Passion For Real Estate Investing

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Passion For Real Estate Investing

Interview with Fuquan Bilal

I do appreciate you being on the show. I do appreciate you referring it to a friend. If you enjoy the show, please give me a nice rating. It does help the show get exposure. It enables me to keep doing this for you, which I enjoy. I enjoy having guests especially people that I’ve known and met throughout the business, in both real estate and real estate notes. They bring a lot of value to you and expose you to other people and other techniques and trainings. As you know, if you’ve followed on along with me, I’ve never been just a note person or just stuck in one thing. I was trying to look at the totality of that. In fact, we have a lot of real estate investors, a lot of stock investors that are now diversifying their portfolio in both notes and real estate. That’s a big part of it. You’ll see that in my book. Writing a book takes a lot of effort to put together. I’ve got Fuquan Bilal. He has finished up a book and he’s been in the industry for a while. I run into him at conventions and such all the time. I’m always impressed with what he has to say about the business. Fuquan, welcome.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on this platform, Kevin. It’s an honor. The last time I saw you, we were in Cali at the Note Investor Summit. I had the opportunity to interview you for my podcast. It’s truly an honor to be on this platform and share my journey with your audience.

Thank you. I enjoyed doing your show and I know we’re going to have a good time on this one. The new book is out. What’s the book and what did you write about?

This is my third book and the title is Passion for Real Estate Investments: The Making of a Strategic Real Estate Investor. I’ve been investing in real estate for many years. I am market-cycle tested. I had the opportunity to ride the wave and go down with it. I learned a lot in that time period. I transitioned into notes and started doing mostly seconds. The book talks about my backstory because I wanted to share with people how I got started and my background, just to give a little insight into that and a little bit of courage to those who are looking to get into real estate who may not have the credit, finances or the know-how. It gives them a point to start from. I wanted to share my journey with everybody. It talks a little bit about all types of real estate, whether you’re doing fix and flips, rentals, notes. It talks about all that. It also talks about how to do it tax-free, investing from an IRA. The book takes a while. It took me two years to put this book together. My first book was about notes and still my heart is on fire for it. I wrote a book about it two years after being in the business. The second book I wrote was a little bit self-motivational book. I took a stab at it. It’s called The Tire Kicker and this is the third one. I’m excited about it.

You said something there that is very important and probably not talked about enough. When somebody gets into a venture like this and they’re investing, they’re taking an entrepreneur’s risk. There are challenges ahead of that. You do have to be tough and you do have to understand it’s going to take some intestinal fortitude to move forward on things. Why don’t you share with us a little bit about your background and what got you into real estate, then maybe some hurdles you had to jump over.

Real Estate Investing: It’s very important to have mentors, somebody to shadow and show you the ropes, because you learn from their mistakes.

Here’s the book, The Making of a Strategic Real Estate Investor. My background is I’ve been in sales. I always tell people I don’t have an MBA. I have a GSD. I’m the type of guy that Les Brown says jump out the window and grow wings flying down. I’m always about action and taking those steps to move forward. I believe that’s how you learn a lot. You’re going to get cuts and bruises along the way and you’re going to learn a lot of lessons. Starting off in sales, that’s my background. After working in corporate for a while, I was tired and exhausted. I had a cousin who was in real estate and he used to tease me with the $30,000 to $40,000 checks he was making. That was, at the time, half my salary. I was 23 to 24 years old and I was like, “The heck with that.”

I started to shadow him around and I got involved in real estate. That was back in ‘99 and we were doing fix and flips back then. I had the opportunity to ride the market because the market shifted from an all FHA market to you could fog in a mirror. Financing was easy, I had the opportunity to sell a lot of houses to a lot of people. When the market crashed, I had learned how to become a landlord because I wasn’t renting anything. At the time, I didn’t understand how powerful cashflow was. At the time, making $300 to $500 a month profit wasn’t as interesting as making $30,000 to $40,000 per transaction. I didn’t know back then that long-term and once appreciation comes into effect, that’s powerful. I learned that in the note business of how powerful cashflow was. Nowadays, I’m doing fix and flip rentals, notes and cashflow is king. That’s pretty much my background.

