Have you ever looked for a particular real estate service but found too many companies to choose from or really don’t know where to go? In this episode, learn about the one bag for all your real estate services with BAG. Dickie Baldwin is the CEO of Baldwin Advisory Group. With Dickie’s 40 years of experience and tons of vendors, sellers, and buyers contacts, he decided to help people fulfill their real estate needs easier and at a reasonable price. Join Dan Deppen and Dickie as they dive into the broker price opinion and the services found on the Baldwin Advisory Group website – from the property inspection report to title searches and everything in between.
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BAG: Your One-Stop Shop For Real Estate Services With Dickie Baldwin
I’m joined by Dickie Baldwin from Baldwin Advisor Group. I appreciate your coming on. For people who aren’t familiar with Dickie, you’ve got a background in the mortgage industry that goes back decades. Give us a little bit of introduction on how you found the note space and some of the things you’ve been up to over the years.
When you say decades, that makes you old. Seriously, I have been in the industry approximately 40 years. I had done everything from being a realtor in Houston. I originated mortgage loans, warehouse lending, set up multiple net branch operations across the country for mortgage companies to become mortgage bankers. I became an investor in the note industry way back when nobody knew what notes were. Also, I had been in the title side of things. In 2018 in March, I decided that I was going to retire because I was turning 70 in that following September. I shut everything down. Literally after about three or four days, I got extremely bored. I realized I’ve got 40 years of experience, lots of vendor contacts, lots of a seller contacts, lots of buyer contacts. Why not create a one stop shop for the real estate investor that does every service imaginable for a real estate investor?
We all know how difficult it is when you want to do a BPO. If you don’t know where to go to get on the internet to try and find somebody that will work with you and give you a reasonable price, it’s a nightmare. Hence was the creation of Baldwin Advisory Group, better known as BAG. As my slogan says, “One BAG for all your real estate services.” That was the absolute beginning BAG. To form the company, I reached out to a lot of the different vendors that I have worked with throughout the years. I set up relationships with them. I like to use the quote “strength in numbers.” I used the BPO as an example. A typical investor may do five or ten BPOs a year. I’ll do several hundred a month.
It makes life a lot easier. When I was starting out, when you approach vendors, if you’re only doing one note and sometimes people will get into the business, they’ll do 1 or 2 or 0 and then move on. It’s nice when you have situation where this big network where you can take advantage of some scale.
As the business has grown, I’m working with the one-off individual as well as the people that are doing small bolts, getting ready to do some O&E reports and BPOs for approval of almost 100 assets.
I know I’ve discussed doing some with you for some smaller pools for fusion income funds. It’s nice when you go to one stop and get all of those as opposed to getting on the telephone to separate realtors. That becomes impossible. I like being able to send an email of, “Here’s what I need,” and then you can wait for a few days until everything starts rolling back in. Who did you use to build your website?
It was built by a company out of California and it being serviced by a local, independent web individual based out of Arizona. He’s in Australia but as soon as he gets back, we’re going to do some updates on mine. My goal was to help not once again, not only the brand-new investor. We’ve mentioned BPO or we mentioned title search and a lot of times, investors are sitting there scratching their heads, “What’s a BPO? What is a title search?” In designing the website, I wanted to have a brief explanation of what each one of the different services were and then once I was able to speak with people, we can get more into depth as to everything that was covered that would benefit them in making an intelligent decision on, on the assets they’re looking at. It’s www.BaldwinAdvisoryGroup.com. One thing I might mention, on each one of these little services, there is an order form. I’ve found out that in some instances under Chrome, it was blocking the order form. People would either go to Internet Explorer or take the blockage off.
Is the order form popping up in a separate window or something like that?
We mentioned BPO. What I’ve done, besides the neat little diagrams on each service is a brief explanation of what a BPO or broker price opinion is.
I want to talk about the property inspection reports a little bit more.
