How To Use DSCR Loans with Alex Bekeza (Loans Edition)

This episode originally aired on November 17, 2025, and we’re resharing it for the new year, as many investors are re-evaluating their financing options and exploring different loan types for real estate.

Zach and Patrick sit down with Alex Bekeza, the most highly reviewed loan officer on BiggerPockets, to break down DSCR loans (Debt Service Coverage Ratio), how they work, and what investors need to know as they plan their next moves.

Whether you’re looking to scale your rental portfolio, explore BRRRR strategies, or understand financing options that rely on property performance instead of personal income, this conversation is packed with practical insights that still hold strong heading into 2026.

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Transcript

0:36

What's going on everybody? Welcome to season two of the Rent-ish podcast. I'm Zach here with my cohost, Patrick. We're two rookies chasing the dream of real estate investing. In this podcast, we'll talk about property management, wild stories, and everything in between. We don't know it all yet. But that's the point. We're learning as we go, just like you. We'll bring in the experts to educate and inform us and we'll figure it out together. So let's laugh, learn, and dive into real estate side by side. Zach, how are you doing on this beautiful Monday? Whoa, it's changing it up. I like that. Yeah, I think that's really fun. I don't know how to answer the question because I'm so taken aback by you asking about the mic current status instead of me flipping it around on you. That's really sweet of you. I'm tired. How are you today? I'm also pretty tired. You said you had to get, were forced to wake an hour and a half early because of your girlfriend's mother. Yeah, so she's... You want to elaborate on that? Yeah, she was going to the airport. and wanted to see our apartment because my girlfriend moved in with me and so she was checking out the apartment at 7.45 a.m. so I had to be up and dressed before then. Yeah, so that's like ass crack of dawn for me. That's a... Yeah, I want all of our listeners to email questions at therentishpod.com if you think 7.45 is the crack of dawn. I have a feeling like a lot of people are gonna disagree with that sentiment. Producer Moussa, what's the crack of dawn? For me, it's when light crests over the... the hill for the first time. It's like. Like 5.30. That's late at night. That's. So that's still the night to you. That's not the morning That's a late night right there. Okay. That's crazy. This is the Rentish podcast, a podcast about property management and real estate. Yeah, wait, don't we have an expert on today? Yeah, we do have an expert. So it's going to be quite the change of pace. No, thank you for listening to another episode of the Rentish podcast. Today we have a great guest who's going to teach us all about loans, investing, and brrrr, because it's cold, you know what mean? But that's also an acronym. So I'm told, or you might hear about it in the interview coming up that we have with uh Alex Bikiza. So stay tuned for that. And remember to follow the podcast online, the Rentish Podcast on basically any podcast platform where you get your shows. Email questions at therentishpod.com, follow us at therentishpod on social media. And Patrick, what do you say we just kick it over to the interview? Let's do it. Welcome back to the Rent-ish podcast today. We've got a really, really exciting guest who's going to be joining us, someone who's been making serious waves in the real estate investing world. That's right. We're talking with Alex Bacchisa, the most highly reviewed loan officer on biggerpockets.com. So really bringing in the big dogs this time. specializes in DSCR based financing, which I'm excited to learn about what that is and purchase and rehab loan products. He's originated over a hundred million dollars in loans for investors. Yep. That's right, Patrick. Not only that, he's also an investor himself, a BRRRR guy with a portfolio of rentals in Missouri and Texas. So Alex really gets both sides of the table. Alex, welcome to the show. Alright, yeah, I appreciate the intro guys We really rehearsed that multiple times. We'll unpack a few of those acronyms. Exactly. Yeah, we're gonna unpack the acronyms. We're gonna talk about a lot of stuff. We're gonna really get to know Alex here. He's an awesome guest. We're very, very happy to have you on board the Rentish pod. Come and hang out with us. At the top of the hour though, I gotta tell you a shout out. We have audio listeners, we have video listeners now. I gotta give you a shout out to your fish tank back there. Man, yeah, this was, you know what, this was my COVID era gift to self, stay sane, having to work from home, uh investment, if you will. That's nice, it's a good backdrop. It's like, he in an office? Is he in the ocean? I can't tell. Yeah, this is the home office today. Yeah, cool. And you it honestly is a nice relaxing thing. You actually find a lot of like high-stress jobs keep one in nearby like attorneys and doctors and things like that. Amazing, well you definitely encouraged me to maybe invest in the fish tank market. So, talking about your market, real estate, we wanna kinda get to know you a little bit. Tell us who you are, kind of where you come from, what made you interested in the real estate industry, what got you into the industry. Just kinda tell us a little bit about your backstory and your story leading up to now. Yeah, I think it's probably really relatable for a lot of your audience who's just trying to break into it because I mean, I really came out of nowhere, right? I was a restaurant general manager down here in SoCal and Malibu and Santa Barbara, Calabasas areas. And I just