How important was it to you that you had somebody to follow around? My path was the same way when I got into real estate, I got soft hands. I don’t know how to do work. I don’t know how to work on houses. I don’t know how to do any of that stuff. I did about 150 fix and flips. I had somebody that could practically build a house. He could walk through and showed me how to do everything. It’s helpful and important for people to have someone like that. Was that instrumental in getting you started?

Yes, of course. It taught me the renovation side of it because my cousin was doing the construction part of it, which is the hardest part. He was managing crews and managing contractors and taking loss after loss. For me, outside looking in, I was able to learn from the mistakes that he was making. When I went off on my own, I was able to correct some of that. I came in because I had a sales background and my older brother was already a loan officer. He was trying to get me involved before my cousin to become a loan officer. I was like, “I don’t want to wait 30 days to get a check. I’m getting biweekly paycheck. I have to secure my check. Why do I want to go out and gamble my income?”

My brother was like, “You don’t understand, you have to build up a pipeline.” I was like, “No.” He was always educating me and telling me how real estate and mortgage world work, how they get the par rate and then they charge more in the backend. They get a piece of the action on the back, a piece of the action in the front. I already had that understanding of the finance side from my brother being involved for about five years or so in the mortgage industry. I would read books on it. He was kicking me while I was working. We would have conversations so I learned that part. I just had to learn the construction part.

When I got involved, my job was to teach people how to get financing and how to qualify for loans. Once I learned the construction side, I matched the two together and then the rest was history. To answer your question, it’s very important to have mentors, somebody to shadow and show you the ropes. You learn from their mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes also, which I called lessons, but you go from there. It’s very important to have a mentor and cut down the risk a little bit.

You’re investing in real estate during the boom times. I’m sure you probably, like I did, got hurt to some degree when the market crashed. Is that right?

Absolutely. I had back then hard money lenders and the interest rates were two points in 14%. The marker was steadily increasing so there was always room for profit. I was flipping and changing houses over within 60 days. It wasn’t that much of a big deal. Once the market dried up, I had an inventory of almost 50 properties that I had fixed up. I was going to hide some stuff in PA. I had some blocks of stuff in PA because they were cheap. You can get properties for $7,000. I wind up going down here and buying a lot. I had so many properties and my holding cost is what was killing me. I had a lot of my cash tied into the property. When the values decreased, I had to fire sale everything to pay off all my lenders. I didn’t file bankruptcy.

That’s how I got hurt because I had a lot of my cash invested into the properties and the market took a dip. As I fire sale everything, I kept some stuff, I rented it out and I had to hold it out until the market increase a little bit and I was able to sell it. It was like starting all over again. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I can look ten or eleven years back and say, “That adversity made me stronger.” A lot of people don’t see that. I don’t look at them as loses. I look at them as lessons and it helped me in my business a great deal.

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Do Not!

It speaks volumes of your characteristics to come through that. I went through the same thing. I had everything and that market crashed quick and hard. I pretty much lost it all. You start to think in terms of, “How am I going to recover?” That shows what a person is all about when you can take something like that and get back up, dust yourself off and go, “Lesson learned. Let’s not make that mistake.” One of the things that it did for me is, for example, you saw my state of the industry address there. I spent a lot of time researching the market because I feel I should have seen that crash coming. I own part of a mortgage company at the time. I was buying about 60 properties or so a year. I should have seen it coming and I didn’t. You get so wrapped into, “It’s going to go on forever.” That was the huge mistake that I made. I convinced myself afterwards that I’ve got to study the market and everything I approach now is risk first before I look at the reward. That says a lot about you to come back and recover from that. What did you start doing after the crash? Did you get back right into real property? Did you make the move into notes at that point?

