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Welcome to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast, with your host Pancham Gupta. This podcast is dedicated to helping the high-paid professionals to break out of the Wall Street investments and create multiple income streams. Here’s your host, Pancham Gupta.

Dave Zook

Hey, this is Dave Zook. I listen to Pancham at The Gold Collar Investor Podcast, and so should you.

Pancham Gupta

Welcome to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast. This is your host, Pancham. I really appreciate you for tuning in today. My guest is Kevin Dureiko. He is the Founder and Fund Manager of Birch and Dobson LLC, a private real estate investment fund located in Connecticut. Mr. Dureiko’s objectives as the fund manager are to source property secured investments that produce returns as expected by his capital investors. The fund and Mr. Dureiko raise capital from accredited investors to place or purchase senior mortgages on investment real estate. The fund also actively raises capital and invests in single-family home building. The two core investments of the fund are single-family grounds of construction and lending to real estate investors with mortgages in first position on value-add syndicated multifamily property, non-syndicated multifamily, and one-to-four family properties.

(interview)

Pancham Gupta

Hey, Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Dureiko

Hey. Thanks for having me, Pancham.

Pancham Gupta

Well, glad that we finally connected and we rescheduled. We were talking right before the show. I just moved to Florida. You are about to move to Florida. We both left northeast. So, good luck with the move, and welcome to the show.

Kevin Dureiko

Thank you for having me.

Pancham Gupta

So, before we get started, are you ready to fire up my listeners break out of Wall Street investments?

Kevin Dureiko

Absolutely.

Pancham Gupta

Let’s do this. Kevin, why don’t we start with your background? Tell us more about how you got into what you are in now, and what did you do before that.

Kevin Dureiko

Sure. Absolutely. I was a mixed bag growing up. I have a blue collar real estate investing dad, stay at home mom. My father worked for, basically, the government. He also invested in real estate on the side. I really didn’t understand what he was doing or see the power of what he was doing because I was so young. He built up a portfolio, almost 10 houses at one point. It was just normal to me. I thought it was what everybody’s dads did. He’d come home from work. Then on the weekends, we’d go mow lawns and do snow, and do all those things. So, that put the bug in the back of my head to say, hey, this is what you chose to do anyway. So, it worked out that way. He gets into retirement age. He said, “Hey, would you like to take over these properties?” I said, “No, dad. Enjoy your retirement. Sell everything. Liquidate. Go enjoy your life in Florida.” That’s what he ended up doing. I took a break. I took a break away from real estate. I was helping him manage a lot of the things. He was getting older, so I was the guy on the roof and fixing everything. I got a good amount of experience with that. Then I went into engineering — underground utilities. I did that for a while. But as you know, in the northeast, when the ground freezes, there’s not much you can do. So, I ended up spending most of the winters sitting at home, driving myself crazy. In that time, he figured out I got to start doing something else. That’s what started my company as Birch and Dobson. We’ve started out as buying private debt. As the laws changed, as the government made it harder for you to collect anything, I started branching out into real estate. Now we have our own fund.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. So, starting out of college, you were working with your dad on his portfolio?

Kevin Dureiko

Yeah. Well, actually, I didn’t even go to college. I went right into the workforce. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. At that point, I didn’t think that spending quarter million dollars on not knowing what you wanted to do was a good move. I look back. I probably missed out on some opportunities. But I think it’s panned out pretty well.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. So, you said that you started buying private debt. For people who don’t know what that means, can you explain what that is?

Kevin Dureiko

A little sub-niche. Basically, if you had a lawsuit or a debt, if you’re a contractor, and you were doing work for an apartment building or something along those lines and they owed you 10 grand, I would come in and I would buy you out for $6,000 and hopefully collect the rest on the upside.

Pancham Gupta

Okay. So, you would basically take over their lawsuit, so to speak, or contractor’s mechanic lien.

Kevin Dureiko: Exactly.