really hustled my way up into that spot in my early twenties, going from the bus boy to the food runner, to the server, to the assistant manager, to the GM. And then I think it was a great experience to you know, spin a lot of plates at once and, and have a lot of people working under you and working through a lot of like, day-to-day situations, people problems. And then I just got lucky really, and had some people who were killing it in real estate, who had known me from when we were young, had seen me hustling in the restaurants and said to me one day, I stopped doing what you're doing, especially as I had my first child and they knew I was barely seeing him. Right. I was going dawn to dusk in the restaurants. And they said, come in and learn how to do mortgages. This is about a decade ago. And I kind of blew him off, you I said, hey, you know, that's too intimidating. I don't know what LTV means. I don't know what APR, none of that stuff is, you it's not really for me. And I think I was working on Christmas day, missing it with my little ones and called him back and said, hey, let me come learn what you guys do over there, you know? So gives you a little bit of context for why I was so motivated to get on BiggerPockets and started learning about real estate from scratch. Within the first few months, well, I realized a lot of people all over the country were looking for certain products and for certain strategies. like the SCR loans, hard money loans and these necessarily niches that a lot of my colleagues were focused on, but it's really a way that I carved my own lane, right? And I found it the most interesting because it's so different from conventional financing, right? I'm not calling your employer, I'm not calculating your debt to income ratio and working through your pay stubs or anything like that. It's really more about business purpose and deal making. And does this deal make sense? Okay. at what point in the process, so loan officer, you work with all this different stuff. When did that officially get, when did you get that stamp? When did that happen for you officially? Yeah, so for a little while I was like just getting my, uh cutting my teeth if you will, processing loans for experienced brokers, doing some kind of like initial lead gen type stuff, but during that time I'm getting my licensing and whatnot. So I'd say like sometime in 2017 I officially got licensed as a loan originator and started getting very active in the forums, you know, because I'd come across stuff on BiggerPockets all the time, people would say things like, my loan officer says my debt to income ratio doesn't work for this purchase or this refi. But I have the cash, I have the income, you know, it's just the way that they're calculating it on their end. Or they'd say stuff like, I want to invest title in my LLC, but my loan officer says I can't do it. Or maybe most crucially was this one. I just renovated this house, but my loan officer says I need to wait six or 12 months before they can use the new appraisal to do a cash out refi. And that's where I That question right there, which to this day is gonna come up on BP every single day. I started injecting myself, just giving advice. Cause you can't really be salesy in the forums there. don't want you to, people kind of do it, but you're not really supposed to be soliciting business. You're supposed to be like giving information. But I found that if you just consistently do that every day, you know, people are gonna come across you and you're, you're an authority on the topic and they'll reach out to you. And I, that's the approach I took because I really hated cold calling. I was like, need, I need like a good way for people to want to call me. Yeah. And that's how I found it. Did you have a good opening line to break the ice when you were doing the cold calling day? uh sort of, because like, it really, and this is why I hate cold calling, because you could have a rock solid, like shooting fish in a barrel type of offer to somebody, but like nine out of 10 people just aren't, don't have their ears open to it if it's a cold call, right? Like in our case, we really were, we had a huge list of borrowers who had rates that were in like this, at the time, sevens and eights and nines. And we were very familiar with who wrote those notes, what the repayment penalties were. So we knew almost every person we called. we could provide a tremendous benefit to, right? We have a program with identical terms or identical guidelines to the one you have, but with rates three, 4 % lower, you know? So, you know, but even with that, just, I didn't enjoy it. What I enjoyed was people want what I am offering and they are trying to get in touch with me. Or, I mean, and then as time goes on, it just gets better and better because it becomes more of like a word of mouth business. Now I rely much less on being in the bigger pockets forums and much more on nurturing the relationships I already have, which naturally bring in a lot of people, part of their local meetups, and they're in Cincinnati, or New Orleans, or LA, all over the country. I mean, sounds like BiggerPockets, obviously has, you've built this great reputation, but BiggerPockets also has a reputation of being this great resource for so many people. mean, the community has been, I'm sure, big uplifting force in driving your career forward. ah I mean, you recommend that as a tool for basically any new property manager or landlord or anything like that, right? 