Creative Financing Secrets: How Women Investors Are Winning in 2025

Most women don't lack the ability—they lack the confidence and support to fully engage in real estate investing.

In this episode of Commercial Real Estate Secrets, Aviva sits down with Liz Faircloth, co-founder of the Real Estate InvestHER community and host of the InvestHER Show podcast, to explore how women are reshaping the real estate investment landscape.

💡 We talk about:
✔️ Liz’s journey from a duplex to managing over 2,000 multifamily units ($150M+ in assets)
✔️ Powerful insights into why women hesitate in investing despite controlling $10 trillion in assets
✔️ How combining knowledge and community creates confident, empowered investors
✔️ Creative financing strategies, including leveraging home equity lines of credit (HELOC)
✔️ Essential tips on conservative underwriting to mitigate risk in uncertain markets
✔️ Behind-the-scenes of Liz’s innovative ground-up residential project
✔️ The real-world impact when women achieve financial independence

If you're ready to build your real estate portfolio, boost your investing confidence, or simply learn from women who are leading the charge in a traditionally male-dominated industry, this episode is filled with actionable insights you can apply today. 🔥

Connect with Liz Faircloth: Website | Podcast | Linkedin

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Chapters

• 0:00 Empowering Women in Commercial Real Estate
• 7:05 Building a Supportive Community for Investors
• 10:54 Creative Financing Strategies in 2025
• 20:31 Creating Generational Wealth through Real Estate

Transcript

Aviva (00:00)
This week's listener of the week is Jess Bray. Jess, thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week, week, week. This week on Commercial Real Estate Secret, we have Liz Faircloth. Liz is the co-founder

of the real estate investor community and the host of the Investor Show. Liz, thank you for being on the show today.

Liz Faircloth (00:32)
Yeah, pleasure. So excited to be here. We were chatting about the importance of women in commercials. So I wanna be a support here and a value of however I can.

Aviva (00:41)
It's funny you should bring that up. know, of course there are limited females in commercial real estate in general. Industrial, it's almost laudable, but I've really found it to be for our business quite a value add. And you know, we differentiate ourselves that way and it's fun. I mean, there is an element of safety that we have to toggle with, but for the most part, we're very safe and...

It's fun to be one of the few females in industrial real estate. Anyway, this isn't about me. This is about you, Liz. Can you tell the audience who you are, what you do, and how we got here today?

Liz Faircloth (01:22)
Sure, sure. So back when I was two years old, no, just joking. You don't want to hear my whole life story. I've been at investing for about 20 years. Started in my 20s. I was going to get my master's in social work and read Rich Dad Poor Dad and was forever changed. And I'm grateful to my brother-in-law for introducing me to the concepts, right? What we have come to love of passive income and entrepreneurship. So long story short, I ended up getting a job in sales and at the same time met my now

Aviva (01:26)
I'm kidding.

Liz Faircloth (01:51)
husband, but at the time boyfriend. And we really started going to REIA meetings and quite honestly learning as much as we could for about a year in our 20s and bought our first duplex with a loan from my father, which was 30,000 at the time, big deal. And he's a school teacher. So 30,000 to my parents was a very, very big deal. And we paid him interest and all that good stuff. And that got our start in investing. It was a little, small little row home outside of Philadelphia. We ended up moving to New Jersey.

really starting investing in New Jersey and had this passion to transform areas and also transform properties. So the next 20 years now, I've been at this since 2004, about, we have focused on taking dilapidated small and then now it's been more large multifamily and really creating these beautifying the properties and creating more of the, know, quality housing where people wanna live versus probably what we bought them as.

We have over 2,000 units now, $150 million under management, and we work with over like 400 investors. So we syndicate work with investors to give them returns. And we have debt, we have on the debt side, we also have on the equity side. But that's my real estate work, flipped a bunch of properties, own commercial buildings, all the above. And about eight years ago, I met my now partner Andresa, and we had this shared passion of talking real estate investing. we would start going to conferences and

We're like, where are the women in this business? And we didn't see many of them at the conference, let alone speaking at conferences or REIA meetings. It was always like this old boys club. That's how we felt. And so about seven years ago, we launched the Real Estate Invest Her and the premise was to empower women to live financially free lives. What felt like a passion at the time now has become, I think a necessity. And the reason why I say that and you'd appreciate this is that

Aviva (03:24)
you

you

Liz Faircloth (03:45)
Women statistically controlled $10 trillion of the US investable assets right now. That's going to 30 trillion in the next five to 10 years. So women across the board are sitting on more and more money, more and more wealth for a variety of reasons, and they just don't feel confident in making investing decisions. So that's what we're on a mission to do, all just really supporting women on the journey. have a platform online, offline, and it's not about one strategy, it's about

where your life is headed and what's gonna make sense for you and your family. And when women do invest, they outperform men. Time and time again, there's research that shows when women have more money, environments improve, neighborhoods improve, just good things happen. So that's what we're on a mission to do. It's no small feat, but we really wanna create the space and the community and the place that women feel safe to get what they need to

build their own investing portfolios on their own.