Pancham Gupta

And get that debt. So, you started with that. That’s pretty interesting, how you pick that niche. How did that come?

Kevin Dureiko

My grandfather is a state marshal. He was a state marshal in Connecticut. He has since passed. But I thought it was incredibly interesting that you could buy money for less than what it was worth. That concept just boggled my mind, where you could buy $1 for $.20. You might not get the entire dollar but you might be able to get $.50 or $.60 out of it, and be able to make that cut in the middle. To me, it was fascinating.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, the entire collection industry is based off that. Every single business, I would assume, which are lending in the lending business, they have certain portion of a business just dedicated to that, right? Like collecting and selling off if they can’t collect to people, who can collect at much cheaper price. That was pretty interesting. So, how did you approach these people wanting this money, like from the records?

Kevin Dureiko

Yeah. It was a little bit of records. Then you get your name out there a little bit. Then all of a sudden, a lot of the times, the lawsuits or the liens or the judgments weren’t really enough to hire an attorney. Once you have a judgment, it doesn’t mean anything. It just means you have the right to collect it. Between attorneys, accountants, they would always reach out. They’d say, “Hey, we got a client. They have $4,000.” I didn’t want to be a debt collector. But judgment is an asset. Somebody owes the money, and a judge has decided that has been owed. So, my whole thesis on it was that I could give the people that were owed the money a little bit of return. They really don’t know how to collect it. Then on the other side, I can also offer a discount to the people that were in that position where they were sued. So, I was able to help both sides, which to me was very appealing. Because not everybody is out to screw somebody else. It could just be a circumstance. So, I was never going after grandma that couldn’t pay her roofer. It was generally going to be a business to business, and just cleaning out that way a little bit and being able to make a respectable margin, not just being a debt collector.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. You said something very interesting, which I’ve never heard or never talked about on the show. You said judgment is an asset, right? Many of the listeners may not even know what a judgement is. Can you just quickly give a 10,000 feet view what a judgment is?

Kevin Dureiko

Sure. Judgment is a contract that is able to be sold, that has been established by a court of law. So, if you owe somebody $10,000, and you didn’t pay them, a judge can then say or an arbitrator can then say, “Yes, this person does owe you money.” Here’s a document that says, yes, you owe them this money. Now have fun and go collect it.

Pancham Gupta

Right. Exactly. Then it’s the job of the guy who has that judgment against the other guy. They have to figure out a way whether it’s through different—

Kevin Dureiko

Collection — yeah, you’d have to figure it out. You have to give yourself a rudimentary law degree to figure out how to collect money from somebody. The laws are always changing. That’s one of the reasons I got out of it. It’s because the laws were so anti collect money, which was fair. There’s a lot of people out there that were collecting money that shouldn’t have been doing it the way they were. So, I just changed with the times. It just became too hard to make a living doing it.

Pancham Gupta

So, what happened next? What happened next after that?

Kevin Dureiko

I spent a little bit of time not really jumping from job to job. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be in real estate somehow. 2008 came. That crushed those ideas for a little while. I’m 36 now. Back then, it was — my company has been around since 2007. So, I was trying to find that middle ground of what made me happy. It’s what’s the most thing. I didn’t want to work for somebody else, but you also have to like what you’re doing. But then, again, I need to make a living. Not everybody can be an artist, so you’re going to have to feed yourself. Then we started getting into the real estate aspect again once the market solidified, multifamily, private lending. Just took that train and now we’re into private lending, as well as ground up construction.

Pancham Gupta

So, that’s what you do now. From all that, to looking forward to do, to doing private lending and multifamily. Now you have part all of that. Now you just do ground up development and have a private lending business.

Kevin Dureiko

Correct. Yes.

Pancham Gupta

Okay. Got it. So, can you talk about, first of all, what does private lending mean? Can you talk about both the sides of it? Meaning, your side of it, how you source your funds. Then on the consumer side, like people who are actually taking that money from you, who are those guys?