I had other businesses. Real estate was a vehicle to finance and set up other businesses. I had a 25-van transportation company for disabled children. I had contracts with the Board of Education. I had a 25-chair, three-story hair studio to where I was renting chairs for $250 a week. I had a car wash. I had all these businesses. I had about 54 employees. My former wife, I’ve been divorced since 2010, would say, “All you do is talk about the businesses. You don’t talk about us anymore.” We got to that point. Then when the market tanked, I didn’t have that influx of cash coming in from the real estate market. It was survival to fittest. I went through some financial stuff and the most strategic thing for me was getting out of those loans and construction where I invested. I would have had them assumed the hard money loans that I had, given me a little bit of cash. That’s how I was able to fire sale quickly and get out of that stuff because I knew how to package the deals for the hard money lenders.

I would help them put the package together and present it and say, “This guy’s going to take me out and take my position.” He has his package and I would get X amount on the side and transfer everything over to them. It took me about three years to unwind the portfolio and keep some stuff as rentals. I started to sell the businesses because I had a divorce and I had to liquidate pretty much everything. I spend time doing that. I had cashflow from other business and that had helped me survive.

One day, I ran into an investor friend of mine who I’ve sold a lot of properties for her. At the time I wasn’t going to meetups and real estate events. It was just like Fuquan’s world. I thought I knew it all. I was young and I wasn’t knowledgeable. I didn’t go out, connect and network. I was doing my own thing. She had me go to a meetup one time and this attorney who was local in New Jersey where I was at, he was doing six transactions a month still in a down market. I was like, “How is he doing this when banks are not financing? Who were his sources?” At the event, he put out something, a mentorship where he said, “You can pay me $6,000 and learn how to do short sales.” At the time I was doing short sales too. He said, “You can come and you can work at my office and do an internship.” I was like, “I will do the internship.”

I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. In the book, he talked about he wanted to open up a bakery but instead of like most people who just go buy the business and figure it out, he went and worked for the bakery. He will go after the bakery closed and get the vendor information out the garbage who they were buying from. He knew how to run it and he knew how to set up shop before he set up shop. I decided to take that same concept and go in and see what this attorney is doing, see what bank he’s using. Maybe there are some investors that were having close and come into his office. I get the chance to network with them and see what they’re doing. I spent six months there with my head down. He didn’t know what level I was on when I came in and I learned a lot.

After six months, I went and opened up shop. I started doing back-office services for attorneys because back then, loan mods and short sales were big in 2009 to 2011. I had a paralegal support team where attorneys were outsourced, short sales to us, negotiate and stuff like that. It was during that time when I discovered notes. It was a short sale I was doing and the loss mitigation officer or the short sale negotiator said, “Why don’t you buy a note?” I’m like, “How do you do that?” I didn’t understand it then. He said, “They sell the notes because the bank goes through certain phases where they book charged your loan off. They will sell that instead of going through the foreclosure process and save the expense and transfer the assignment of mortgage over.”

By the time I looked at all the short sales I was doing and I say, “What if I can buy all these loans that are in his position?” I had homeowners financial already. I knew what they can afford and I can restructure it and be in the note business. I started to seek hedge funds that would do bridge loans. I ran into PPR and I didn’t know that they did second at the time. I started searching for hedge funds in the area. They popped up on the radar. I took a meeting with Van Horn. He took two hours out of his time and explained the whole second mortgages business to me. I was like, “Who would do second? That’s crazy. That’s so risky like most of this thing.” In my two-hour drive back home, I was starting to understand the concept. I was like, “Wow.”

I went through the training program. I had a mentor and I learned the business. I started to replicate the process they were doing, sharing with people my experience, going to the local real estate meetings, hitting hard and going on all the tour. You used to see me back in 2011 to 2012 at every event, networking, just putting it out there and share organically with people what I was learning. That helped me grow fast in note space. That led to relationships directly with banks, servicers and brokers. I get a lot of REO product and notes from these people. In 2015, I wanted to get back into real estate. I was doing and building my own personal portfolio because I don’t have a fund at that time for notes.

I went to a conference. I was a guest speaker to speak on a panel on notes. It was a real estate event. While I was there, there were fund managers that were managing 10,000 single-families. I was like, “How do they do that?” It’s crazy. I wanted to get ten properties and here they were buying thousands of properties. When I learned a few things from them in how they manage it and events they use, I started to get more serious about getting back into real estate. At that time, I rehabbed 30 properties in 30 months, which is nothing. I’m a part of a mastermind with guys doing 150 transactions a year. Now, I have a diversified real estate investing model where it’s notes, tax liens, real estate, fix and flips, anything within the real estate realm. It is important to create that diversity.