What a property inspection report is when an agent will go out, take pictures of the subject and then forms that they complete. Does it have a roof? Does it look like it’s occupied? Is the yard maintained? Is the house up to standards of the neighborhood? The agent will take pictures of the subject and the address available and in street views. In a property inspection report, all of that is in there but there is not a value. There are no comps that are used as compared to a BPO, which is also done by an agent. They also give a detailed report on the property, but they will use three comps in the neighborhood, three recent solds in the neighborhood. The agent will come up with a value as is.
In some instances, if they’re able to see what repairs are needed, do an after-repair value. Real quickly, then there’s a big discussion on somebody trying to find an agent to go out and one of these services. I understand that people want to have the control of it, but the issue is one, trying to find an agent that will go out and do it with the intent of actually giving a value on the property and not just trying to get a listing. Whereas you go through a third-party vendor, my BPO vendors, the agents are paid to do a very specific job and that’s to go out and obtain a value in pictures, not to get the listing.
Once the agent completes that, it will go into a quality control review. If the review has issues, they will send the report back to the agent for revisions before it’s released to the client. By doing this, you have an extra set of eyes and it’s impartial as far as trying to get a listing or not getting a listing. Because even a lot of times on the BPO, the agent will not be listed. I’m not going to say don’t call your agent to do a BPO, but if you think about the extra set of eyes, an agent isn’t going to do it for free. Most of them don’t have the right forms to put an overview together, whereas the vendors that I have do.
I was going to say, I like having the property inspections more and more with them because when they put the BPO together, they’ll note repairs that are needed on the outside. Of course, one of the big risks with note investing is you’re generally not seeing the inside. What I’ve found is on the BPO, since they don’t have other information, they assume that the inside is all good. If it’s something where the borrower’s going to ride the ship down through a foreclosure and you’re going to end up with the back, there’s usually stuff going on the inside. I like the property inspection report because it gives me more information on the condition of the outside, which I can then use to try to extrapolate what might be going on the inside. It gets qualitative.
I mentioned back in the old days when the note industry was unheard of, we would buy a very large bulk of assets and unfortunately a lot of them were in Cook County, Illinois. The pools that we were buying, the taxes hadn’t been paid in two or three years. We started doing property inspection reports to see if there was even a house there. Cook County was very good about demoing a property. There are lots of stories there. One other thing I want to mention is I do have several hard money and private money lenders in the network. A lot of them are using what is called a hybrid appraisal. That’s one of the new selections that is going to be on the order form when we work on it. With the hybrid appraisal, it’s a lot cheaper than what a full appraisal is. What happens in the hybrid is they will go out, pictures will be taken and usually it’s of the interior because these are mainly on rehabs. We’re able to get inside. We do exterior as well as interior. That information is given to an appraiser that basically does a desktop appraisal and it’s not done by an agent. It’s done by a licensed appraiser that is familiar with those areas. That is also something to consider. A full appraisal typically will be $500, $600 where the hybrid is in the $200 range.
They would have to get inside to do the full appraisal, right?
Yes.
A lot of times, that’s not an option anyways if it’s occupied.
The industry is going bananas where everybody thinks you can buy everywhere. You can't. Click To TweetThat takes care of the BPOs.
They talk about the title searches and how that works.
I’ve got to compliment you on your newsletter when you were talking about the different steps and processes and part of the due diligence. The two things that you highlighted are right here at the top, which are BPO and title search.
Verifying the value of the asset and then making sure the title is clean are two of the biggest things. If one of those is not there, you’re in trouble.
This is why we have them at the top. A title search basically is where they go out and pull any taxes, liens, judgments, anything that could potentially cloud the title. Once again, here’s an order form where I collect the subject information. Are you wanting a current owner search, a foreclosure or two-owner search, a 30, 40, 60 years search? Is it a commercial or an update of a search that typically will be done within the last six months?
If somebody buys an O&E and then they need an updated version within some time window, six months or whatever, they can do that at a reduced price. They don’t have to pay for the entire search.
I will clarify a lot depending on who that original O&E came from. Everything that I do is in the United States. There are some cheap online overseas O&E reports that we have found not to be truly accurate.