Kevin Dureiko

Sure. My general lender, my general capital infusion and borrower is basically nearly the same person. Mostly, it’s going to be your listener base. It’s doctors, lawyers, accountants, attorneys that are in that type of 9 to 5 community, 9 to 5 job, that want to diversify their incomes. What they do, in my case, is they provide their money through accredited investment. They fund a account within our fund. We take that money and provide them a steady return, a predetermined return. I take their funds. I lend it out to real estate investors that use that fund to go out and purchase real estate, shopping centers, hotels as an acquisition, rehab, restabilization. Then at the end of a predetermined time — 12 months, 24 months — they pay the interest payments. My investor gets their predetermined amount of interest. The property is then sold.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. So, a couple of questions here. How do you vet out these people who you’re lending the money out to, or these investments? Do you have certain criteria or certain things that you would lend to? Second, what kind of return the investors in your fund can expect from this? I’m sure that’s changing. Just as an example with the last one.

Kevin Dureiko

The general return on investment for one of my investors is between 7% and 12%. So, we currently have two buckets. If you want to be paid on a monthly basis through the lending bucket, you’re going to be getting between 7% and 9%. If you want to be paid on a yearly or quarterly basis, you’re getting paid 12% to the ground up construction bucket. So, in this case, if you’re doing in the lending bucket and you’re looking for that monthly drip, the monthly cash flow, we lend that money out to the investors, as I mentioned before. The way we vet those people is that it’s a loan to own lender. It’s what most people assume that hard money or private money is. It’s when the lender wants the property. We actually don’t want the property. We’re on our money back. So, we’re looking at credit scores. We’re looking at the property itself. We’re looking at cash reserves. We want to give the borrower every opportunity to be able to give us the money back, so that we can obviously recoup the investment and pay our investors. Investor’s capital retention is key number one. If you don’t pay back their money, they don’t give you money in the future. So, it’s key number one.

Pancham Gupta

Anyone who’s listening, this particular field also fascinates me even though I was, back in the day, very interested in doing something very similar, but I didn’t do it. Anytime I spoke to anyone, people who are listener base of the show, they probably wouldn’t understand. Can you break this down? Why would someone come to Birch Dobson to get money if there is Chase, buffers of the world, and hundreds of credit unions out there like local banks? Why would someone come to Kevin and say, hey, give me a loan?

Kevin Dureiko

Well, the Chases of the world, they don’t like lending to assets that are unstabilized, vacant, within repair, deferred maintenances. Our niche is being able to give you debt based on a property that a bank doesn’t want. Also, generally, you need 30, 60, 90 days for a traditional bank to close on a property. If you’re doing a fix and flip, you have maybe 20 days to close. 10 of that is going to be not by an appraisal. So, the traditional banking methods are not poised whatsoever for that risk tolerance of being able to make a fast decision. I’m sure you’ve figured that out in trying to buy basically anything.

The investor, the borrower, rather, comes to us because we don’t need tax returns as long as they have a credit score. The credit score really isn’t the biggest problem. It’s the history of the credit score. Every real estate investor maxes out their credit cards at some point. It doesn’t mean that they don’t pay their bills. It just means that they’re operating. So, if you go and walk into a Chase with a 60 credit score or 60, 80, they’re going to basically laugh you out the door at this point, unless for an investment purpose. So, our credit box is a lot larger. It’s a lot more open. We understand the business model. Generally, you can’t walk into a Chase Bank and say, “Hey, I want a 12-month loan. I want you to lend me $200,000 to fix it. Then I’m going to sell it.” So, you basically don’t make any money. That’s just not within their business model, not within their risk profile.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The goal for these guys who are getting these loans from you is to quickly fix them up and get a cheese loan or sell them off, basically.