100%. It's actually the most easy answer I ever give someone. Like all the time people who know me or meet me from outside of real estate, they are curious, right? Like, oh, I've always wanted to do that. Right. It's been on my back burner for a while. Like, you know, best advice I can give you is to get on bigger pockets because I mean, just about any question you could possibly have has been asked there, right? Hey, I'm looking for a plumber in Cincinnati or hey, I know any good property managers in this town or hey, I'm self-managing. what do I do when my tenant says this? Like lot of that has been answered and it's pretty sortable and yeah, you just gotta throw yourself in and start listening to podcasts like this and other ones like BP, you know? If you want to listen to this podcast, you're going to really learn something because we're starting. We started at zero. No. Well, think back, think all the way back. And I'm sorry, Patrick, I don't mean to steal every question out of the ether here, but I will give you a chance to chime in in a minute. back all the way back to your very first deal. When you're getting into the industry, your first property or deal, what was it like? What do you remember? Any mistakes that you made that you still hold on, that you thought was a great learning experience? That first time out the gate, do you remember it very clearly at all? do and I always felt very uh self-conscious of perhaps saying the wrong thing because you know there's so many things in this world that you just don't know until you come across it right and so it's kind of a hard industry to break into in that sense because there's a lot going on right so the biggest mantra I kind of kept telling myself was the obvious one all salespeople kind of you know have which is you know under promise and over deliver but another one that's great for me that always seem to work because as long as you're showing good faith in everything else you do with that person, they're never gonna get mad at, I don't know, but I'll find out. So I find that people who end up like torching your reputation are the ones that don't do that and they'll confidently say something that they're not really sure about and then throw off the whole experience and possibly a deal, possibly money, right? This is, in many cases, this is the, I'm involved with maybe the largest transaction, largest financial transaction of this person's life, you know. is power. That is a lot of response. It's like the old Spider-Man quote. With great power comes great responsibility. You to make sure that you're on top of things. And to that topic too, like part of how I never get out over my skis on that type of thing now and can manage a pipeline of 40, 50 deals at a time in process is uh by not being a master of none, right? I really try to stay in my lane with these DSCR loans or these fixing flip products. They're a great one, two punch to each other. They compliment each other for certain strategies. And oh the good news is our company has a bunch of other loan officers who love to specialize in different stuff. So if you got VA scenarios, conventional scenarios, you know, agency commercial scenarios. Odds are I have someone within arm's reach who by staying in my lane helps me become an expert and practicing the same kick a thousand times kind of thing, you know? Okay. You explained earlier that you shifted gears from the restaurant business to become a loan officer, but you also own properties of your own, like rental properties of your own. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. So again, wouldn't happen without BiggerPockets because it kind of simultaneously fostered and fueled my loan officer position while also really like, you know, I was just like every other user trying to learn for my own sake, right? Especially when I started doing all these deals and I'm like, man, this guy has 10 houses. How did he do this? And let me reverse engineer this a little bit for my own sake, you know? And so how I cracked into my first deal as an investor, was after a couple years of being a mortgage loan officer. I guess I'd been doing it for like maybe two, three years. Finally started making some great income and I had two borrowers. They didn't even know each other but I was speaking to both of them. Like every other day it felt like both doing BRRR in St. Louis, Missouri like once or twice a month with me. One or two deals. So after like a year or so of doing that, you know, I sit back and I have dozens of a Appraisals in my Google Drive in the same zip code and they're all very similar deals, right? You can kind of narrow it down. Okay, here's a 3-2 He bought it for this he put this into it and it was worth this much after and so I just tried to kind of mimic Deals that I saw working out really well that were scalable But my first deal was not like most people's first deal at all So, you know, I took it I took a huge risk, but it all worked out. I it's one of these clients Great guy, I'm still friends with him to this day, became the seller in this situation because he was a very active flipper in St. Louis, but he lived here in Los Angeles, working in the music industry. And I had met him at a local meetup. what you might remember around that time is that Holly, one of the most locked down elements of the country was all that film production stuff. So a lot of people who were, you know, working on shows, shows were canceled until further notice. So. If you can imagine this this guy has several, you know hard money loans out his great income just vanished overnight He can't even send workers to a lot of these job sites if you recall it was hard to get even plumbers or electricians or anyone to go out and He had a one ballooning note and for those that don't that don't know what that means it means that the Short-term loan like a one-year hard money loan was coming to an end And it was at probably like the worst possible like dark hour where like you couldn't get toilet paper. Nobody knew what was going on with this thing. Banks weren't really willing to