Offerpad Adds Director, Plans Product Expansion

Bryan LaFranchi has joined iBuyer Offerpad as its national director of Homebuilder Alliances. He was previously with Zillow Group for nine years. Offerpad’s Homebuilder Alliance program allows homeowners to coordinate the sale of their existing home to coincide with the purchase of a new construction home, eliminating the need to sell the current house before buying. Offerpad pays cash for the current home, and homeowners can apply that toward a new one.. Among other responsibilities, LaFranchi is charged with leading the expansion of the program into new cities as well as new product development tailored to buyers of new-construction homes. Founded in 2015, Offerpad is headquartered in Arizona, with markets in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Tampa and Tucson.

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Capital Markets Veteran Joins PeerStreet

PeerStreet has appointed Deepa Salastekar as the vice president of institutional sales. PeerStreet is a marketplace for investing in real estate backed loans. Salastekar will lead the expansion of the company’s relationship base of institutional partners across all PeerStreet’s investment types. Salastekar has more than 20 years of leadership experience in capital markets, including with Pacific Investment Management Company, Bear Stearns & Co, Inc., and Inveniam Capital Partners. Salastekar is PeerStreet’s latest executive hire to an expanding team of capital markets professionals. In March, PeerStreet surpassed $2 billion transacted on its platform.

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Sagent Lending Technologies Adds Executive

Stephanie Durflinger is the new executive vice president and chief product officer of Sagent Lending Technologies. She will lead product management and customer support for mortgage and consumer servicing solutions. Durflinger brings more than 20 years of mortgage technology expertise to the new role. “I have a passion for bringing to the market compelling, innovative mortgage technology solutions that help people achieve and maintain homeownership, and I am excited to foster the transformation of solutions in the mortgage and consumer servicing market,” she said. Capital Markets Veteran Joins PeerStreet PeerStreet has appointed Deepa Salastekar as the vice president of institutional sales. PeerStreet is a marketplace for investing in real estate backed loans. Salastekar will lead the expansion of the company’s relationship base of institutional partners across all PeerStreet’s investment types. Salastekar has more than 20 years of leadership experience in capital markets, including with Pacific Investment Management Company, Bear Stearns & Co, Inc., and Inveniam Capital Partners. Salastekar is PeerStreet’s latest executive hire to an expanding team of capital markets professionals. In March, PeerStreet surpassed $2 billion transacted on its platform.

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Single-Family Build-To-Rent Investment Platform Launches

Lafayette Real Estate has teamed up with Guardian Residential to create an investment platform that focuses solely on the acquisition and development of newly constructed homes for the purpose of long-term rentals. The new firm will be known as Lafayette Communities. It will be led by Thibault Adrien, current CEO of Lafayette Real Estate, and Dennis Cisterna III, current CEO of Guardian Residential. Both are long-time industry executives in the single-family rental space. Lafayette Communities opened its first rental community, the 51-unit Preserve at Pine Grove, in the Riverview submarket of Tampa in early June. The community consists of three- and four-bedroom detached homes with modern features such as granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances. The company has additional communities under development in Florida and is planning expansion into markets in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee before the end of 2019.

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World’s First Closing Automation Platform for Lenders Launches

Notarize, the first company to enable an entirely online real estate closing process, introduced the world’s first closing automation platform on June 5. With the introduction of this platform, Notarize is pioneering the ability for anyone to buy, sell or finance their home entirely online. The platform can accommodate every type of closing—from fully online to hybrid closings. The first is a fully automated, entirely digital experience that helps homebuyers close on their home from anywhere in the world, on any device. Hybrid closings allow most documents to be reviewed and electronically signed with Notarize before the closing, but the big day still happens in person.

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Filling a Void in the Marketplace

The NPLA serves as a full-time advocate for private lenders. Private lenders play a vital role in the health and growth of our national housing market and the broader economy. By making B2B (business-to-business) loans to real estate investors on deals that do not fit the standards of “conventional” lenders due to time frame or perceived risk, they play a crucial role in revitalizing local communities, preventing and ameliorating neighborhood blight, and creating new opportunities for homeownership. Despite their vital place in the financial ecosystem, private money lenders have historically held a near-invisible place in the lending industry. Leonard Rosen, CEO of the Pitbull National Hard Money Lending Conference, has plans to change that. “Private lenders are a valuable part of the economic infrastructure of the United States, but they are largely misunderstood and even mistrusted,” he explained. Rosen’s new organization, the National Private Lenders Association (NPLA), will fill what he described as “a void in our marketplace” by providing private lenders with “a strong, full-time voice in Washington D.C. and on a state level.” He added, “It is the NPLA’s job, our function as an association, to educate, inform and lobby for the growth of our industry and provide valuable information to legislators.” An Organization Unlike Any Other Rosen is passionate about the need for “full-time advocacy for the protection of our industry.” He described legislators as generally “confused” about private lending, which leads to well-intentioned but adverse policy decisions that hurt private lenders’ ability to deploy capital safely and productively in the real estate sector. “99.9 percent of our industry is making business-to-business loans. Lawmakers must understand how we work and, further, that we are not usurious in our efforts to deploy capital,” he said. “NPLA’s educational goals focus here.” The Foundation of the Financial Food Chain Under Fire Rosen noted private lenders are often self-directed investors using money in their individual retirement accounts (IRAs) to fund deals, making it imperative that those individuals’ interests be protected from a legislative angle just as any other lenders’ interests would be. “There is a whole food chain that begins with the deployment of capital from an investor,” he said. “These investors deploy billions upon billions of dollars into the marketplace every year, whether it be for the investor rehab market, the small-balance capital market, or midsize and large commercial projects. Support for all of these comes from private investment because traditional banks simply do not have the appetite for it.” Rosen, like the majority of the private lending population, worries electoral shifts looming in 2020 could bring in a new crop of legislators uneducated on how the private lending community functions and erroneously equating the industry with the check-cashing and payday-loan sectors. “People have good intentions when they want to regulate the private lending community. They want to protect the consumer. However, those good intentions adversely affect our industry when the legislator is uneducated about how private lending really works [in the real estate sector],” Rosen said. “NPLA’s strong, national voice, full-time representation in Washington, D.C., and its role as a clearinghouse for legislation that comes up on state levels will provide that education, create positive partnerships between lawmakers and private lenders, and, ultimately, fill that void,” he said.  *** NPLA’s first meeting will be October 27, 2019, in Scottsdale, Arizona. To learn more about the NPLA private lending think tank—which will assemble leaders in the industry, including hedge funds, hard-money lenders, private lenders and investors in a series of panels dealing with legislative issues, education and ethics—visit NPLAOnline.com. You’ll find details on the association’s agenda and how to be involved. By Carole VanSickle Ellis Suggested Posts Perspective Grow Your Network, Grow Your Business by admin 0 Comments Profile Jeff Tesch Take the Reins at RCN Capital by admin 0 Comments Profile Jeremy Brandt: The Innovator Who is Making a Difference by admin Comment Off Regional Spotlight Kansas City: Stable Growth in a Hot Market by admin Comment Off Perspective It’s Time for a Checkup From the Neck Up by admin Comment Off Commercial Evaluating Your Commercial Real Estate Investment by admin Comment Off Commercial How to Become an Investor in the Best Investment in the World by admin Comment Off Risk Management Know the True Cost of Investor Insurance by admin Comment Off Single-Family Build-to-Rent Housing Garners Investor and Lender Interest by admin Comment Off Single-Family Here Come the iBuyers! by admin Comment Off

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