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The IMN Conference is an annual notes and defaults servicing conference that’s held every February in Fort Lauderdale. While it only runs for a short period of time, it’s the perfect opportunity to pick up and learn quite a few things. Dan Deppen goes through his key takeaways from attending this prestigious conference. His learnings are a mix of both note industry knowledge and general knowledge for attending these kinds of conferences. Check out what Dan has picked up from the IMN Conference!

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Top 5 Takeaways From The IMN Conference

I’m going to be giving a recap of my trip to the IMN Conference and my top five takeaways from that conference. IMN is a notes and default servicing conference that they do once a year in February in Fort Lauderdale. There’s another one on the West Coast in June in San Diego. This was my first time attending this conference. I want to share some of the things that I learned from it. For me, this was a unique and cool event. I’ve done a lot of conferences over the years, not just in notes but in my corporate career. There were a lot of elements of this one that I liked and got a lot out of. This conference had about 500 attendees altogether.

The difference between this and some other note conferences I’ve gone to like NoteExpo is the notable one is, this was a higher level conference. We had a lot of hedge funds and some larger hedge funds, a bunch of individual note buyers and note sellers and then a whole boatload of vendors, foreclosure attorneys, some different servicers and then a lot of various REO vendors or vendors that can help you deal with REOs. I’ve talked about that before and it’s always a big pain point for me. There were a lot of other vendors as well. This is a conference I had thought about going to before. What held me back in the past was it’s expensive. It’s $1,200 or $1,600 ticket normally.

I had the good fortune of getting invited to take part in a panel discussion on due diligence which got me a free ticket. It was nice and I enjoyed that. It’s a good conference overall and it’s a higher level. Some of the others, if you look at other note conferences like NoteExpo, which is one of my favorites and I’ll be attending. I highly recommend you go. The ones like that tend to have more new note investors, where IMN is a level-up where you’re dealing more with hedge funds and pretty much everybody there is neck-deep in the business. They’re either doing a lot of stuff or been at it for quite a long time. There are a lot of interesting conversations that you don’t normally get to have that I enjoyed.

Pre-Networking

We are getting into my top five takeaways. Takeaway number one was that the IMN had the most pre-networking than any other conference I’ve ever attended. If you go to conferences for your job, you probably know that the key to having a successful conference and getting a lot out of it is to do a lot of pre-planning. Set up meetings ahead of time with people that you want to meet with or potentially work with. The IMN Conference had a website where they listed all the attendees and they had this mini-social network where you could connect with them ahead of time and set up meetings. I had set up a bunch of fifteen-minute meetings with various people. I had a lot of other people reach out to me as well. I got concerned that there were too many. At one point, I stopped scheduling them because if I wanted to, I could have scheduled myself wall-to-wall throughout the entire event.

This event only runs one and a half days. It starts on a Monday morning and then goes until Tuesday at lunch. You can fill up that time pretty quickly. At some point, I stopped scheduling meetings because I wanted to make sure there was time to schedule time with people I might bump into while I’m there. I also want to attend some of the sessions. The other thing I’ll point out too is that a lot of people come into town the Sunday prior. I set up some meetings that Sunday afternoon. If you’re thinking about going to this next time, I recommend getting in by Sunday morning so that you can have some opportunity to schedule things by Sunday afternoon and then go to dinners and things like that. There was a dinner meetup beforehand at Rocco’s Tacos. That was good. Originally, they planned it for twenty people and there were probably 50 there altogether.

Erin Quinn, who I’ve done a podcast with before, bought dinner for lots of people, which is amazing. I didn’t expect her to do that. My original flight, I was getting on was Sunday night late at 11:00 PM or something like that. When I realized there were all these things going on before, I changed my flight to get myself on Saturday night. That didn’t quite work out the way I planned because I flew Spirit Airlines. Spirit and Frontier, I hate them both. A lot of times they are cheap and if it works out, I go into it knowing it’s probably going to be a mess. On Spirit, I was able to fly in directly from Denver to Fort Lauderdale, which was nice.