do extensions. They're like, look, I think the world might be over right now. Like we're calling this thing due. And uh he didn't want to, he had finished the rehab on this. It listed for sale because nobody was refining at that time. Like a small, small period of time, but like for, for like three months, you really couldn't get one of these type of. I saw him struggling and kind of squirming and feeling the pressure and, you know, foreclosure or default would have really affected his ability to do other investments, right? So by any means necessary, he needed to get rid of this one, even if that meant kind of breaking even on it and taking the loss. after kind of like just having like friendly console calls, really, never, I wasn't really ready to buy a property. I've been thinking about it a lot, you know, like a lot of your listeners probably soaking up podcasts and thinking about it a whole lot. But, um you know, I had about a hundred thousand to my name, like all sources, um you know. retirement stuff that was untapped and savings and everything else. He owed like $85,000 on this freshly renovated duplex and I had seen the quality of the rehab seat on all the rehab draws and I know him as a person. And so long story short, I worked up the courage to say to him, hey man, uh my relationship with you is much more important than this deal, but if you got into the 11th hour and you consider this like a win-win, like a sigh of relief for you, I would pay all cash what you owe the lender. no appraisal, no nothing. Just fastest title company can move. somewhat reluctantly like a day or two later, he says, hey man, like, it sucks to lose this one, but I'm happy to see you your first deal, like let's do it. And so, whew, now I gotta go explain to my wife that we're gonna completely exhaust the tank oh in the middle of COVID with little kids at home and like really not sure what was going on next, but you know, we pulled trigger on it and then, you know, things kind of normalized, they didn't really normalize, but like banking kind of came back to normal somewhat. over the course of the next few months. So I was only completely tied up for like three months and I didn't do one penny of rehab. I just got it for much less than it was worth under the lender's previous underwriting of it. And it ended up appraising right about where I needed to get a loan for about $85,000 where I'd still cashflow several hundred bucks a month. It was rented for $1250. I think my PITI was like less than 700 bucks. And I left almost nothing in it. I left like two or three grand in the deal. Wow. Okay. That is a big gamble. you correct me if I'm wrong, but you may not suggest that level of risk for all new property and the people that are looking to get into investing in. No, there's way less heart-wrenching ways to go about this, know? But it was one of those things where I had already worked on this specific deal as the originating purchase loan officer. I had a ton of due diligence on it. In many ways, I had a lot more documentation than a typical buyer would have in any scenario. Sure. I had all the invoices from all of his rehab. Well, that's cool. I mean, it's awesome that it paid that it paid off for you. And I mean, that that must have been quite the feeling of just like, well, here we go. You know, it's like Yeah, and technically I got paid to buy that property because a couple years later I ended up pulling some more cash out of it as things kind of, values crept up after the uh part of the pandemic. So yeah, I have definitely negative cash in that and it does cash flow and I get the depreciation and everything else. And from there, I really just, uh to simplify things, I just tried to go after the same type of property in the same neighborhood uh because it's like we can kind of understand the everything about that building and what it's worth and what it'll rent for. Did your experience buying this property and your other properties after that, has that influenced any aspects of your loan officer position? Like in terms of how you think about about loans and helping others? Yeah, I mean, it gave me a real like inside look at the psyche of somebody who's like really backed into a corner uh almost no fault of their own, you know? So from like interacting with seller and I guess interacting with client respect too, you kind of got to think of things this way is like, hey, what's the heartbeat of this? You know, it's not always like the price. It's not always the rate down to the eighth. the origination feed down to the eighth. A lot of times it's something else. It might be something more emotional. It could be timing. It could just be responsiveness. um So I guess what I learned is like figure out, you know, the heartbeat. the deal. Gotcha. Let's get informative. Okay, so we've got a lot of people out there, and that was a bad segue, but we've got a lot of people out there that are listening to the show that, you know, we might've had it in the description or maybe we'll put it on social media, ah but one thing specifically that is a big uh part of your role is DSCR loans. So getting really like basic with it. For listeners who might be new, you know, what exactly is a DSCR loan? And why do you think that it's become so popular with investors right now? So it's in the name, DSCR stands for debt service coverage. In other words, what's the ratio at which you're covering the debt on this property every month? Easiest way to think about it would be a 1.0 break even. It means that the rent, in our case it means the rent is equal to the PITI. the principal interest, taxes, and insurance on the loan. So you don't really want to be at a 1.0, right? But it is a very helpful qualifying tool. And perhaps that's because in the real world, it's not a 