy that for pennies on the dollar. We're not one of them because we're not in the business of, of it's more like a collection at that point. You know, the notes are lost. Some of the people are dead. You know, we, we buy the actual secured instrument. We don't buy something that gets referred to a debt collector. And then, you know we we buy the actual secured instrument we don't buy something that gets referred to a debt collector and then you know you have to call the person and you know it compelled them to make

the payment that's kind of an interesting business we had we had one guy who does that he doesn't do that as a job but they they do buy they do buy notes but they found that since they're the financers on the notes, they can deal with some of that. So they've kept defaults from happening, which is kind of cool. That's right. It's an interesting story. And I was like, yeah. And they're like, yeah, we'll work with them.

There's no reason to force them into if we can figure out a way to work with them. And it used to be back in the day that mortgage companies had this rule that they wouldn't allow you to pay less than the mortgage payment because if you do that, it rates a new contract over time because that's the lawyer ease of it. And so if you do that, then that can become a permanent thing. If you accept $700 for once or twice, then you've established a new contract that an attorney can argue, I guess. That's so.

But yeah, so they figured out a way around it where they just go, no, if it, you know, if we want the guy to stay in his home and you know, you want, you want someone who feels like they have an ownership in the home over renter and they'll work with them on it. And I was like, wow, that's pretty. Yeah. Sense. I mean, why sure does. Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? If you can.

We do the same thing. We, do you really? Yeah, absolutely. In the sense that we'll work with them. And we're not in the business of taking properties. I mean, we want that monthly payment, right? So if we'll buy what is called a modified loan or a sub-performing loan where you have two payments on time and then it goes late for four months and then another payment and then it's late for two months, that's referred to as sub-performing or someone who's in a significant hardship that just completely fell off the wheels, fell off the bus. We buy that loan as a non-performer. If we buy it correctly, we will then, the first thing we do typically is reach out to the borrower, try to keep them in the home because that's, you know, we, the last thing we want is, you know, you have 230 properties and foreclosure spread across the entire country

now you got to manage properties water especially in cold areas the pipes burst squatters you know we like no we want the paper not the bricks yeah so that makes sense i mean i i heard that and i was like yeah that kind of makes sense i always kind of wondered why they want to throw it away but i know banks you know they try and keep that puree paper and they have to, because they got auditors coming. Yeah. Coming in and, you know,

every month they're getting, or every quarter they're getting audited. And they're the financial, especially after 2008, the financial health of the bank is what keeps us in business, right? I shouldn't say keeps us, but it's,

it's a big ingredient into like right now, Q4 of every year, every bank is trying to get healthy for the new fiscal year. So right now we have the majority of our activity with banks occurs between January and March and September and December. There's other activity in there, but that's the bulk of the bank activity because that's, you know, they, you want to talk about procrastinators i mean these folks wait to the last hour all the time so it's the craziest thing it's like pot kettle black you know what i mean yeah you ride it out and then you know once once the end of your fiscal year comes i guess assuming it's the calendar year uh you're like get rid of this

get it out that's right right fast fast fast you know we're gonna have to shorten the books if it's here on december 31st that's right and you know ceos lose jobs because of that yeah that's very true that's very true uh so give us your final pitch out tell people how they can onboard reach out to you etc etc so we you know you could absolutely reach out to me on linkedin i got a big presence on linkedin i'm also on x formerly twitter Twitter, at Abby Shemish, and then also at AmerinoteX on Twitter, both Twitter and LinkedIn. And then of course, you can always reach out. I'm very, very approachable and available through our website, AmerinoteExchange.com. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it i mean it's been

fun and what a what a wonderful story of survival and and being an entrepreneur you know getting through those tough times it's it's they were ugly times i i i you know we lost our little empire of companies i mean just everything just wouldn't move um and then i got into twitter but before that i was starting like everything i could to try and survive that thing. And at one point, we were starting all sorts of little companies. I think there was a thing where you would talk to people on default on their mortgages about trying to… Yep, modification. Yeah, loan modifications.

Yep, I remember that. And so my friend said to me, he goes, you know, Chris, you've tried so many different ways to survive and just start new companies and try and just stay alive during this recession. And he goes, if it came out on the news that you had been an international arms dealer to try and survive, I would be surprised because you you were working so hard to survive i mean i just i was starting companies trying to find something that would hit and get traction yeah and thankfully i found twitter and we got good at it and tinkered with it and and the people started calling us going you're really good at this so i think it was like top thousand person on twitter at the time oh is that right early joining yeah and wow and so people are like hey we'll pay you to consult on this and i'm like are you kidding me yeah let's do that and then wow media burgeoned and all that and we launched the podcast in i i adopted the

twitter in 2008 and then 2009 we launched the podcast and the chris fun show and the brand and all that stuff yeah all right it's amazing. Continued success, Abby. We really appreciate it. Chris, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks to everyone else for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss,

LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe, or else don't even come back there, kids. We'll see you next time.