Our Journey
This is Laura Cabrera along with Kate Turpin and together, we are Oakwood Investments. We can be reached at 510-508-9752 or Laura@OakwoodNotes.com or Kate@OakwoodNotes.com. Our friends and fellow investors are always asking how we got into Note investing so I thought I would take the time to share our journey through Real Estate Investing and more specifically how we came to invest in Non-Performing Notes.
Like most real estate investors, we started out with grand ideas about making millions flipping houses. Well, I had grand ideas. Kate was kind enough to allow me to dream. In 2007, with no experience, no training, no mentors to lead the way, we purchased our first investment property in Oakland, CA. Plan A was to fix and flip. Plan B was to fix and rent out. Plan C was to fix and move in. We did everything wrong. We bought too high. We used our own money. We did most of the work ourselves and you guessed it, we moved in. The real estate market continued to drop, and we found ourselves under water for the next 7 years. Ouch! We vowed never again!
While we licked our wounds in our newly renovated underwater house, we dove head first into real estate education. We read every real estate book we could get our hands on. We attended countless classes and seminars. We learned from the greatest real estate minds out there, such as Peter Fortunato, David Tilney, Mike Cantu, Gary Johnson, Jack Miller, Bruce Norris, Walter Wafford, and Dykes Bodiford to name a few. I found a successful investor in San Francisco and convinced him to mentor me. We had our first profitable Real Estate venture in 2011 and we haven’t looked back since.
Kate and I focused on Buy and Holds otherwise known as rental properties. We used private money lenders to fund the purchase and rehab cost. Once we he had a paying tenant in place, we would refinance with a bank, pay back our private lender with interest and start all over again. We offered our investors better returns than they made in their IRA’s, 401K’s, or even the stock market. We have never lost a cent of investor’s capital and we plan to keep it that way. We got so good at doing this, we grew to owning and managing over 70 doors in a very short amount of time. We quit our day jobs and became full-time Real Estate Investors in 2015. We enjoy providing clean, safe, quality housing for our residents while at the same time providing secure, profitable real estate investments for our private investors to grow their wealth.
As the real estate market continued to climb, more and more investors jumped in to try their hand at investing. When more investors bid on the same number of properties, the prices climb, profits disappear, and the numbers stop making sense. We knew we had to adapt and change our strategy if we were going to survive. That’s when we learned about Notes. With a new strategy, comes more education. We found several educators out there but Scott Carson and the We Close Notes Crew was by far the best educator we found. Quick shout-out to Scott and his crew. Thanks for all you do!
And that’s how we began investing in Non-Performing Notes. We will maintain the rentals we currently have but we are focusing our efforts on buying Non-Performing Notes. We will use the same funding strategy as before but this time we will be creating wealth for our investors as lien lords, not landlords. Stay tuned for more information on notes as well as how you can profit from investing in Notes with us,
By the way…. Kate and I ended up selling that house in Oakland in 2014 for a nice profit. Maybe we will share those numbers as well.