What things are investors looking for when they get to the O&E report back?
The biggest thing in my mind, first off, are the delinquent taxes and then you would go into the liens. Right at the very top of an O&E report, obviously you have who the current owner of record is.
You always want to verify whoever owns it. If it’s a contract for deed, you want to make sure whoever you’re buying it from are the ones on title.
That gives you the avenue. Further in the report, there’s a chain of assignments. The last thing any of us want is to be working diligently on a pool that you think that you’re working with the seller and it ends up being somebody that’s trying to make a couple extra bucks by brokering the deal.
Sometimes, I’ve had it where the seller did own it but they hadn’t gotten everything recorded. That’s where I say, “Let’s get everything recorded first.”
The O&E report, Owner and Encumbrances report, which is a current owner search is the most active. I will say though, there are a lot of times in contract for deeds that a lot of my clients are asking for a two-owner search versus a current owner.
I always like to go back through the chain a little bit and see where everything came from.
Once this form is completed and the code put in, you hit submit. That immediately comes to me. I will say on the BPOs, in the title searches, I do handle those directly myself. The vendors that I have to do each of those entities or services, the product is privately-labeled under the BAG logo. When it’s all said and done, the vendor invoices me. I in turn invoice you, the client, typically only on BPOs and title searches. I’m able to keep track for you if I ordered it on the fourth, I know it should be in by the 7th or 8th and I’m able to stay on top of the vendor to get an EPA status. I might mention in order to use the BAG network, it doesn’t cost you. I don’t have a subscription fee, a monthly fee, anything like that. My job is to give you the services that you need and that’s why I did the BPOs in the title searches as a private label because it’s able to group everything together and it gives better control for everybody.
I like it because it’s one stop shopping. You’re not paying any more on the pricing side than going directly to some other vendors who do title searches and BPOs. I’ve had a couple of cases too where I bought 5 or 6 notes at once and it’s nice because a lot of times, I’m not in the habit of going to the website. A lot of times, I’ll send you an email and say, “Here’s what I need on these 5 or 6,” and then I know it’s all taken care of and then I can move along to the next thing that I’m trying to do. The value for me is it’s a big-time saver because I’m not herding all the cats. I’m not following up on five individual agents. A lot of times, I’ve contacted agents directly and had them get me BPOs, but sometimes they disappear or sometimes they forget about it. You’ve got to do all this following up, which gets to be a challenge when you start getting a lot of different balls in the air.
A lot of other folks that deal with BAG instead of using the form, they do email me, which is absolutely fine. There’s absolutely no problem emailing to me at Baldwin@BaldwinAdvisoryGroup.com what you need. I will always follow up every time one of these order forms come across to make sure that all over the information is accurate and then I can place the order.
You mentioned RMLOs. That’s one thing I haven’t done a lot of originating yet, but that’s something that I’m personally interested in because I know some different options for getting that done. For me personally, doing seller finances, it’s probably going to be a bigger part of my business going forward as I have some potentially soon to be REOs there in the pipeline. I’ll probably be exiting some of those by originating mortgages and land contracts and things.
Many times, individuals can have a package in front of them and not know what they're looking at. Click To TweetA classic example, I was speaking with an investor that is fairly new in the business, but he’s building a rental portfolio in Mississippi. I asked him about seller financing. He says, “A lot of these people are going to be wanting to buy the house so I might as well seller finance it.” I made an introduction to my RMLO, residential mortgage loan officer. This is not your typical loan officer that you watch your house with. They are licensed through the FDIC that will originate seller-financed mortgages compliant to Dodd-Frank, which is the key. They also issue a certificate that it is Dodd-Frank compliant. If you would ever happen to sell that seller finance mortgage note to another investor, that certificate goes along with that note. My RMLO is able to originate nationwide.
Thanks so much, Dickie. You’ve got an amazing wealth of knowledge and experience that other note investors can leverage to your network.
We can do a property preservation. For instance, I’m doing a lot on winterizations right now.
