The School Of Cash Flow

People and the media often say, “This is a terrible time to buy.” Because you hear these negative stuffs from the media, you end up associating the current market as a terrible buying opportunity. But what if we look at it in a different lens? In this episode, Dale Corpus welcomes Arjun Dhingra, a Certified Mortgage Advisor, to share his thoughts on how you can approach the current mortgage market despite the negative narratives from the media. Arjun added that some of the greatest wealth and stories of prosperity was during a market downturn. He also shares the challenges he face in the mortgage industry. Tune in to this episode to hear more!

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The Current Mortgage Market From A Different Lens With Arjun Dhingra

I have another great guest for you for this episode. His name is Arjun Dhingra. He is a Certified Mortgage Advisor and has been in the industry for many years. He creates content around financial literacy and real estate-related topics to empower people to make smarter decisions around mortgage debt and portfolio growth as relates to real estate.

With the ability to serve 31 different states, he can offer a creative and holistic approach to mortgage clients while collaborating with real estate professionals via social media in these respective markets. He’s also featured as a San Francisco host for the Emmy-nominated television show, The American Dream. Arjun has a martial arts background in Taekwondo and is the current co-head coach of Team USA. His passion is helping people level up and win, whether that’s from renter to owner, saver to investor, and athlete to world champion. He’s committed to making his clients’ dreams come true. I’m very excited to have you on this show, Arjun. How are you?

Thanks, Dale. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate all that you do for the real estate community and everything else. I’m doing good.

Have you always been living in the San Francisco Bay area?

No. I grew up in Nevada originally, which is where I got into the business, but I moved out here shortly after getting in the business to open an office for us, and then I would travel back and forth between both markets. Around the time of the market crash in 2010, I started making San Francisco a little bit more of a home base. I was there and then now with my family, we live in Marin, but I’ve been in the Bay Area on and off for several years.

Let’s first start chatting about your mortgage business. Your office is based in San Francisco near Jackson Square. Tell me more about what types of clients that you work with. Is it primary residence owners, investors, everybody, or all the above?

It is everyone. My main niche and why I enjoy working with the most, specifically our first-time buyers, whether that’s individuals looking to make their first purchase to live in or start acquiring and building a real estate portfolio, but a first-time buyer, in general. Those are newly formed couples or households that are looking to join forces and buy something to start their lives together.

We deal with a lot of investors as well because we have very good and flexible investor product, which is helping create a lot more inroads and making things possible for people that want to acquire real estate. A lot of it as well are past clients during certain times of the year or certain types of the market cycle, like refinance activity, debt strategies, consolidation, and pulling out money. Primarily, those are the types of personas that we’ve worked with and who we enjoy working with.

With the rising interest rates that doubled in 2022 and whatnot, we’re not seeing many refinance opportunities. A lot of the stuff that you’re focusing on is purchasing business, I’m guessing.

It is. There’s a lot of purchase. There are some strategic refinance businesses that are out there where people will look to tap the equity because they want to have money ready to deploy for other investments. They want to see if there’s a correction in the market. They want to have money ready to go. They may or may not pull money out and restructure their existing mortgage. They might want a line of credit, which is always a good thing to do. It’s to get these things in order so that you’ve got some weapons ready to go when the opportunities come in the market. As somebody who is an investor yourself, there are major opportunities that are going to be around the corner here in 2023, so people want to be ready.

In times like this, people want to have access to cash as we’re approaching another downturn. There are still yet to be a lot of good investment opportunities to be had and be ready to be able to pull the trigger and have access to that type of capital. Do you help people get standalone equity lines of credit?

Yes, we do.

That’s awesome.

We have access to that.

Both on their primary residents and their rental properties too?

It’s more difficult to get them on investment properties in general, given the current climate, but we have access to them and do them.

You’re the first mortgage originator that I’ve brought on. A lot of folks here are investors. Since you’re here, let’s talk about mortgage programs for investors. What are some of the popular mortgage programs for investors nowadays?

If you’re looking to put money into real estate as an investor, on the mortgage side, there are products out there if you’re looking to acquire a residential property. Meaning four units or less. Maybe you want to acquire a fourplex that you have rented out. That’s fine. There’s an amazing product out there in the way of one particular loan, which is called a DSCR loan or Debt Service Coverage Ratio loan.