Aviva (04:45)
The data, I mean, you got some really cool data. I've got some, you know, high level data. I think I went to a female investor summit led by Beth Azor. Shout out Beth. She's the best.

Liz Faircloth (04:58)
know Beth, think we interviewed her at some point. I've interviewed many people, 500 episodes. Yeah. Yeah.

Aviva (05:02)
You probably did, you probably did. And some insane statistic like two or 3 % of commercial real estate owners are women. And then, know, a large percent of that are people, women who inherited it, which, you know, it's a trend in a reality. It's just overwhelming. The percent is, you know, so low, but. So like you say, no easy feet,

Liz Faircloth (05:32)
Yeah, and I think on the commercial side, is even, like you said, we were saying earlier, it's even less women, right? Yet women have such the ability to bring so much of their resources to the table. They tend to be more cautious, more conservative, but they see opportunities. And I think women have so many advantages, tremendous amount. Just the analysis paralysis needs to stop in...

And also the belief in themselves, right? I'll meet a guy at a conference and he'll be like, I'm a real estate mogul, I'm killing it, I got five properties, I'm now gonna become a coach, no offense, that's great. But I'm like, great, good for you, I love your confidence. And then I'll meet a woman and this really happened to me. And I said, how are you doing? She's like, I'm really just getting started. Just getting started, I have five properties. So one thinks they're the mogul and the next, you know. the next coming to the next perfect investor and the other one thinks they really don't know anything. And that way of being has to change because women are so, they know so much. They know more than they think.

Aviva (06:42)
So tell me about the community. How do you meet? Where do you meet? What does it look like?

Liz Faircloth (06:48)
Yeah, absolutely, right? Because community, and I'll also say that so many people, we believe, like, let's go back to the confidence, right? In order to be confident and to take action, you need two things. You need knowledge and you need a community. Most people are like, I can learn what I need to learn to buy a commercial property. You probably can with all the resources out there. You probably can learn what you need to learn, but will you? It's the community part that's gonna get you over the hump to say, are the women doing this?

Aviva (07:09)
Yeah.

Liz Faircloth (07:15)
I know women doing warehouse or I know women doing self storage or whatever that asset class is. But yet the other side of it, community is not enough. You need to have the right knowledge. So we really believe knowledge and community really creates this confident action because you're around other like-minded women doing it. We started with our podcast and then it led us to doing a Facebook community, just a free Facebook community. We have over 17,000 women there. That led to doing kind of local meetups. At one point we had about 55 meetups across the country and in Canada.

And those are local groups of women coming together under the same sort of mission to support women on real estate investing. So after just doing a bunch of free different free and what women want to need after our first virtual event, said a lot of women are like, what do you guys have to sell? We're like, we're not selling anything. They're like, well, we want to do more with you guys. So we're like, okay, let's put something together. And so we actually put together a strive mentorship program, which is for women who are doing five to 10 deals or more.

a more, you know, they have experience and that's a mentorship program. So we meet on Zoom, we meet on Facebook, we meet at InvestorCon, that's where, that happens. The free community, we're actually segueing, we actually just launched, because community is like, I don't know about you, but like so many people go to events and they wanna build community, but they meet the wrong people. They're just like, I gotta get through these 25 people to get one normal person to talk to.

Aviva (08:32)
Yeah.

Liz Faircloth (08:40)
And I don't know about you too, but women really don't have time to waste. We just don't. I I have to go down and help my daughter with homework after this podcast. I gotta go to my son's wrestling practice this evening. I got a ton of work to also do with things I have committed to. So I have time to waste. So I'm very intentional with my time. So what we did, we said, okay, all these women are meeting on Facebook. It's not intentional. They're meeting at meetups, but it's not intentional. It's not focused. So we created this platform for literally like a couple hundred dollars a year. That's what it costs.