Kevin Dureiko

Or sell them off, or they want to refi it. Another thing that we don’t have to do is we don’t have to report to credit. So, if you get a loan to Chase, it’s going to end up — unless you’re a big player, it’s going to end up on your personal credit. You can only get so many of those loans. I believe they maxed it out at seven loans now, whereas if the property, if it’s a rental, is paying the loan, we don’t care how much you make in your 9 to 5 job if you even have one. If the numbers align and the property is paying the debt, we’re happy.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, that’s one side. On the ground’s upside, what is your niche? Is it something that you’re doing? You have your own development team, or more like you’re an investor? You’re investing with other developers?

Kevin Dureiko

We have a fully integrated vertical developer in Florida. That’s one of the reasons why we’re moving there. I’m going to be living within 10 minutes of the development.

Pancham Gupta

Nice.

Kevin Dureiko

The development is already residences. It already has amenities. We’re just being allowed into the second and third phase of it. The lots are shovel-ready. As soon as we have investor capital, we can start throwing houses up. There’s about a two-year waiting list for these homes in this particular area. You know the Destin area. You look up there, you know how hustle and bustle it is at this point. There’s about 15 years’ worth of investment opportunity there, and over 300 applications for new businesses just in a small corridor that we’re working in. So, we’re poised for a big start up growth for the next 15 years.

Pancham Gupta

Great. So, you’re building single-family homes there.

Kevin Dureiko

Correct.

Pancham Gupta

You’re more a funding source for the developer. Then you’re basically going to sell it to the retail buyers.

Kevin Dureiko

Yeah, we’re actually going to own the property. We’re taking the title of the property. We’re developing it with a developer, and we’re selling it.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. Okay. Cool. That’s awesome. So, at this point, I guess you have these two strategies. What advice would you give to someone? Let’s say, someone’s listening to this show and they’re hearing this story. They’re getting very interested in what you do, and they’ve never done any fund investment — the kind of fund that you have. What advice would you give them, to what kind of things they need to look at before investing in a fund like yours?

Kevin Dureiko

Basically, you have to buy the person, really. Particularly, my fund is not going to be a billion-dollar fund. I don’t want it to be. If you want to be able to call somebody, you have to take that as a consideration. I think communication in the funding model is the most important. If you don’t want to be a number, I believe you should be able to talk to the fund administrators. I believe you should be able to talk to the people controlling your money and being able to have those communications. I give everybody my cell phone number. I have an office line. People texted me constantly asking how things are going. If that is something that’s considering what you’re considering doing, I can’t stress enough the communication aspect of it. If you give somebody a half a million dollars of your money, and you want to know what’s going on with it, then also being able to have a boots on the ground — a fund manager. Most people would say, what’s the problem or what’s the benefit of having a fund manager that’s going to live 10 minutes from a development? Well, like I mentioned before, when I was managing properties of my father, I can weld, I can put plumbing in. I know how to wire a house. I could walk onto the lands and say, “Hey, this is what’s happening. I can understand what’s going on,” rather than a guy sitting at a desk somewhere in Manhattan, on Wall Street, taking money here and putting it there and not really knowing what’s going on.

If that’s important to you, definitely ask them what is their involvement in the investments. I can’t say that everybody that doesn’t do that is a bad fund manager. Because, obviously, that’s not true. But it all depends on what you’re looking for. If you want the small-time guy that’s not — I can’t say small time. If you want the guy who can be able to pick up the phone and not put you through a directory, one of the things that some people are very happy with being through the directory. You never know.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, that’s good. Their money is protected through first lien by you, right?

Kevin Dureiko

Correct.

Pancham Gupta

Like you have a senior lien on the property or the only lien on the property, right?

Kevin Dureiko

Correct.

Pancham Gupta

If they don’t pay or if the investments go bad, you have the right to get the property.