A lot of your investors or people that read this are probably familiar with it. In a nutshell, it uses the rents of the property or the fair market rents to qualify you for the mortgage instead of your income. A lot of us, especially those that are investors, entrepreneurs, or business owners don’t show a lot of income on paper. This is where a lot of investors feel they get stuck and are like, “I can only go the private route.” No, there’s a great space or niche which is in between private and traditional, which is called non-QM. The type of loan that I described to you falls within that space.

This has been a great access point for a lot of investors to be able to acquire four units or less, purely for investment purposes only. It’s not meant to be a loan that you acquire and then you live in the home, or it’s a second home. This is meant to be an investment because it’s only qualified based on the fair market rent. You have to put down the appropriate down payment to make the numbers pencil out, and you’ve got to do it.

There are other ways in which investors can get into real estate, whether it’s buying into REITs or C-REITs, which are more incubator styles. There are also ways of doing syndications. There are a lot of people out there that are very successful, particularly here in the Bay Area. There are great resources that people can connect with. People who source deals know how to structure deals and are looking for either debt or equity partners.

A lot of investors out there got capital to deploy, but they don’t have the time to deal with the maintenance of a property, the ongoing month-to-month upkeep of it, or the servicing of that property, collecting rents, cashing checks, and doing it, but they would be happy to get a fixed rate of return by investing with a group that is going to do this for them and does the heavy lifting. This is a popular way as well.

There are always many ways to get into real estate. You can partner with people, go the private route, do products that are creative like this DSCR loan, invest in REITs, do crowdfunding within REITs, which are C-REITs, and then syndications. There are many ways in which investors can get into real estate. It’s not a linear process.

With real estate investing, to your point, you could be as active as you want in real estate investing by doing everything yourself or do syndications and be as passive as you want. You invest with partners and let the partners do more of the heavy lifting where you invest your $50,000 or whatever it is into the syndication for a certain amount of return.

The DSCR product is a nice product in the sense that it doesn’t even require you to have a job because it’s based on the subject property that you’re buying, provided that it cashflows, and it’s greater than the mortgage payments and tax insurance, then you’re good to go, for the most part, which is an amazing thing. Going back, how did you land in the mortgage industry out of curiosity? My readers know I also got into the mortgage industry, too, in the early 2000s.

It’s the same as everyone. Nobody sets out and looks for this industry. This industry finds you or you’ve fallen up by accident. That was the case for me. I was living in Reno and still in college in my senior year. I was living in a fraternity, and I had some friends that had dropped out of school and living in Vegas at the time. They got into the mortgage industry as brokers and were doing well. They’re driving nice cars and living a high life, which, for college students, is like, “Wait a minute, what are you doing?” I suspected they were doing drugs or were good gamblers and making a lot of money, but they said, “No, we’re doing mortgages, and we need help up in Reno.”

I started driving around to people’s houses on their behalf because this was 2001 when everything was on paper. There was nothing digitized or automated about the industry at all. You had to go to people’s homes and have them hand-fill out applications, process them, and submit them that way. We did that, and I was making money that way. I said, “I want to get on the other side of this because there’s clearly something that can be scaled here.”

My brother and I teamed up as well as with another partner that we had. The three of us signed a lease on office space and hired a bunch of college students to be telemarketers for us and ran a call center, doing refinances all over the country. That’s how we got started, and then it grew from there. Many years later, even through the market corrections and cycles and the financial collapse of 2008, we’re still here doing it. It’s been a wild ride.

It has been. You’ve been in it long enough, where you saw the mortgage credit crash in 2008. Now, here we are again with another slowdown in the real estate market and whatnot. What are your thoughts as it relates to the current economy? What’s your take on the housing market in the mortgage situation where rates have doubled? Are we in a recession? What do you feel?

There’s a lot of information out there and negativity that’s being pedaled. We have to remember where that’s coming from and who benefits from that. The media portrays things very negatively and very doom and gloom. That’s their business because they’re in the click business. They’re in the subscription and hooking you business. The longer you’re drawn into a negative story, the more profitable they are because you’re being exposed to ads, tuning in to boost their ratings and viewership. There’s a whole cycle behind it. You have to understand a lot of it is by design.

Mortgage Market: The longer you’re drawn into a negative story, the more profitable the media is because they expose you to ads, and you tune in and boost ratings, viewership, et cetera.