Aviva (08:48)
Yeah.

Liz Faircloth (09:10)
And it's our own platform where women actually can match up with other women who have the same interest and asset class, location, across the country. And then it's also, there's resources in there, knowledge. But it's a really, it's like a matchmaking powered by AI that women can actually meet the right people in the right time. So I'm really excited about it. We really wanted to create something that was for like the masses of women. And it's got such a, and then you can join chapters and.

Aviva (09:27)
Wow. Yeah.

Liz Faircloth (09:37)
get into local community, because I don't know about you, but real estate's hyper local. And women want to meet local women that have similar interests. They also want to meet online so they have something common to talk about versus their neighbors who aren't interested in buying property or getting into, especially warehouse, right? If I talk to my, I actually, we're invested passively in a warehouse project. If I said it to my neighbors, they'd be like, I don't even know what you're talking about.

Aviva (10:02)
No.

Liz Faircloth (10:02)
So the community aspect of what we do and then we have our annual conference once a year where it's 400 women that come together once a year at a different location. So community is big, but the key is knowledge plus community and finding a tribe, finding a group where you can be stretched and stretch others, right? Because that's important with any great group. It's not enough to like know everything, because you're gonna be helping everybody. And quite honestly, you wanna be challenged, both in real estate and mindset and...

way of being so you can be your best self, right? That's what we kind of stand for.

Aviva (10:35)
Do you sleep? Okay, okay, just curious.

Liz Faircloth (10:37)
I do sleep. I do sleep. I do sleep.

know, I get really, actually I have a narcolepsy problem to be perfectly frank with you. So I actually sleep very well. Cause as soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm out. So if I ever just look like I'm about to fall asleep, you know, it's not personal.

Aviva (10:48)
No.

Okay, I'm glad I asked.

That's funny. So let me ask you in 2025, financing is a stretch. It's ugly. let's talk about the creative ways that you are strategically navigating money lending in 2025.

Liz Faircloth (11:09)
Yeah. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll give you, and really my husband and I tapped out at about 60 units in when we were about eight years into our path. And we learned very quickly we need to raise money. So my husband actually wrote the book for Bigger Pockets, Raising Private Capital. I co-wrote it with him too. So we learned a lot early on and then how we've scaled our business, both on the debt side and equity side, right? A lot of those things still apply.

People want to lend to people they like, trust and respect. So, so many people get so enamored about the deal. Oh, it's gonna make this return or that return. And then they know nothing about the market. They just are starting out. mean, and somebody who's gonna lend to them or work with them, they're gonna question those things, right? Because it's about the operator. So, because financing is, and then we're under contract, I'm about to close on Friday. My husband and I have not done a ground up in a really long time.

And so I'm really excited because we're closing. It's a him and I project locally in my town. And so from a financing perspective, I'll just share a little creativity that we got into this deal. We're in a kind of like a small boutique luxury market, right? So like Bradley Cooper has a house here, his girlfriend Gigi, you know, it's gotten some really great press on in New York Times and what have you. It's a very small little boutique on the Delaware River. It's very pretty area, towpath, running, biking.

Aviva (12:34)
Thanks

Liz Faircloth (12:44)
restaurants, et cetera, where we've been looking to do something and we just haven't gotten the opportunity. So Realtor presented a property right on the water. And she said, they're one point, they're asking two million, but you're gonna have to tear it down. I'm like, hold on, I've never bought a property for two million that I've had to tear down, right? I mean, that's like, even in my tenure, right? I've done a lot of different projects. That would have been that type of numbers, right? I'm like, what's the outsell, of course. And she's like, probably five million.

Aviva (13:03)
Yeah

Liz Faircloth (13:13)
you know, not probably, but that's where we're trending, four and a half to five million. All right, now I'm curious. Now I want to hear more, right? Those numbers could work depending on the construction, right? So long story short, we have a HELOC on it. We decided to get a HELOC on our house. And you know, for those listening, I'm sure you probably have savvy listeners who know what a HELOC is, but in essence, it's a home equity lighter credit. And our house, because we're in this neighborhood, not the $5 million house, not a $5 house, but...

Aviva (13:39)
Yay.