1.0. In the real world, you'll get higher rents in the near future or something like that, right? But these are a absolutely crucial tool for anyone who expects the portfolio because Fannie and Freddie, your conventional loans, just have guardrails at a certain point that are going to really limit your ability to do that. So the big thing about DSCR loans and why they're even looking at the subject properties. DSCR. is that they're not looking at your DTI. So we're not looking at tax returns, we're not looking at pay stubs, or even trying to quantify your debt to income ratio at all. We're just concerned that the subject property can cover its own debt. We rely on FICO, you know, that's still very important. These do allow LLC vesting. In some states they'll even require it, but require one guarantor, someone who's gonna have at least one guarantor, whose credit is gonna be relied upon. who owns at least 20 % of the currency. But the reason I say it's so crucial to scaling is for a couple of reasons. One, most people's DTI can't support more than like maybe a couple of mortgages. Two, Fannie and Freddie actually cap you at 10 financed properties no matter what. And most lenders have overlays to cap beneath that. And then the other thing would be like scale. And I'd say this might be like the number one You sir. or marketable factor about DSCR loans is doing cash out refis with little to no title seasoning. So sometime in like May, 2023 or so, conventional lenders change their guidelines to require now 12 months of title seasoning when there's a first position lien on the property, which is most deals, unless you bought it cash, right? Most deals are doing some kind of hard money loan or fix and flip style loan on the front end to buy the distressed property, fix it. up and then they're coming in for a... because we'll use that new title season. We do want to see like hey why did it appraise for so much more than you bought it 90 days ago and that's as simple as you submitting your script to us and allowing us to disconnect the dots there that you made. improvements. So do you think that it is basically that flexibility that that kind of, you know, the way that maybe that you might be able to drive things a little bit higher, like maybe do a little bit more with what you have being what why it's becoming so popular with, you know, with investors these days? Yeah. definitely the easy button. yeah, I mean, even me, like, I actually got a lot of flack from uh people in my cohort in the mortgage industry. when they didn't quite understand it at first, why I was using DSCR loans on my own personal investments, they were like, you qualify for the bank rate. Let's go get you a full doc. I'm like, dude, I'm trying to get this thing closed, like, without any question now, you know? And so it's a much simpler process. And what's crazy is that the industry has become so competitive. There's so much capital chasing too few that nowadays the Delta between conventional rate and DSCR small, if at all, there are some scenarios in which uh the top DSCR lenders might even price inside of Fannie and Freddie on certain scenarios, namely like max LTV cash outs on two to four units or stuff like that. Okay. Patrick, I don't know about you, but he, I, I've heard the name Fanny and Freddie a few times. I'm wondering, I'm like, they sound like they're good, bigger pockets users too. We have to their contact information. Yeah, so Fanny and Freddie are the... Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, they are government sponsors. entities, the GSEs, basically the federal government. backstopping mortgages and this came into place after the financial crisis, know, as a way to the mortgage. Very strict rules of underwriting proved that borrowers have the personal ability to repay the loan. In my world, DSCR loans, we are not trying to prove that the borrower has the personal ability to repay the loan. We're trying to sell as many loans as possible and the underwriting is much better than back then, right? Because we have much more strict requirements on FICO, in some cases experience, and namely just, we kind of work hard through multiple... Strong on this property. Okay. Patrick, you gave me a weird look when I asked that question. Did you know what that was? was it? I was I was trying to use context clues. uh Fannie and Freddie, what I mean is conventional. What I mean is go. What I mean is they have certain federal guidelines that you cannot get around. Whereas with this, we are not supported by the federal government, GSEs or anything like that. We're supported by hedge funds, life insurance companies, large private investors, entities that would want to purchase this paper on the secondary market. And so for like, let's say for the average, for the average home buyer, let's say, do you pretty much, in most cases, do you recommend DSCR loans? Like, do you feel that it's beneficial, you know, let's say nine times out of 10 or something like that, or like what specific instances would you say that one is better than the other? