Owner Financing & Note Investing Podcast with Dawn Rickabaugh · Dawn Rickabaugh | Expert Advice for building wealth through Owner Financing & Note Investing

Make Better Seller Financing Offers with David Olds of EZREIclosings.com

·46 min·3 clips

He says fast, jargon-heavy offers can push sellers into the “fetal position” and kill follow-through.

Don Rickabaugh opens the conversation by setting up David Olds as someone who has spent years in real estate investing and turned that experience into a practical business. David says he is just a basic investor, which is usually how the people with the best stories start. He talks about buying his first house with his wife in 2002 and not realizing until closing that it was a Wells Fargo foreclosure. The closing itself was almost anticlimactic, because there was no dramatic handoff, just him, his agent, and the title person. He fixed the house up a little, sold it two years later, made 50,000 on the deal, and went back through the same title company with the same agent. David says he has always remembered a guy in town who had about 200 properties and lost almost all of them to the bank. That story made him careful about leverage. He wanted to build wealth without setting himself up to get wiped out. He also says that when he was buying these properties in his late thirties and early forties, he had a very specific retirement target in mind. His original plan was to retire at 50 and sit on a beach somewhere. That did not quite line up with the math, so he pushed the goal out to 60 and adjusted the structure of the notes he was creating. That is where owner financing started to matter in a very practical way. Because he was creating the notes himself, he could set the interest rate and term to fit his own timeline. He mentions using rates like 4 percent, 5 percent, 3 percent, and even 0 percent when the deal called for it. He says he started with 20-year notes and later moved to shorter terms as he got older. One of the biggest packages he describes was 1.1 million on a 17-year term at 4 percent interest. That package also included three months with no payments and 10,000 back at closing. The whole point was to get everything pointed toward the same finish line. Now that he is 53, he says the payoff schedule is finally starting to catch up with him. He would rather hold a note than a rental, even though he knows plenty of people feel differently. Along the way he points to pressure on property rights and the way regulations can change the risk profile quickly. He references the period when the government told property owners they could not evict or foreclose for a bit, which reinforced his sense that every form of ownership carries its own kind of risk. The conversation then moves into Easy REI Closings, which he describes as a large virtual transaction coordination company. He says the company works with clients all over the country. His approach is deliberately cautious, especially when mom-and-pop investors are involved and retirement money is on the line. He says he likes to stay below 50 cents on the investment-to-value side so that if the market crashes, people can still eat. At the end, he points listeners to his Instagram and to easyreiclosings.com if they want to talk through transactions or book a call.

As heard by us

A practical talk about owner financing, note investing, and keeping deals structured around risk and payoff timing.

David Olds keeps the focus on the plain mechanics of seller financing: buying his first house in 2002 as a foreclosure, fixing it, selling it two years later, and then using owner financing to shape notes around a longer plan.

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Learn how owner-financing notes can be structured with safety in mind.

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