Liz Faircloth (13:41)
We, our house has doubled in value since we've owned it in the five years. So we got smart, we had a HELOC for about hundred grand and we were able to, because the value has gone up, basically double our HELOC or triple our HELOC, excuse me. And so we had that kind of waiting and we're like, okay. And then we had some other money, we sold a property, we were like, okay, we have some money we could deploy into something that's worthwhile to us, right? Not with partners, just us. We did so many things, us at the beginning and now we have a lot of partners and we're like, okay, let's do something just for the fair cloths.

So long story short, we're able to get to closing. The majority of the money is from a sale of a property, is from our HELOC and from, we have one partner in the deal who also has a HELOC that we're kind of doing this project with. So my point in saying that is most of the money we're going to close in with is all creative, right? It's all, it's not, mean, it's actual money, but it came from other assets. So my big point in saying all that,

It's not about the numbers. It's about, okay, what assets do I have? What can I deploy? And also the relationships. So the lender we're using, negotiating with them. We negotiated the terms. The construction loan's 100%. I feel like we got really favorable terms in today's landscape. But that was because, not because I have a relationship, but I was able to like, okay, what is a good term? What's the going rate?

Aviva (14:59)
Wow.

Liz Faircloth (15:10)
shopping around, working hard. Insurance is crazy right now. I mean, I don't have to tell your listeners that. I got a quote for $40,000 to insure my single family home. I was like, what? No, I'm like, you must have made a typo. Was that 4,000? I'm like, this is an extra zero. He's like, no, that wasn't a typo. I'm like, okay. So obviously we didn't go with them, but my point is there's a lot of challenges right now. And we're in an area that is not hit by hurricane or

wildfires, we're in Pennsylvania. So my point in saying all that is creative financing was important when we started 20 years ago, and it's just as important now. But I do believe you have to be more conservative with your numbers. We played the worst case scenario in our numbers. So we decided to do this deal, meaning it took 18 months, shouldn't take us 18 months. Took us 18 months, you know, this is the kind of lender we'll have. We played it all out and we were still

Aviva (15:39)
Yeah.

Liz Faircloth (16:09)
comfortable with the profit, comfortable with the project. And I think people didn't do that and they're having to give keys back to the bank. Their loan is coming due, they have a floating rate and they're like, hold on, I didn't see this coming. People are not doing enough conservative underwriting and playing out worst case scenario. Because honestly, I don't think they've been around enough to know that.

Aviva (16:31)
Sure.

Liz Faircloth (16:32)
I didn't do what I'm doing now when I started. I mean, I was like, this is gonna go great. This is gonna go great. And then there's projects that I had to bring money to closing, right? You don't wanna have to bring money to closing after you flip a property, it sucks. So I'm saying all that because I think creative financing partnerships, but concertive underwriting is the way people are getting deals done today. And that's how it'll always be.

Aviva (16:58)
So when do you expect this project to be done?

Liz Faircloth (17:01)
Our goal, so the goal, right, because we're gonna be doing a ground up, so we're bringing it down to the foundation. So it's not new construction. So the goal is that we're, with our architect, with the plans, that we're gonna go to our town, and not, the goal is that we're not gonna have to get any sort of additional, we're not gonna have to go in front of zoning. Because if we can show that we're literally just putting another story on this property, same footprint of the home, we should be able to go more on as is. Now if we have to go to zoning, should kill it.

Aviva (17:25)
Hmm. Well.

Liz Faircloth (17:30)
but will add a month, it will add at least two months. The other challenge, I'm gonna have to document this, the other challenge is that this property has a private road, but the road is like a towpath, right? So you have to drive on a towpath. So our contractor is gonna have to get very, very resourceful on bringing materials to the site. So there's literally a strip of homes that are very, I once you live there, it's lovely. It's like a retreat, it's like an oasis, right? On the water, it's lovely. But in terms of,

Aviva (17:42)
Hmm.

Wow.

Liz Faircloth (17:58)
renovating a home and bring it down to the foundation and building, there are certain logistics that are going to have to get figured out. So these are all the things we love about investing, right? If that wasn't the case, this would, everyone would be doing it, right? But our goals a year, our underwriting is like worst case scenarios, 18 months. But on this size project, the interest is costing, you know, up to, when we're fully optimized, our interest is 20 grand a month. It's a lot of money.

It's a lot of money and I'm a pretty frugal person. So the quicker we get this done and we play with the numbers, 12 months, 13, every month, you know, so our contractor knows that. And so everyone's on the same page. He believes it's gonna take, the construction begins six months, we're building a 3,400 square foot house. This is not like a conglomerate huge home, but still, right? It's a ground up. I'm pretty excited about it. I mean, there's certain challenges, but.