Kevin Dureiko

Correct. I don’t want to get too far in the weeds here on how the fund works on the back end. But yeah, there’s built-in failsafes. So, first off, the investor would have to have reserves. The reserves would then have to get depleted before he gave into the thought of the property for closing. At that point, we have maximum loan to value. So, we’re never going to give them 100% of what the house is worth or the property is worth. We’re going to have a buffer of usually 35%. So, not only with the market, really half the tank, the borrower then have to deplete all the reserves. They would have to do this in about a year. So, it gives us a good cushion. We call it ‘protected equity.’ If we’re into a property for $600,000, the property is worth a million. We have $400,000 of problems that can happen without us ever getting hurt.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. Anyone listening, I think, if you want safe and secure return on your money, so the banking business is pretty great. If you think of your own home that you bought, as an example, the bank gave you 75%. They already built in that 25% cushion on the equity of the house. So, the market has to go down. Your house has to go down 25% in value before they even lose any dollar. For you, as a person, you would be the last one to do that because you’re — in this case, I know you don’t put them on their credit score, on their credit. But you will not want to lose your credit score, your credit history. Then you also have reserves, all those things. I feel banking is pretty safe business. It’s only when they started securitizing all of these things and making selling them again and again and again with different layers. That’s what made it really bad. That’s what 2008 is famous for. But back in the day in ’80s, from ’60s to ’80s, ’90s, they’re pretty secure.

Kevin Dureiko

Mortgages have been around in Europe since 1790, the modern mortgage. Money is really — it’s the perfect product, because you can take it. You can deploy it, and it gets multiplied without you really doing anything through interest. It’s extremely powerful. When you structure it that where a hard asset is backing that money, that is worth more than the money that you’ve put into it, you really have to mess up to not get at least what you put into it back.

As a private lender, there’s flexibility. I mean, eventually, I’m going to have a borrower that dies, or I’m going to have a borrower that has a divorce during the middle of a project. Eventually, it’s going to happen. When you pick up the phone and call Chase Bank and say, “Hey, my husband just died. He has this loan with you. What do we do,” then you’ll get a letter in about 10 days that say you need to satisfy this debt. It’s not assumable. If that scenario happens to me, I’d just say, “Okay. What do you want to do? How are you going to handle this?” It’s a completely different way of operating.

Pancham Gupta

Exactly. Cool. This is great. Is there anything else you want to add to this before I ask you my last question, which is a completely different question? Then we’ll move on to the second part of the show.

Kevin Dureiko

I think we’re doing pretty good, for the both of us having our offices completely disassembled. I think we’re all right.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, exactly. You’re in the process of moving, and I just moved. So, either way, both of us have empty place. I used to have a nice background with the podcast logo and everything. It’s all gone. All right. Cool. Well, thanks for that, Kevin. My last question before we move on to the second part of the show is, do you have a morning routine that you follow? If so, what is it? Do you think it contributes to your success?

Kevin Dureiko

Yeah, I have a relative morning routine. It changed a little bit when we started having kids. But I try to get up before seven. I’m an avid reader, so I’m always trying to stay off my phone until at least eight. I have a little bit of yoga I try to do in the morning. Just sit there and think, and try to get a couple pages of a book before the family wakes up and the house begins to get a little loud. I think that clarity in the morning to set your day up is extremely important. Giving your brain a little bit of a chance to figure out what it wants to do throughout the day is advantageous to anybody’s success.

Pancham Gupta

Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I do that, too. Since I moved, I’ve not done it. I can totally feel that my days are not under my control. So, thanks for that. We’ll be back after this message.

(break)

If you’re an accredited investor and have been thinking about putting your money to work for you, then I have good news for you. I have created an investor club which I call the Gold Collar Investor Club. I will be putting together investing opportunities exclusively for the group. These are the opportunities where I have done the due diligence for you and will be investing my own money alongside you.