If you haven’t had your stuff winterized, you’d better get on that.
What’s so exciting about this property preservation, as we all know, property preservation companies deal a lot with FHA and HUD and their pricing is in that arena that’s allowable by Fannie or HUD. I’m putting together a nationwide realtor network. These are investor-friendly realtors, which you and I have used together, Dan. The whole goal is there are lots of agents around the country. There’s not a whole lot which I would consider investor-friendly.
There’s a big difference. Most of them are doing what I call retail sales. There are ones out there who specialize in foreclosures and REOs. That’s one thing I do like. If I’m in an area where I don’t have anybody I’m calling around, I’ll ask, “Do you specialize in foreclosures and REOs?” If they don’t, I’ll ask if they know somebody who does because they usually do.
My goal is to have an investor-friendly realtor in every major city of the United States. These realtors cannot only list sale or property manage, but they’ll be able to be door knocking, have door locks changed, cut the grass, do winterization or even help on a rehab. These realtors either do it with their own construction companies or they work with local contractors that they can refer. You being in Colorado and you’ve got a property in Ohio, you’ll have feet on the ground basically overseeing the work for you.
Having the right realtor is worth their weight in gold. I did one in Cincinnati and the realtor, she knocked on the door for me. There were some different postings you had to put up. She went to court for me. When we had to do the clean-out, she knew folks who could handle that. It was even more complicated than a normal clean out because the way in Cincinnati, the bailiff was going to show up. You had literally a few hours to get everything out by the curb and then you had to move it again. It was all seamless. It was very easy to handle as if I was on the phone trying to coordinate everything, it wouldn’t work.
I’m proud of that particular service because it enhances the property preservation. We also have various money lenders. If you need a traditional closing, I can help on that. I’m also doing a lot of lender title policies right now through my title company, which is a whole new segment that maybe we may want to get some of my title people on and discuss the benefits of a lender’s title policy.
That might be a good topic for the next time you come on.
Title curative or lease tracking, I can take care of that. Collateral review, many times, individuals can have a package in front of them and they may not know what they’re looking at.
I actually didn’t realize you did that one.
Can I tell a story you? You obviously were one of my original clients and do an awful lot of BPOs with me. When we were doing a presentation in Austin and I was going through the website, when I got down to skip tracing, you raised your hand and said, “When did you get skip tracing?” “I’ve had it since day one.” This is why I like going through this website. It’s to let you know of all of the different things. The collateral review, they let you know what you do have, what you don’t have and what you should have in order to make an intelligent decision on all the assets. I can also do the assignments and the recordings for you. I can store original documents. If you want to change your servicer, I have mortgage servicing available, self-directed IRAs. If anybody’s got an IRS tax problem, I’ve got an attorney that will take on the IRS for $10,000 or more claims.
Fortunately, I’ve never needed that one.
That’s good but it’s there. I got the realtor network. I also have a nationwide attorney network that can assist in bankruptcies, foreclosures, document review. I’m now 71. I’m retired, but I’m having a ball working 60 hours a week helping out.
I was going to say, you seem like you’re pretty busy. There’s a lot of a lot of stuff going on here.
It is, but you don’t realize the satisfaction that I get helping individuals such as yourself accomplish your goals of building your portfolios. That’s the bottom line of what I’m doing.
Thanks, Dickie. You definitely made a help to me. It made my life a lot easier as I’ve been picking up notes. I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on. I have to have you on again to go more into depth on some of these other areas that we didn’t even have a chance to get into.
In fact, if you scroll on the website, I got your testament right there.
Thanks a lot, Dickie.
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About Dickie Baldwin
Dickie Baldwin has over 35 years of real estate experience as a Realtor, Loan Originator, Mortgage Wholesaler, Mortgage Correspondent, Mortgage Warehouse Professional, Title Research & setting up multiple National Mortgage Net Branching operations. He is in a unique position to provide guidance and expertise to note investors by leveraging his vast network of realtors, title companies, and other services.
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