When I first started running notes, I would go around and say, “No toilets, tenants, trash and termites. Focus on one thing, notes.” I didn’t understand that if you have the processes, you have the experience and you have the team, you can do it all once you understand it. It’s like tax lien. I knew about it for years, but I took the action in the third and fourth quarter of 2018. I started to buy one to go on the next step and pivot from the market because the market is increasing. Everybody’s paying retail prices. I had to figure out another way to get properties at a discount. Now I’m doing tax liens also. Having that diversity in your vehicle is very important to help keep those yields high.

When I teach, especially new investors, you’ve got to teach them the totality so they see the whole business. I always tell them, “Focus on something and get that first deal done and then you can start to expand.” You’re doing the same thing in different parts of real estate, that’s great. I know that going to the meetups, taking time out and going into these groups and masterminds, it takes effort. You talk a lot about passion. It’s in your name. You talk a lot about that and it comes through. Is that something that you think is in you or in a person? Is that something that you work on yourself? How do you keep motivated? How do you bring the passion? What could you share with my audience about how they can get that same passion to get out there and expand their businesses?

I’ve been in sales all my life. I talked about it in my book. I dedicated this book to my mom because she was the one who turned me on into becoming this hustle mindset. When I was younger, she used to go to Chinatown and buy by the flint and sell by the inch, whatever the saying is. We used to do wholesaling back then. She would go to Chinatown and buy scarves for $5 and sell them for $12. She would give me and my little brother $3 off of every sell. We used to go to this bazaars or flea markets. We set up shop and sell stuff. I grew up in an Islamic community. We used to sell oils and papers and stuff like that.

Real Estate Investing: If you put in the effort and time, there’s no way in a certain amount of time that you can’t prevail.

I was always hustling newspapers and Muslim oils and stuff at the flea market. That got me into the sales. I always wanted to sell. Having that motivation to try to do things and make somebody say yes. That was my motivation. People who say no, how do I get them to say yes? What framework do I use to get them to say yes? How do I present this? Which way do I present this? Being in sales gave me that gift and when I learned real estate, I was like, “This is important.” Especially coming from where I come from, I was born in Newark, New Jersey. It’s a blighted community. When I got into real estate, it gave me a feeling of importance to go back in a community where I came from, revitalize the property and give people better apartments to live in and better living standards.

That is what empowered me and motivated me about real estate. I can make a lot of money doing it. That’s what attracted me about notes. You can help people stay in their home and keep their homes. You can build cashflow and you become the bank and it’s like passive-inactive if you’re managing the vendors. That’s what gives me the passion. It’s not even just about the money. The feeling of importance is helping other people and making money out of it also. It’s a lifestyle and it’s a passion. I can wake up and I can now do these interviews. I don’t have to be in a cubicle and force to do some things. It’s the freedom alone is what gives me the passion. The control that I have with my wife is what gives me the passion. Real estate, I like it. I like going in and designing properties. I like helping the contractors figure out challenges. I like helping homeowners and building cashflow out of that. I’m passionate about real estate investments because it gives you the lifestyle and freedom. It’s something I want to pass onto my children. You can build a legacy with it.

Is there something that’s like a daily mental exercise that you use to feel yourself every day? Is it the mantra of getting somebody to say yes? I see you have, “Expect nothing and appreciate everything.” Is it something you consciously think about every day to start off your day? If you’ve got somebody who’s at home and they’re not motivated to get out there and look at deals and they keep seeing deals pass them by, what little exercise or tip can you tell them to do to get to that level where they’re fired up about it?

My daily ritual every day is getting my mind right. The way you think controls everything. Even if you’re sick and you say, “I’m sick, I don’t feel well,” that makes you not feel well. It’s all about mindset. For me, it’s the daily ritual. I work out, journal and write my goals down every single day. That’s usually my ritual. I get up, I write in my journal, I write my goals down, go exercise and read. These things keep my mind stimulated. I’m always researching the market that I’m in. I’m always looking for deals and I’m always networking. If you put in the effort and time, there’s no way, in a certain amount of time, you can’t prevail. You have to keep going and you have to believe it before you see it.