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. Like, I'm leading more towards saying, yeah, there are scenarios on a turnkey rental property cookie cutter deal. but he had a great W-2 bar where... who's not interested in investing title in an entity just using their personal name. Yeah, I'd encourage you to shop a conventional lender and see what they're coming back with. There's a chance you stand to benefit a couple basis points on your rate. Might not be as much as you expect compared to the DSDR loan, but surely, yeah. Okay, cool. I've got a couple, not necessarily rapid fire questions, but I do want to touch on you as an investor. So from your experience, what's the number one thing that investors can do to make themselves more attractive to lenders? Yeah, good question. You know, being easy to work with on my end means like, you don't have to know everything. I'm here to answer your questions, you know, but strong communication skills. I highly recommend that investors start kind of setting up some type of work drive folder, or whatever you like and store certain documents in there that are like ready to go. Like driver's license. If you have, if you already own properties, like schedule of real estate, you're, if you're using an LLC, have the entity docs. ready to go, the basics, like you of organization, operating agreement, EIN letter. And then if it was recent, like if you're coming to me for a refi, which is most people, I'd say like the lion's share of my deals are refis on recently renovated property. And people like that, I say you should really have your scope of work dialed in. Whatever you did to this property recently, have a beautiful one pager that just lays it all out. Not just for me and the underwriter, we're kind of barely going to look at it, but really for the appraiser. Right? I really want you to have the best chance of success. I make the more I loan you, the more money that I make, you know? So it's never like I'm like wanting that to come in low, but one thing you can do to set yourself up for success is have a one-pager put together of your recently completed renovations and perhaps maybe some before and after photos. Another thing to avoid appraisal surprise is really having a good grip on your comps to begin with. You know, a lot of investors I ask them, okay, great. What do you expect this appraisal to come back with? so we can size up the initial quotes and they go, Zillow's got this and Redfin's got that and hey, sometimes is that reasonable? Yeah, most of time, no. What I'd much rather you do is contact a local agent or broker and request a comparative market analysis or a CMA. It takes them all five minutes to set some filters and run a search and print you out a nice, if it says, hey, here's the most similar comps that sold within a half a mile in the last six months. I love the practicality of your first tip being organize yourself basically, like get your Google Drive or all of your stuff in the right format. You speak that as if you've run into situations where disorganization can cause chaos. Yeah, it does. There's a big difference between the client who has everything signed, sealed, and delivered, and the one who's got no subject line, and just says something like, what are your rates and terms? Well, you should see how complicated this rate sheet is. There's adjustments for everything, right? Every 20 points in FICO or so, the LTV, the specific DSCR ratio, the loan amount, this location, the unit count. all types of things that can affect the rate. And actually we built out a pretty cool pricing engine for this product. We can maybe plug in the show notes or something, but I created a really cool tool and we're spending a lot of time on it every week to make it, you know, bigger and better and eventually become something I think is like industry leading. But right now it's, very simple widget where you can go in there and punch a few details in on your scenario. Like whether it's a purchase or a refi, what's the value, what's the rent, what's your estimated FICO score. annual taxes, annual insurance, so that I can calculate the DSCR. And as soon as you've entered those figures, boom, instantly you're gonna get dialed in rates and terms, fees, loan amount, monthly payments. And even if you're not trying to start a loan application with me, I highly encourage you to play with it, because I think it will actually really help you size up your deals. Like when I was first analyzing deals to purchase on my end, the cheat code that I had was like all these wholesale broker portals, where I kind of worked it from the angle of the loan. to begin with, it was kind of like, okay, how will this loan work? What I intended to do was really like give that to the borrower in a really digestible way that's easy on the eyes and comprehensible. And the other thing is like a lot of our industry is so archaic where this whole conversation is like, you know, kind of whining and dining you on the phone and asking for documents and telling you we'll get back to you later. Whereas this is like, hey, this is exactly what it is based on what you're telling us. And if you'd like to proceed, you know, click the next button and we'll start. working on reaching out to you and collecting some stuff. Yeah, that is cool. We'll definitely have to link to some. So it's like a website that you built or like a. It's like a widget on our website. so it's investorpropertyloan.com. DSCR. Okay, sounds like a super useful tool. I'm definitely gonna mess around with it, because I'm in the market to start looking at homes in the next year or so, whatever, but it's like, you know, kind of play around with those kind of tools. It's always cool to see what you can find online and see. If nothing else, it just gives you like some flavor for like where rates are at, So in terms of rates and like the condition of the market right now, we've asked a couple people that we've had on as guests, but I'm curious to hear your perspective. How have lending conditions shifted in the last year and what should investors expect going into 2026? I mean, I'd say in general this year we had a lot of rate improvement. We had very good volume on this side of things. think as a small company, we originated more than $100 billion worth of loans this year already, much more than $100, probably a little bit more than $150, which is a lot for a group of six or seven loan officers. Right now, the average Rate for a DSCR going to assume a few things here