If you don’t believe me, you have to think back to COVID. It was a terrible situation, but certain networks were airing a death tracker. How morbid is that? They were tracking the number of debts and showing it like a ticker as if it was a stock index. People were drawn into this, and it was consuming them. If you don’t believe in fear pedaling or raising hysteria by way of negative reporting, you have to think back to that. That’s the frame of reference.

We have a lot of that, but how do we combat that? We have to also recognize and acknowledge that some of the greatest wealth and greatest stories in terms of prosperity are created during down markets. The biggest names and tycoons in US economic history like the Rockefellers were built during the Great Depression. Clearly, a lot of companies, wealth, and visionaries see opportunities during downtimes.

There’s absolutely one now. I can point to something a lot more realistic and more relatable in that you’ve got big funds or institutional investors like JP Morgan or Blackstone that have acknowledged and said they’re sitting on the sidelines. I know you know this too. They’re sitting with $1 billion or several billion dollars, lined up, waiting for a little bit of a pullback in the market, and then they’re going to get in there, acquire, and absorb a lot of single-family and multifamily inventory.

That means the real estate market has got some very good prospects because billionaires and funds are very anxious to buy. That tells me the asset class clearly has some legs underneath it, and it’s not going to collapse. This is nothing comparable to 2008. We had a slowdown in housing that eventually was exacerbated by a financial collapse that led to a recession. It wasn’t the other way around.

A lot of people think a recession caused the housing market to collapse. It was the other way around. Whereas now recessions happen irrespective of what’s going on in housing. Housing sometimes ends up being a bright spot in that recession, or it ends up taking off and doing well during recessionary periods because mortgage rates tend to get better.

The point I’m making in all this and what it means for an investor or consumer when thinking about all these things going on and all the negativity that’s out there is there is a huge opportunity. Let’s look at all the negative things. We’ve got a market that doesn’t have a lot of confidence and a lot of people sitting on the sidelines. We’ve got interest rates that have doubled, and we have tight inventory. That all sounds pretty negative. You’re like, “Who would want to buy during this?”

A lot of people associate and equate a good market to where interest rates are at. When rates are lower, they think that’s a good market and a good time to get in. When, in actuality, it’s the opposite. We have a herd mentality when everyone starts to get in, and then everyone feels, “I’ve got to get in this market too. I need to find a place. Everyone’s buying. Everyone’s moving in.” It creates a little bit of a frenzy, but it’s because of those “negative things” that I pointed out that we have all the opportunity we have because we have less buyers, less bidding wars, and less crowded homes during open houses.

If homes are priced appropriately with the right incentives, the right pricing strategy, the right type of deal, and the right negotiation can take place, there are amazing deals that you would’ve never been able to find years ago that you can get now. For buyers, it’s an amazing opportunity if you choose to see it that way, but if you choose to read into all the fear-mongering and all the negativity, you could get swept up and say, “I’m going to sit this out because everybody’s saying and the media says this is a terrible time to buy.”

It’s not that they’re saying that. They’re just putting out a lot of negative things, and you are associating that as a bad time to buy, but in reality, there’s an amazing and tremendous opportunity. It may not be for everyone, but for those people that are locked in and looking, there’s a huge opportunity. I see that continuing this 2023 because rates are temporary moments. We have to remember that nobody ever keeps an interest rate long enough to realize whether it was a good rate or a bad rate because the average person refinances every 3 to 5 years so quickly that you don’t realize whether that was a good rate. The rate is merely an access point.

If you focus more on the right deal, the right incentives, the right price, and the affordability, the rate doesn’t matter because you’re going to have a chance to restructure that debt in this current cycle. Probably, in this calendar year of 2023, we’re going to have lower rates as inflation cools off. When we have lower rates, you’ll be able to restructure, but at least you’ll be on the ownership side, whether as an investor or a home dweller as opposed to then trying to get back into the market.

You bring up good points out of there. The mortgages are never permanent, but the house is. I see people with social media with the hashtag, “Date the rate. Marry the house.” Lock in that low price because that price now is a lot better than what we’re seeing in 2022. Rates are higher. Your monthly output for the PITI for the house is more than we paid for or whatnot, but the thing is, your price is a lot lower so your tax base is lower.

Here in California, that’s the basis on which your property taxes go up. They’re capped every year because of Prop 13, but regardless, people need to know that could be restructured exactly what you’re saying, and those payments will be able to go down and whatnot. You’ll be even happier that you bought in a time like right now because you locked in that lower price point, and you are paying a lot lower property tax than somebody that bought in a prior year.