They then called me on Saturday and said they had some problems with my ticket. I no longer had a seat to get in there Saturday night. They said, “No problem, we can put you on a red eye.” I ended up getting on Sunday at 5:30 AM. I rode in the back in the middle seat all night with two people next to me flopping around and hitting me. I’ve done a lot of traveling in previous jobs. I can deal with whatever. When you do fly-in, I recommend getting in by the morning on Sunday so you can meet some people. Set up as many meetings as you can ahead of time while still leaving the room to participate in the conference.

Session Content

Takeaway number two was that the sessions that I did attend and I did attend a ton because what always happens is, I ended up networking with a lot of people and talking to a lot of people. The last time I went to NoteExpo, I maybe took in less than an hour of the conference content. This one I wanted to do a little more. Takeaway number two is that the session content that I was able to listen to was extremely meaty and dense and there are lots of good things to learn about. There was advice on sourcing. There was my due diligence panel but then there were some other panels that talked about due diligence as well and getting into specifically dealing with title flaws.

There was another session, which was on buying tail loans. Going into this, I wasn’t familiar with the term tail loans, although I bought some myself. With tail loans, what they’re talking about is loans that are maybe the leftovers when a fund is shutting down or the leftovers from mortgage-backed security. Buying loans from a fund when they’re shutting down is a great time because you can often get good deals. Oftentimes, the way that funds are set up is they’ll have some time horizon that says, “We’re going to run this for five years” or whatever it is, then sell everything out, often cash out our investors. That’s often where you can get good deals. As they talked about on the panel too, you want to be careful with that because sometimes the loans that are left at the end are ones that may have problems.

Whether they be title defects or properties that are in rough shape or other things, buying tail loans is a pretty good opportunity. It’s something that I’m a fan of doing. You have to try it even maybe a little bit more lightly than you would when you’re buying other loans. There were a lot of great takeaways from that. Sometimes in other various note events, there is session content that’s I’ve heard several times before or sometimes stays high level. They’re a little more aimed at the beginning note investor who is trying to wrap their head around it. What I loved about these sessions at IMN was they went into depth and you’re able to leverage the experience of people who have been at this a lot longer than what I have. I appreciate that. That was worthwhile.

Getting On A Panel

Takeaway number three is that if you can get on a panel, it’s a great way to meet more people and also wrangler yourself of a free ticket. I participated on a panel that was on due diligence. It was moderated by Alex Goldovsky, who owns ProTitleUSA, who’s one of the vendors that I use a lot. As far as doing the panel itself, we had some talks beforehand in some ways. I’ll reveal that these are a little bit scripted. We talked ahead of time about what topics we’re going to cover and who is going to talk about what. I was prepared for that. That makes it a little bit easier. I talked about some things like talking to code enforcement beforehand and ways to deal with them and how to get information out of them on your assets. There were some other questions came in as well. There was a question I answered that wasn’t involved in due diligence, but when it’s okay to cancel an indicative bid. What I explained to them was, “You can cancel bids if you need to, but you want to be good about how you communicate with the seller.”

Hopefully, you stated your assumptions upfront when you put in the bid. If you do need to cancel it, follow through with the reason why and the supporting information. As an example, if you find a fatal title defect and you give them a copy of the O&E report. If the value was low and the property was trashed, I give them a copy of the BPO that you had pulled and things like that. That was great. Also, they cut my ticket to the conference, which I didn’t even realize they were going to do. When I accepted, I was interested in going anyways and interested in being on the panels. That was a great experience and it is fun honestly to sit on the stage and answer some questions. You also get to meet some of the other people on the panel, which is great. It’s a cool experience and probably one of the highlights of my note investing career was being able to do this.

Sourcing

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do this again at a future one. Takeaway number four was on sourcing. Sometimes finding the right sources can take a little bit of luck. I talked a little bit about how you want to pre-plan meetings and networking. You also want to go in there with a mission. If you’re going to go to a conference, you don’t want to go to a conference for the sake of doing it or for traveling and running around even though that’s fun. For me, my big mission in going to this conference was to find new sources. That was what I was focused on. It was interesting because the first half of the conference, Sunday and it seemed like Monday morning, everybody I talked to, no one seemed to have loans for sale.