like average FICO range and maximum LTV somewhere in the mid-6s and that's up a little bit from a few weeks ago pre-fed rate announcement. These fed rate announcements really throw the average person through a loop with what to expect with mortgage rates because largely these announcements are telegraphed, right? Wall Street and the secondary market knows exactly what Jerome Powell is about to say. Well they know what he's going to reduce the rate by. And that's largely baked into the pricing pre-announcement in the lineup. But in this specific case, he lowered the interest rate, the federal funds rate a little bit, which does not control mortgage rates. It's the overnight lending rate from one bank to another. But in his speech, he had some damning words about the economy, really questioned his decision to lower rates, basically said that the next meeting, it's not promised that there'll be another drop. and all of this kind of like negative language caused the five and 10 year treasuries to actually go up. So contrary to what everyone was, the average person was expecting, uh after that federated, a federate cut most recently, mortgage rates actually went up. they're more in line with, mortgage rates are more in line with the five and 10 year treasury note. yields. Okay. Yeah. So some signs of positivity. of positivity but what I would actually uh my my main point here is to not worry about it too much. I really I really think I really think that things are going to be sticky for a long time. I expect 2026 to be a fairly flat. you know, lake water type of year for rates, are things gonna go up a little bit and down a little bit and up a little bit and down a little bit? Sure. But if you're really like stopping yourself from doing a deal over like an eighth or a quarter in rate, I think it's largely wasted time. I think that when you're underwriting these deals, as a matter of fact, you ought to just try to make all of these work at 100 bips higher than what you think the rate's gonna be, you know? Rather than relying on uh needs to be low. Because here's the thing, real estate, It's really all about time in the saddle or time, you know, I think I'm thinking like a workout, a punt or an out, like time under tension, you You can make moves as rates fluctuate over time, but I just wouldn't, I wouldn't stop yourself from getting into a deal that works today at the current rate, or at a rate that's slightly higher than the current rate, because you think rates might come down in six months. I've been watching people play that game for years, They think rates are coming down in six months, and maybe they are, maybe they're not, but... Yeah, yeah, one of the one of the most interesting things that and you know, we've been doing the podcast for like, probably around a year, maybe a little less than, but every almost every interviewee we've ever had on the show, when we've asked about like basic advice for people like looking to jump into the real estate industry, everyone kind of just says like, the waiting for the right time thing is just kind of like not the way that it works. Like you kind of just have to take that plunge and jump. my story. Sure. Yeah, I I jumped in like, not just I mean, I jumped head first. That's putting it mildly, right? two feet of uh water. That's cool. So I do want to ask a couple like some quick fires again. I've got a couple more questions What is some of your favorite real estate books or podcasts? Like, you know, obviously besides our show that that you might recommend to people like besides like, you know We talked a lot about bigger pockets, but are there any other great real estate resources that you would recommend to people? Yeah, mean, you know, one that I listen to as often as they put it out, which is a couple of times a week, is an offshoot of the BiggerPockets podcast. It's a lot of like the core guys, but it's called On the Market with Dave Meyer. And usually they run kind of a panel where Dave is like the big data guy and can run you through a lot of like local and nationwide data in terms of like what's going on in the housing market. And then the other bit of the round table are investors, one of which is a friend and client of mine, Henry. Yeah, that's a great. show because they're very short episodes. Usually they're less than an hour, like 30 to 40 minutes, and they're very topical. So a lot of times it's about what's been going on in the last few days that may move the needle for investors. Okay. Cool. Patrick, you got anything else? My one question is circling back a little bit, but I'm just kind of curious because uh Zach and I are both in a position. We're like learning about real estate. We still have yet to buy our first property. And so I think a lot of uh our angles at things are about buying that first property. From a loan perspective, what's the biggest difference between getting that first property and then getting that second property? Because that's something that we haven't talked a ton about in the past. Because like from my point of view it's like yeah, you save up you save up you get the down payment on the first property You got a loan but like the second property seems kind of like a like science fiction at this point to us because we don't even have the first one but it might be good to like know about that and plan ahead a little bit so just any any thoughts on that Yeah, I mean... short of you guys just having like, beaucoup crazy income, you know, it's gonna be very hard to like, buy one turn key rental property with 20 % down and then save up another 20% and do it again. Like that's kind of crazy. So like what, what I've done with my limited amount of cash on hand is employ a strategy, which is going to limit my amount of cash in every deal, thereby allowing