Hey Reader, Better Mortgage and Coinbase just made their token-backed mortgage program broadly available. The headline is obviously going to be: “Use Bitcoin to buy a house.” But as a note investor, that is not the part I find most interesting. I’m looking at the debt structure. Here’s what they built. The borrower gets a traditional conforming first mortgage. Then there is a second loan used to fund the down payment. That second loan is secured by the borrower’s pledged Bitcoin and a second...

Hey Reader, Last week, the City of St. Louis filed a lawsuit against a real estate investor over a strategy called the “slow flip.” The idea sounds simple. Buy inexpensive homes. Sell them to buyers using a contract for deed (Check out an article I wrote about this). Let the buyer make monthly payments toward ownership. In theory, this can create a path to homeownership for people who may not qualify for a traditional mortgage. But according to the lawsuit, there was a major problem. The City...

Hey Reader, When I look at a seller financed note, there is one question that matters more to me than almost any other. How was the borrower qualified for this loan? The reason I focus on it is because every other number on a listing is a snapshot. The property value. The interest rate. The LTV. The payment history. All useful. None of them tells me whether the borrower could actually afford the loan when they took it out. The qualification process does. A note where the borrower put $500...