A lot of note investors I was talking to are complaining that things had dried up for them and they weren’t finding a whole lot. About halfway through it, things seemed to flip and all of a sudden, I started finding people who had non-performing and performing loans for sale. Either I bumped into them directly. In some cases, I was getting referrals from other people. As I continue to network throughout the conference and I would tell people what I was looking for, I would start to get leads and say, “I talked to this person, they had some things you’re looking for, you should go talk to them.” I would track them down. At one point, in the end I was having a conversation with someone who’s going to send me a tape of assets and someone was sitting there that I didn’t even notice. When we got done talking, they said, “If that’s what you’re looking for. I have some of that too.”

There’s a little bit of serendipity involved with 500 people at the conference. I sat down beforehand and I tried to figure out everybody who was there, but there are too many people to do that. It would take hours to get through everything. What I did was I found some people ahead of time to make meetings with. As I was at the conference, I continued to talk to different people and see what was out there. Eventually, you can find your way. I’ll point out too that it’s important to get out of your normal group. I spent a decent amount of time hanging out with people that I’m good friends with and talking to them. One of the things I like about these events is that it’s a good opportunity to catch up with people face-to-face. Some of whom I talked to on the phone all the time. You also want to spend some time out of that network so you can meet new people and find new sources as well. Sometimes it feels like a little bit of a crapshoot. I thought it was interesting how the first half of it I was coming away and going about things. It seems like sourcing is dry out there and by the time the conference was over, I had the opposite perception. There’s quite a bit of product out there that you can buy.

Read This Podcast

Takeaway number five, the last one is that there are more people reading this blog than I had realized. I’ve talked to a number of people. Some of whom operate at a fairly high level and have some decent sized funds that knew who I was and said, “I read your blog.” I was humbled by that and blown away. The reach is a little bigger than I had realized. That made me feel good. I’ll keep trying to put out good content. A lot of times I record it in my house or I’m having a conversation with somebody and I don’t quite realize how many people end up reading it. That was cool and provides additional motivation to continue to put these things out.

The last thing I’ll mention, this wasn’t a key takeaway but it was something that I already knew. I think it’s important. It’s something that I want to emphasize when we attend conferences is that following up with people is a big key. A lot of times people go to these events, talk to a lot of people, collect a lot of business cards, but then they don’t follow up after the fact. Having a conversation with somebody is great, but if you don’t do anything afterwards, then you’re not going to build the relationships that you need and make the solid contacts that are going to benefit both of you going forward in the future.

That’s one of the things I do too during the conference because the other thing that always happens to me is, I have conversations with various people and at the moment, I think, “I can follow up with them and do this and do that.” They told me this great information. I always carry around a notebook and then as I can, pick little notes on things because otherwise, you get back from a conference a couple of days later. For me, it becomes harder to remember specific conversations. When I came back, I had my list of notes and my business cards and I make sure that I followed up with all of those people afterwards. That’s where you get a lot of the value out of the conference.

People I need to follow up with in the future, I’ll also make some notes in my CRM of what we talked about. The other thing I’ve been guilty of is I have a conversation with somebody and then they get in touch with me six months later. I have a hard time remembering what we discussed because much has transpired by then. If you ended up going to this conference or you go to NoteExpo and some of the other events that are coming up, definitely follow up. It’s a huge key. Don’t ever forget to do that. It’s easy to forget to do. That’s what I’ve got for you in this episode. Leave comments and reach out if you have any questions about this or any other suggestions for future episodes or other things you’d like to know, please do keep in touch. I will see you next time. Thanks.

Important Links:

• IMN Conference
• NoteExpo
• ProTitleUSA
• Erin Quinn – previous episode
• https://www.IMN.org/real-estate/conference/NPL-Notes-Default-Servicing-East/

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