I know some of you are like, “I heard that before,” but it’s true. You look at people who are doing stuff in this business and you ask them, “How do you do it?” they will tell you, “I set these goals, I write them down, I’m visualizing it, I go after it, I stay on it and I talk about it all the time.” Even when I got to notes, one of my business partners, I would tell her, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to raise money, I’m going to buy notes, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.” She’s looking at me like I had three heads and she’s like, “Whatever.” Everything that I said in that meeting at a Sushi restaurant came true two years later. We raised the money I said I was going to raise. We purchased notes. We created relationships and then it gave me a firm belief of that you have to be conscious of what you think and what you say because it comes into reality. Believe in yourself and keep the faith. There are three pillars of success that we always talk about: commitment, belief and action. Once you have that understanding and knowledge of self, nothing can stop you.

It is funny and it’s underutilized. It was said all the time, going back to Napoleon Hill through Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki and everybody else. Every one of them, what they have consistently is you have to write stuff down. You’ve got to put dates. What I found even scheduling my classes, you do a lot of floundering until you put that date on the calendar. You’re like, “I’ve got to fill that class.” I’ve got to be prepared for that particular class. It is a powerful thing when you write stuff down and think of it. It translates it into the real world. Instead of just the idea that you had, it makes it more concrete. I bet if people did that one little exercise and said, “I’m going to buy a home or I’m going to buy a note within 30 days,” odds are it’s going to happen. When you start to look at that every single day and I hear what you’re saying on that. We’ll shift gears here a little bit and talk about some techniques. What’s your favorite forward-thinking technique that you’re looking at in this market?

I think in my market, the tax lien is going to be the thing for me because it’s going to help me continue to get properties at a steep discount. I’ve learned about it for so long. I had the tool in my tool belt. I didn’t take the actions until the third and fourth quarter of 2018. I’m focused on action works and going to auctions. I’m getting connected with the town playing the politics that I have to play as a developer and getting involved. I’ve got fourteen pieces at a steep discount and it took me about ten months to foreclose on six of them. I started rehabs on them and I’m about to go to an auction and try to get at least another ten or fifteen of them. Building up that portfolio. They’re all in opportunity zone areas. I’m pretty sure you talked about that on one of your podcasts. That gives them the best opportunity to come in and put in some of that capital gains money in and defer the taxes. I’m focusing on those opportunity zone areas.

The opportunity zone areas are interesting. I don’t know enough information about them. It’s not something that I have looked into, but I’ve read a few things about it and I know there are good opportunities there. You’re not buying a lien. You’re buying tax deeds.

No, in some states it’s tax deed. In New Jersey it’s a tax lien. There’s a fast track foreclosure law. You should probably know about that also in New Jersey if you’re in the note business. If the property is vacant, you can fast track the foreclosure. It takes about ten months. Usually, people don’t like to buy notes in New Jersey and New York because they’re like, “It takes three to five years to foreclose.” There are laws in place that if the property is vacant, you can fast track the foreclosure. People were telling me, “Tax lien, don’t buy them. They take two years to foreclose.” I spoke to one of the head attorneys that do the foreclosure and we did the foreclosure process. It took us about ten months to foreclose on six out of fourteen and probably in another 90 days, I will have the deeds for the rest. It’s the lien that turned into judgment and that’s actually the deed.

Turning Distress Into Success

I have one that I have to go through the short sale process because there is a federal tax lien against the property. I have to go through the short sale foreclosure to extinguish that lien and clear its title. Some of them do take a little bit longer. That’s the process. It’s a tax lien. To give you an example, I’ve got six family for $130,000, about 225 on rehab is worth $650 to $675 based off of rental income. Those are the opportunities that I’m seeing that we’re rehabbing, we will cashflow, then we will sell them on a retail market and keep repeating that process. They usually help for more than a year to avoid capital gains if they take that long to go through the whole process. This is a special tax lien. Most tax lien, you can buy them and you can assign them and make money in certain states. This one you can’t sell it unless you get the CO. That means you have to fix them up. That’s what I liked about it because it’s less competition and it forces the investor to revitalize the area where the blight of properties are because now we have rehabs going on and the township is thriving again. That’s my favorite part of it.