Yes. It’s a huge advantage. What happens when rates go down? You have to remember. If you get in now with a higher rate environment and rates go down, more people enter the market, get approved, start shopping, a bidding war starts, and the value runs up. If you are already on the other side of the fence where you own, you’re going to benefit from that run-up in the value uptick as opposed to trying to get back in and now getting into the race all over again like it was a few years ago.

One of the things I wanted to touch upon is the fact that you’ve been in martial arts since you were a kid, it sounds like. Did you and your siblings do it together?

My brother, sister, and I all work together. A lot of people that follow this show and people in the real estate space know who they are. My brother is Neel Dhingra and my sister is Shivani Peterson. They’re both very active on social media as investors, educators, and thought leaders in the space. We all did it together, but it was not that we were forced into it. I got into it at the age of eight because I was being bullied in school. I wanted to get into some martial arts classes, so I knew how to defend myself. My mom took me to one, and it happened to be a Taekwondo class.

My brother joined me and started a few years later. We did it together for a number of years, and then my sister got into it too. I ended up being the only one that stuck with it. It was a very big piece of my life during my formative years and even post-formative years. It gave me an amazing network of people. It was good for my wellness and provided me with the opportunity to be able to compete and represent my country in international sports.

I started competing internationally in 2007 for Team USA. I did so for a couple of years and then retired. I had the privilege of becoming the co-head coach for Team USA’s Taekwondo team right after that, which is what I’ve done now. It’s been several years that I’ve been the co-head coach. I started a little bit before I retired as an athlete as well and was doing both roles. It’s been extremely rewarding.

It ties into my mortgage brand as well because being a mortgage advisor and being a Taekwondo coach are two very similar hats because you’re taking somebody from point A to point B, from athlete to champion, or from a kid who is being bullied to someone who can now stand for themselves and defend themselves, from saver to investor, and from renter to owner. It’s all about a journey. The coaching hat and the advisor hat are very much the same. That’s why I interweave the two very much into my social and online presence because I feel like they’re one and the same.

Any lessons learned or the skills you picked up in the martial arts world that have translated and used a lot in your personal and professional life?

You can always learn from people that have done it before you. That applies in real estate. If you want to figure out what ways to get into real estate, invest, and create portfolios, talk to people that have done it. Be around people, learn from people, and subscribe to the show where the guy running the show like this great one has done it and walks the walk. Learn from those people. Taekwondo and my martial arts upbringing were very much the same.

Mortgage Market: You can always learn from people that have done it before you.

If I wanted to be successful, I wanted to hang around and learn from people that have done it, that have achieved certain ranks, won certain titles, and competed at certain levels because that eventually rubs off. That’s one. The other one where martial arts give you a lot of humility, which helps me out as a professional and someone who provides a service and an experience, is that you’re never done with your work. You have to constantly get better. You got to improve. We can all improve. There’s a saying that a student is always a student. You never stop learning. You don’t quite ever master anything. It’s been many years that I’ve been in Taekwondo, and I still feel like I’m a student.

You’re still doing it now and still a student.

I’m still a student. You’re always a student. A good student can learn anytime and anywhere. We need to also take that on as professional service providers as well, like people in my industry. My work is never done. I’m constantly trying to get better, learn better ways to advice, more creative ways to market, and offer solutions to clients. That type of humility and eagerness to get better and advance and evolve is something that’s kept me in business this long, and it’s keeping me inspired in the martial arts space as well and helping other people do it.

How often do you do Taekwondo nowadays?

I trained two days a week on my own because we’re in a down cycle. We had our world championships in Amsterdam this last July 2022. Team USA was there and participated with about 40-something other countries. It was a great world championship. They had been delayed because of the pandemic. They were supposed to have happened a year sooner, but they got pushed off. It was a great experience.

Our country and team did very well. Team USA did well. We had one of the best overall outputs that it’s ever had. I’m proud of that and the work we did. We had some amazing stories from some of our athletes, but now we’re in a little bit of a down cycle, so we’re not coaching and training as much. Everyone keeps up on their own. I don’t get out to the East Bay as often to train as I’d like to once or twice a quarter, but a lot of the training is on my own right now.