Aviva (18:33)
Smart.

Yeah.

Liz Faircloth (18:53)
it's exciting, and also you have to know your risks. There are risks, but that's what an investor does, right? You hopefully mitigate those.

Aviva (19:03)
Yeah, and everybody has a different appetite for it, but we would not be here if we didn't all have a little bit of appetite for it.

Liz Faircloth (19:06)
That is the truth.

I would also

say those listening, it's like, also become very blessed to not just run this community, but I'm part of the community. So, when I needed insurance carriers, I went to the companies that sponsor my conference, our conference that knows other women. I was like, well, who are you using now? Who's like, and a couple of the lenders. So the lender and the, are people in our community, they're active. So I was able to tap people like, who are you using right now?

And I think that's the benefit of a community that you don't have to just figure it out on your own. I know I'm gonna have challenges, but I know between us and certainly my business partner and the woman in my circle, I'm gonna get support, right? I'm not gonna know all the answers, but you don't need to know all the answers, but having a place to go to bring those questions, it really makes me feel comfortable. It makes me feel like I can get through things with support versus on my own. Because on my own, right, I've left up to my own crazy head.

Aviva (19:42)
Mm-hmm.

Liz Faircloth (20:08)
And I may not have all the answers. So I think that's the other part about community is so important. You don't have to have all the answers. Stop relying on yourself. And women, quite honestly, do it a lot. We rely a lot on ourselves. And we need to learn how to stop doing that.

Aviva (20:24)
You know, my last question is generally what makes you happy with what you do in real estate and commercial real estate? I feel like you just answered it, but I will not take the chance for you to answer the question, what makes you happy with what you do every day in real estate?

Liz Faircloth (20:40)
Yeah,

for me, being an active investor in commercial, because we're building 30 unit apartment complexes, so I'm very active in the, still active in commercial and then this single family. I love the idea of working hard to make my investors money, to make our family from a generational perspective and my kids, they're involved in this project. So that generational wealth creation.

I have a lot of hard work is very exciting. But the reason what really lights me up and why I founded Invest Her with my partner, Andresa, was that how cool would it for more and more women to have the independence to make decisions on their own terms, not relying on anyone so that they can grow their investments, buy that first, second, third property, and begin to create more financial freedom for themselves and their families. Because when they do, they just

They do really well. They just do, statistically. They just need to be doing it more. I think that really lights me up when I hear stories of like a woman coming into our community and she had like one property. And it's not about numbers of doors, but then she's grown her portfolio because of the confidence that she's gotten here, or she's getting involved in something new, or she's writing a book with somebody. And it just really lights me up to see that. The women in our program, coaching other women, helping other women.

That's super cool. I don't hear all the stories. So when I hear them, I'm like, that will give me a lot of juice for the next week or two, you know?

Aviva (22:10)
Liz, that is just really impressive. Thank you for what you're doing for the greater of womankind. Where can the listeners find you, follow you, listen to you, et cetera?

Liz Faircloth (22:22)
Yeah, sure. Our website is a really great place to go for free resources or our podcast, therealestateinvesther.com. I would encourage right on the homepage, we actually have free assessment and it's like, what kind of invest her are you? And it gives you then like an action plan that's more curated to where you are in the journey, whether you're more experienced or whether you're new or whether you be passive or active. And it's a really cool.

like action plan, it's not like a stupid quiz you take, you get nothing, you're like, I just gave these stupid people my email address, know, those kinds of quizzes. It's not because we're like, we're not doing that. We wanna give women an action plan that's actually useful and has resources and quite honestly, they do nothing else in our community, this will be helpful for them. So that you can find on our homepage, that's probably one of the free resources I can say that's actually high, high, high value that we have right there. And then our Facebook community is a free community.

It's called Invest Her Community, pretty easy to find. I'm on there daily. So if you actually have a question, I can support you, tag me there. I literally am on there every day, very active in that group. I answer questions and everything. So my name there is Elizabeth Randazzi Faircloth. So I would welcome getting tagged. Hey, heard you on this podcast. I have a follow up question. I don't get that a lot, but I would love to see that more, because that means

people are taking action on what they're learning. They're not just listening and forgetting it.

Aviva (23:57)
Liz, this has been really, really great today. Thank you for being on the show and for everybody listening. We'll see you next week.

Liz Faircloth (24:03)
Thank you.