You’re able to specifically focus on vacant properties and buy the liens on those. Are you using a list? Are you buying over the counter?

The city put out a list. The list I have now has over 50 properties. I usually go back in a week before the sale to see who redeem. A lot of banks have liens on these and when they know they’re going out for tax auction, they will redeem them. I will keep my eye on it and start to hammer down on the due diligence a week before the sale. Everything is local town next to me. I can view 100 properties in one day. The first auction, I went out at 5:00 AM. I got a driver and paid him for the day. I brought my cameraman with me and we saw 115 properties from 5:00 AM until 6:00 PM. I wanted to get fourteen. I wound up winning everything that I wanted to get because of the visualization. I have it on camera. We went to this one property and I see myself getting this property. It was a mixed-use and I was like, “I can see a Wings Spa here and two rental apartments at this property. I’m going to get this property.” The guy recorded it. When I won the tax auction, he was there with me. He was like, “It works.” I was like, “Yeah, it works.” When I was going to bid on it, I wrote down my maximum. I came in less than my maximum that I was going to offer.

Having that real estate experience and having that note business experience, those things help you. They correlate with each other, whether you’re buying notes, if you have to foreclose and take over, it becomes real estate. You’ve got to know what you’re doing and how to disposition it. One of the strategies I learned from you at the last summit that we were at, putting two liens on one property. Having that diverse background and going to different meetings whether it’s whole selling, whether it’s note or real estate, you’re going to learn something from everything. Even if you’re focused on rentals, still go to those other meetings so you can learn different strategies. You never know when you’re going to have to use that strategy with what you’re doing.

What do you do loan-wise? Do you pay in cash? Are you getting loans? Do you use lines of credit? What do you think most people should look at for that?

I have a fund that raises capital for real estate and notes together. I set up a fund for the hybrid model because the first fund that I had was for notes only. Before I got into the fund world, I was borrowing money from hard money lenders and private investors. When I was doing short sales, I was frustrated and I talk about this in my first book, Turning Distress Into Success. My son would hear me on a phone with the negotiators arguing back and forth. He would say, “Why don’t you just become the bank?” I was like, “That’s impossible.” “I thought you said nothing is impossible?” I start to research and open up a fund, but that was to buy notes. After three years of doing that, because I was getting IRA money from my personal real estate investments and I was getting so much inventory from the banks, I was like, “I need to set up a vehicle where I could just go out and write a check and buy properties in a wire.” I created a fund and that’s what I do today. I raise money to buy properties and notes.

It’s a good way to go. It’s a little more advanced for beginners. We’re certainly not saying, if you’re reading this going, “I have to start a fund to start investing.” That’s not what we said. You start where you can.

Start with private investors if they can. I would strictly say stay away from hard money loans unless you’re doing something like profit participation where they’re going to give you a favorable interest rate. Those interest rates will kill you. If you’re new, it’s going to take you longer to get a little bit of the learning curve. The way these lenders set up the deals, they’re typically not into more than 50% or 60%. If you don’t have your stuff together, you don’t have the right contractor and you don’t know the process, it’s going to take long. It’s going to eat your profit. Try to find a private lender. If you will go do a joint venture, both of you are active and you’re going to the property together. You can build your track record like that. You do three or four, then you have some skill sets where you can go to a hard money lender and show them your resume, “Here, I’ve got three properties.” They will give you more favorable points and more favorable interest rates now that you have experience and pretty much the rest is history. You can then use private lenders or hard money, whatever you want to do.