I’m going to switch back and go back to the mortgage industry. I forgot to ask about this one. What are some of the challenges now that you’re facing in the mortgage industry and your business?

This ties back to the media. You’ve got the media that’s painting a certain narrative, so you have to combat people’s anxieties, fears, and confusion around what’s going on. You’re battling also the fact that rates have doubled. Having to explain and clarify and add context around that instead of saying, “I’m sorry for the rates,” or whatever, I’m not apologizing for them, but rather accepting that the market is what the market is.

The market’s where it’s at, and that’s the market. You have to make something out of this current market. In doing so, you need to be solution-oriented, but that’s been a challenge that’s hit the industry for over a few years, but I’ve embraced it because this is where the good gets separated from the weak ones in our industry, both in real estate and in lending.

Around 600,000 lenders and realtors will exit the industry nationally over the next two quarters, Q1 and Q2 of 2023. That’s a lot of people. That’s a reduced amount of competition, which means the market share is relative, even though the pie might be shrinking of the available market because there are not as many buyers or there are no homes to refinance, things like that. The amount of competition’s gone down. if you choose to see it as an opportunity, you can go after it. That’s what we’ve done in spite of the challenges.

Your question was, “What challenges are we seeing on the mortgage side?” It’s higher rates, dealing with consumer mindsets and paradigms that are set and trying to break down some of those patterns or deconstruct them, and getting people to see things a little bit of a different way by offering a different light and a different set of information. That’s been a challenge, but it’s one that we’ve accepted and taken on. I enjoy doing that by way of content creation, sharing on podcasts, and having conversations with folks.

Those veteran practitioners in real estate and mortgage, the ones that are here to stay, thrive in these types of markets because as the competition dwindles and people are leaving the industry, it keeps the business for us. You still got to work hard, and nothing’s still going to come easy, but what I’m hearing is there’s still a ton of opportunity.

A lot of the stuff regarding education with the consumer is just making sure that you’re breaking down all that hysteria, all of this stuff that’s being pushed on the media, and whatnot, and making sure that it’s being told the right way. I don’t believe all of the narratives, and it’s not all to be included necessarily. The narrative needs to be changed.

I can’t agree with you more.

Let’s switch topics to investing, especially real estate investing. You’ve been involved in real estate investing for some time now. What was your first real estate investment, and what are you doing now in real estate investing?

A lot of the initial investing I did was during the market run-up in early 2001 and 2002. I bought a house with one of my business partners that we lived together as roommates. We wanted to co-own it so we could share any exposure and benefit from the upside. We then bought a couple of rentals because everyone was doing it, and that’s the way you get in.

We had some rentals that we didn’t hold for too long. In hindsight, I would’ve held them longer, but that’s something you learn along the way. That’s something we did. I did a few fix and flips. There’s one that I did okay on and another one that I got burned badly on because the music stopped in 2008. I was so upside down on the deal and the delays in construction and everything that we ended up having to do a short sale. It was painful and a lot of money went into it, but that was a big learning experience.

After 2008, coming back and rebuilding up capital and doing deals again, eventually buying again and reentering the market for myself, I went back into acquiring not so much investment property but trying to do more syndications because of limited time. That’s where I’m at presently. I want to go with proven winners. I work with some development groups and asset management groups that are investing in alternative real estate classes around the country that are predicated on good and strong commercial tenants with good rents. These are great rates of return.

I’m doing another remodel project with a partner out in Marin County in the San Anselmo area on a home that’s going to be flipped that was bought at a unique time. I partnered with somebody who’s very strong with remodels. I didn’t want to do it again because I was not experienced in it. A bit of advice for people is that if you’re going to do things in partnership, make sure that one of you or the person that you’re partnering with carries the skillset to achieve the objective in what it is that you’re investing. Don’t get into flipping with a partner if you’ve never flipped a house before or you have no idea of what it is to improve a place or bring something up to date because that could become a very expensive and painful learning lesson.

Mortgage Market: If you do things in partnership, ensure that one of you or the person you’re partnering with carries the skillset.

Syndications right now are what we’ve done. Me and some partners are also in the process of starting a hard money lending and a private lending fund. This is going to be critical for serving the investor community, not necessarily investing myself because private money for developers, private money for a lot of rehab specialists, or people that are looking to acquire property without wanting to go through normal loan channels is very fluid in active space.