me to do more deals. And that's really the BRRR strategy or the fix and hold strategy. BRRR stands for, you know, buy, renovate. rent out refinance. And in doing this, you're usually dealing with lower down payment because on our end, we can do this with 10 % down where we're funding 90 % of the purchase price and 100 % of the rehab with no prepayment penalty. You force the value up through your innovations and hopefully you're able to do a cash out refi where you get all or most of that initial cash. That way, hey, now you have a cash filling rental property. you have the same or almost the amount of cash you started with, you can go do it again. That's a very oversimplified view of it. And then once you develop experience, I really don't recommend this to first time investors, but what I will say is that once you've built a track record of doing that a few times, like I have, you would be surprised how many people would be interested in private lending relationships. after I did that seven, eight times or whatever, I was able to do the next few days. with true private money where I'm going to an individual with a large self-directed retirement account and I'm explaining the deal and where their loan amount would be relative to the after-repair value. Hey, here's why it's so similar to the other deals I've done. And now I can get like 100 % financing on the front end. got it. Yeah, yeah, LTV DSCR and brrr a couple good ones So it is called burr because we've talked about that term like way in the past and we didn't like be like we weren't sure how to. Yeah, and I'm on, if anyone's on Instagram, I'm actually, it's just my name, Alex Bacchese Berlender. Okay. Yeah, because I can kind of help on both sides of that, right? can help with the hard money loan to buy the distressed property. And then of course. the DSCR refi. Did you check and see if at Burlander just that was available? I don't remember, I've had that tag for a long time now, like probably almost a decade, but like, yeah, I think there were a couple domains that I was upset about being taken already, but I doubt they're even still being used, because I don't know who they are. Like, Berlones or Berlender or something more simple. Here's the other thing, loan officers kind of like, unfortunately carry this uh stigma sort of of being like in the same vein as like used car salesmen, I feel like sometimes. So like, I just feel like a lot of times people have their guard up already. and it's nice to have the ability to have one unique name. like they Google it, quickly the Instagram comes up. Yeah, it's a lot of stuff, but it's mainly actually just personal stuff. it kind of like, I just wanted to reflect, hey, this is an actual human, right? Not some kind of 80 guy. Yeah, exactly. The people's own officer. There you go. They might have to change the name to that. Now you should absolutely check and see if at the Berlander is available because that's a sweet tag. All right, well tell the people where they can find you. I you've already given out your Instagram handle. We've heard a couple resources here, tell the listeners your resources online, where to find you. Basically this is your chance to kind of just plug away for a second. Yeah, so easiest place to find me would be either Instagram or BiggerPockets. Very simple, just my name and Instagram, TheBerlender. And then our website, investorpropertyloan.com slash dscr. I kind of run point guard on all those submissions that come through. So if you simply use that tool, it will ping me and I'll be reaching out to you. Okay, that's awesome. Well, thank you, Alex, for being on the show. It was enlightening. It was a pleasure to get to hear about your story and listen to you talk and you've educated Patrick. Patrick, do you feel educated? I feel so educated. I know so much now. That's what it's been insightful. Yeah, and for your own investing sake, you forgot to ask something you guys have my cell phone, you let me know. Sure, and we'd love to have you back on the podcast anytime you feel like it. yeah, I'm sure one of these days we'll have you on to kind of pick your brain a little bit more about what's going on in the world. Alright, that sounds great guys, thank you. Cool. Awesome, Alex. So thanks again. All right, thank you Alex for joining us. That was a great interview. Patrick, did you learn a lot? I learned so much. Yeah, you look it. we've been uh excellent at having a good, I'm freaking out too. Damn it, that was really funny too, shit. All right. All right, and we're back. Alex again, thank you so much for speaking with us today. It was awesome to hear from him. I think Patrick, on this beautiful Monday, we both learned a lot, wouldn't you say? I learned a lot, yes. Cool. I know all about burr now. And I'm a lone expert some might say alone. Well, let's not get carried away You still should consult with the experts, but thank you for listening to this episode of the rent ish Remember to follow us on all of your podcast platforms of choice out there Spotify Apple podcasts overcast wherever you get your shows Check us out and give us a rating thumbs up five star review Leave us a comment tell us how much you like the show Share it with a friend of yours that may be interested in real estate or property management or it's just someone that wants to listen to a couple guys having a good time. uh email your questions to questions at therentishpod.com. uh yeah, I think that's about it. So until the next time that we see you guys, I've been Zach, that's been Patrick, and we'll see you next week. The Rentish Podcast is recorded in Cincinnati, Ohio, hosted by Patrick Giro and me, Zachary Retello. Produced by Moussae Gebermeskele and Charlene Mulchendani. Edited by Elliott Monjenis. Theme song by me, Zac Ritello.