You said show them your resume. It’s documentation. It’s showing proof because I used to have a fund where I did hard money loans and I want to get paid back. I look at the investor and say, “What have you done?” As you’re going through deals, even if it’s one deal, if you can document everything and put it in a three-ring binder or a little spiral type of thing at Staples or Office Depot, you can show these investors what you’ve done. Everybody walks around with a camera and a video all the time. Take pictures of the procedures so you can show to not only the lenders and such but potential partners also. That becomes a powerful tool in your toolbox. Fuquan, where can we get your book? Where can people learn more about it?

I have a couple of books. This is the motivational book. I took a stab at it. It’s called The Tire Kicker. You can get it on Amazon. This is the latest book, Passion for Real Estate Investments. You can get it on Amazon. This is my first book, Turning Distress Into Success. This one is about the paper business, whether you buy an auto loan or any type of debt, I walk you through that. Passion for Real Estate Investments, chapter one is my journey. It’s my favorite chapter. It’s very important to me. I put a lot of time and effort. It’s starting the book off with my backstory. You can find it on Amazon.

I will be working on the audio. People are telling me, “Put on the audio. Automobile University is happening, don’t you know? We need the audio.” I’m like, “I will work on that. I’ve got to find time to do it.” I’ve been promoting the book to give people who want to get into real estate my backstory. To show them I didn’t get a finance degree from Harvard or anywhere else, but people say, “Do you have a finance background? How are you doing this? How are you doing that?” It’s taking action and getting stuff done and showing them where I come from in my journey. I share my experience and why I’m passionate for real estate investments. You will find it on Amazon.

Are you doing local meetups or are you just attending meetups?

I fly around and go to different meetups. The first few years, I was hitting all the local spots. A lot of people in the local meetups at that time where I was going were not into note business and especially didn’t understand seconds. When I would go and talk about it, I was like the outcast of the group. I will stay to learn different things. Once I started to travel around and go to different events, I do more out of town events and I do plan on going back to local events. After two years of not going, I’m sure it’s a whole new group of people. I definitely want to connect with some of those people.

I want to connect with the newbies as they call them. A lot of people don’t like that because they have many questions and everything else. My goal going into these events is to share my journey and helping people get started. They can catch me on Instagram, @FuquanBilal. I use that as a tool to help people who ask me questions all the time. People reach out to me, “How do I get started? What do I do if I have this situation?” I use that as a customer service tool to help people push forward. My goal is to educate 1,000 people and I’m doing that through podcast like yourself and also Instagram.

I do appreciate you being on and taking the time to be here. It was a pleasure interviewing you. Check out his book. You can go to Amazon and also on Instagram to find out where he’s going to be and learn a little bit more. I think his story will resonate with a lot of people. Everybody, thanks for reading. Fuquan, do you have a website?

PFREI.co or @Passion4REI, that’s the Twitter and Instagram handle. You can go there. I have a lot of podcasts there as well. I had a great opportunity to interview Kevin. You can catch that on the PFREI YouTube. My goal with this platform is to share my knowledge, journey and education and bring other people like Kevin and other experienced real estate investors and share their journey to try to educate the masses. Catch me, be passionate, PFREI.

Fuquan, thank you.

Important Links:

• Fuquan Bilal
• Passion for Real Estate Investments: The Making of a Strategic Real Estate Investor.
• The Tire Kicker
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Turning Distress Into Success
• @FuquanBilal – Instagram
• PFREI.co
• @Passion4REI – Twitter
• Instagram – Passion4REI
• Kevin Shortle – podcast episode of Passion4REI on YouTube

About Fuquan Bilal

Fuquan founded NNG in 2012 with the principal mission of capitalizing on the growing supply of mortgage notes in the interbank marketplace. The CEO utilizes his 17 years of residential and commercial real estate success to identify real estate opportunities and capitalize on them. To date, he has successfully managed three private mortgage note funds that primarily invest in single-family performing and non-performing mortgage notes. His financial acumen and proprietary set of investment criteria enable him to purchase under-performing real estate assets at a deep discount of face and market values, thereby increasing the value of the assets. This, coupled with his ability to maximize the use of leverage, enables him to build strong, secured portfolios with solid passive income flows.

• Here’s How »

• kevinshortle.com
• Kevin Shortle on Twitter
• Kevin Shortle on LinkedIn