Me and some partners pool together resources and have wanted to get into that. We’re starting a hard money company. There are lots of syndications. I’m looking for a multi-unit in the Midwest. That’s what I’m actively looking at now during this economic downtime because I feel there’s going to be a great opportunity with certain properties being unloaded.

Do you have any favorite real estate investing types of strategies?

On the syndication side, that for me is a personal favorite because I’m trusting people that are very good at what they’re doing. I’m coming in at a certain percentage at a fixed rate of return, which I like. There are a lot more assurances with that, but I don’t have to manage the actual property itself and get into the day-to-day. It’s easier and works better with my life. A lot of others prefer to be more hands-on and in the deal. My bandwidth is limited as a family person. Also, within my career and the service, I’m providing to all my other clients so that is a favorite of mine.

For your syndications, what asset classes are they mainly in? It sounds like they were commercial.

Commercial, yes. There was a little bit of dabbling in some spec housing developments in Texas, but no, it’s predominantly all commercial.

In terms of advice, a lot of folks here are investors. Some are experienced investors and new investors. What do you think is good advice for an investor to know in general? What advice would you give to even a newer investor starting off their journey?

Get a mentor. There are a lot of resources, but the first thing is to find a mentor or someone that’s done it so that you can learn from them. Maybe even partner with them because a lot of investors are always looking for more partners. It’s a great way to gain access but also mitigate your risk because you’re working with people who have done it.

The other thing that, as silly as it may sound, is the free university that people have access to, which is YouTube. There’s so much you can learn from YouTube from seasoned pros and investors and get a baseline education on a lot of things. I’m not saying that everything on YouTube is valuable, but find the right ones, and there are many great sources of legitimate influential people that are successful in the space that will give away a lot of value.

Investors several years ago didn’t have access to it. YouTube wasn’t around when I got in the business, but it would’ve been invaluable and helped me avoid a lot of mistakes, and probably saved me a lot of money if I had it prior to the 2008 crash. Use these resources, find mentors, find people that have done it, get around them, and also study up on YouTube.

Have a lot of men mentors come along the way to help you get to where you are?

Yes. Nobody gets to where they’re at on their own. We have to do the work, but it’s not by accident. You have people that were there. You have people that nudged you and people that you looked up to. At my current company, my CEO, who is somebody I look up to, is a great deal. He is a great resource and mentor but also a good supporter. In every place, whether it was in martial arts or the mortgage business, even in investing, I’ve had mentors, and I’m always getting more. I want to be around more of those people because that’s what’s going to ultimately navigate you through, show you the way, and you can save yourself a lot of time.

It’s a fast track to success a lot of the time. They already know the pitfalls, so they’re a good guide to help you avoid stuff that you shouldn’t be doing and focus on the real stuff that you should be doing. Here are some final questions for you. What are you excited about in your business now?

It’s the opportunity here this 2023. I’ve touched on it. I’m very excited about the opportunities. I’m excited about the exodus of people and the competition shrinking. That also creates a lot of opportunities for growth and growing our team nationally. It’s growing advisors and helping people use content and video marketing as a platform for driving new business, forging new relationships, and creating more opportunities.

I’m excited about that opportunity from an expansion standpoint. From a market share standpoint, as I said, there’s tremendous opportunity out there for buyers. I’m making it a continued ongoing mission this 2023 to educate people and clarify and be the voice of reason, calm, and optimism so that more of these clients shake off the negativity and proceed forward with making some good moves.

Now that we’re in 2023 and it’s a new year, are there any new big goals, either personal or business that you’re focusing on working on now?

It’s more of a growth thing. We are looking to grow our team. There’s been a lot of contraction and consolidation within the mortgage industry. A lot of places are closing. Wells Fargo announced that they’re closing correspondent. They’re going to scale back a lot of their retail ops, and this paves the way for them to do a lot of layoffs because they don’t need it anymore.

Whenever these things happen, which are all cyclical, it’s not an indication that a market is crashing or that anything truly negative is going on. It’s a smart business that has to be done. They are doing so, but that creates an opportunity for other places because there are a lot of people within the mortgage industry that works at places like that, that are going to be looking to go somewhere else and maybe take their career to a different level in a totally different arena because what we offer is very different from the banking world. A big goal of ours is to see the opportunity within the labor markets within the industry for growth and addition.

It makes sense. Let’s talk about the word success. What does success even mean to you?