If you are interested, please sign up on thegoldcollarinvestor.com/club. I repeat, thegoldcollarinvestor.com/club. I will reach out to schedule a 30-minute phone conversation to discuss your investing goals once you sign up. This can be a good opportunity to diversify and take some chips off the hands of Wall Street to produce some passive income. And in case you are wondering what is an accredited investor, accredited investor is someone who has earned more than $200,000 as filing single or more than $300,000 filing jointly for the last two years. Another way to qualify as an accredited investor is if your total net worth is more than $1 million, excluding your personal home. It includes your stocks, 401Ks, IRAs, cars, et cetera—just not the equity in your personal home. If this is you, I would highly encourage you to sign up.

(interview)

Pancham Gupta

Kevin, let’s move on to the second part of the show where I ask these four questions to every guests. My first question for you is, when was the first time you invested outside of Wall Street?

Kevin Dureiko

I’d say my first investment was before I even got into Wall Street. That was when I was buying distressed and new debts. That was pretty much it. I believe I had one ETF fund. I was like, why is this money even sitting here anymore? I just pulled it out and used it for other things and paid down some debt. I was making more money paying off the debt than it was sitting in there making money. So, it was an easy choice.

Pancham Gupta

Did you have any fears that you had to overcome when you invested in that or you bought those distressed things like liens and all that?

Kevin Dureiko

Everything is basically fear-based when you first start doing something. So, you’re going out on a limb. You’re going on a little bit of faith that you’re going to figure it out. Yeah, I was pretty scared. Then when I got married, that’s a full-fledged panic attack when you figure out you have to raise a family. We got married. We went to Greece for our honeymoon for a month and then came back. I was like, okay, this is a real thing now. Then, thankfully, I was able to retire my wife, and she gets to stay at home full-time with the kids. So, that ended up working out pretty good, too.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, pretty cool. So, my third question for you is, can you share with us one investment that did not go as expected?

Kevin Dureiko

Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. When my father asked me if I wanted all of his properties and take them over, I said no. Not because I believe I should have taken them to have a better leg up in investing. It’s what I should have done is to hold him to hang on to them a little bit longer. Let’s improve them. Let’s make them better. Then let’s get rid of them. Because I didn’t know any better at the time. I believe we could have set him up for retirement a lot better. That plagued me to this day. I wish I would have known what I know now so we could have set him up a little better.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, that’s what they say, right? You need to buy real estate, and then wait. Not wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate, and wait.

Kevin Dureiko

Yeah, I dropped the ball. I should have known better.

Pancham Gupta

You do these things and you learn. So, that’s the whole game. My last question for you is that, what is one piece of advice would you give to people who are thinking of investing in Main Street that is outside of Wall Street?

Kevin Dureiko

Educate yourself. Pick something that you like or that you think you might like, and become a nerd on it. Because if you can’t understand it, and if somebody can’t explain it to you easily, it might be something that wouldn’t fit your bill. I’m a big proponent of learning. So, if you’re going to give somebody your money, or if you’re going to go invest in something, you should know exactly what you’re doing with it. You might not be actively doing the investing. You might be giving the money to somebody else to do it, but you should understand what they’re doing. Most of all, education. Learn what you’re putting your money into.

Pancham Gupta

Great. Thanks for sharing that advice. How can people connect with you if they want to reach out and learn more about your fund, or you, or just talk to you?

Kevin Dureiko

You can call me or text me, 860-990-3030. That’s my cell phone. You can find me online. You can Google me. I have a really weird last name, so I’m going to pop right up. My company, Birch and Dobson, if you Google that, it’ll pop right up as well.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. Thank you, Kevin, for your time here.

Kevin Dureiko

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Pancham Gupta

I hope you got some value from Kevin’s experience. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to me at p@thegoldcollarinvestor.com This is Pancham signing off. Until next time, take care.

(outro)

Thank you for listening to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast. If you love what you’ve heard and you want more of Pancham Gupta, visit us at www.thegoldcollarinvestor.com and follow us on Facebook @thegoldcollarinvestor. The information on this podcast are opinions. As always, please consult your own financial team before investing.

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