It means it’s a process. It’s not something that happens. It’s nothing instant. Instant and success are two words you can’t use in the same sentence. Success is ongoing. Success is evolving. Success is a process. It’s a commitment. If you’re committed to process and details and you remain structured, you’ll ultimately have success. There are a lot of victories that happen along the way, which are successful, and that adds to your success. You then create a successful life, endeavor, or career by way of that. It doesn’t just happen. It’s in more of the trenches and more of the day-to-day.

What would you say is your superpower? What makes you you that has contributed to your great life so far?

It’s empathy. I have a lot of empathy. Sometimes way too much that clients and partners take advantage of, jokingly. A lot of that compassion is around the volunteering I do, or maybe it’s because I coach, and I have a lot of empathy for the athletes and the people I’m around. I carry that forth with clients. I’ve been there, and it matters. You want to work with people who have done it. You don’t hire a trainer who’s not in shape, isn’t walking the walk themselves, eating well, and is in good physical condition. You’re not going to take advice from them.

Why would somebody trust me with the biggest indebtedness they’re going to take on if I’ve never bought a place, flipped a place, or made mistakes and learned from them and lost in real estate? That’s important when it comes down to people choosing people who they want to work with and who they want to associate with. Learning that along the way and learning from those lessons and bringing that forth into my business is something that I’m constantly doing.

Any final words or advice for the audience?

This is an asset class that the media will continue to poke at because they feel that they can easily predict this one. The media is generally wrong on almost every asset class there is. Real estate sometimes is the donkey they can kick if they can. A lot of them are trying to liken this with other motivations to 2008. This is not 2008.

My final thought is to keep things separate. Do a lot of your own analysis. See through the noise, the clutter, and the negativity, and you’ll see there are real opportunities in this. 2008 was the real dark days. That was seriously dark for those of us that were around during it. This is nothing like that. There’s an opportunity here. There’s capital and liquidity in the system. We didn’t have any of that stuff back in 2008, and that made it a tough time, whether you were in the industry or trying to get home. Now, we’ve got different pastures. That would be my advice to everyone. See through it, seize the opportunity, don’t buy into the hype of the hysterics, stay calm, keep learning, be a student of the game, and you’ll get yours this year.

I love it. The sky is not falling. There are a lot of opportunities out there. Arjun, how could somebody get a hold of you?

Connect with me on Instagram. That’s my favorite place to interact with people. I love exchanging ideas. Find me there @ArjunMortgage. I’m here locally in the Bay Area, and I know a lot of readers are, but there are also a lot of readers outside. We work all over the country. I love exchanging ideas and connecting with people, so find me there.

That’s a wrap then. Arjun, thank you for joining me on this episode.

Thanks for having me.

It was a joy connecting with another Bay Area local. I picked up a lot of great stuff from you, and my readers have too. To my readers, please feel free to reach out to Arjun directly should you have any questions for him, so connect with him. Also, thanks for checking out this episode of the show. Remember to leave a review on iTunes as it helps me attract even more great guests like Arjun. Until next time, live life abundantly. Thanks, Arjun.

Thank you, brother.

Important Links

• Arjun Dhingra
• @ArjunMortgage – Instagram
•  iTunes – The School of Cash Flow

About Arjun Dhingra

Arjun has been serving clients as a licensed mortgage banker for 18 years.

He started his career in 2001, during his final year of college where he was majoring in marketing and economics. Having worked in several businesses through his years of education served him well in developing market sense as well as client negotiation skills. With the ability to lend in 13 states and provide all aspects of the entire mortgage process in-house (processing, underwriting and funding), Arjun is able to provide value to his clients and strategic partners that goes well beyond interest rates and good service.

Clients rely on Arjun’s ability to remain creative in an otherwise challenging lending market. His team are professionals in dealing with the entire lending scope, from seasoned buyers and investors to aspiring first time buyers with challenging loan scenarios. He understand that each loan is a unique story and needs to be approached accordingly, all while maintaining the ability to adapt to an ever changing lending market that constantly issues new guidelines and challenges in the pathway to closing a deal.

During his time away from mortgages, Arjun is active in volunteering, traveling and training in Martial Arts. He currently serves as the National co-head coach for TEAM USA’s TaeKwon-Do group. Having won 2 gold medals in World Championships during his competing years, he remains very connected to the art, using the synergies between business and training that can be applied to dealing with clients and fighting on their behalf.