Are you having problems with your home equity? In this episode, Matthew Sullivan shares details on what their company, QuantmRE, is doing to help people in this space. Before settling in the real estate industry, Matthew had the opportunity to experience working in several industries. Now with QuantmRE, his team is solving a major problem for homeowners who want to access the equity in their homes without taking on more debt using their equity freedom platform. How are they doing it, and how can you take advantage of it? Tune in for the answers!
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Tapping Into Your Home Equity Without Borrowing Money With Matthew Sullivan
How are you doing, Z?
I’m doing great. I’m sitting in Washington State. Every time I’ve been telling people I’m going to Washington, they’re like, “Are you going to DC?” No, we have a state called Washington too. I’m in my new Airbnb. We spent a week setting it all up. Hit me up on Instagram if you want to check it out and want to come to visit. It’s been a journey. We got this done real fast. We’ve been mostly exploring Western Washington.
Who are we? Do you have a partner on this deal?
I do have a partner on this deal. He did not come and did not have much sense of design. I had my friend, Amy, @AmySellsBoulder. She’s one of my agents and a magic maker. We’re in here making magic. What’s new with you?
We are sitting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I finished an Ironman.
You’re all about it. Did you finish?
I finished. It was a ballbuster, for sure. For those that don’t know, an Ironman is a 2.4-mile swim followed by a 112-mile bike ride, followed by a marathon run. I had seventeen hours to do the entire thing. I did it in 16.5 just as timed. It was crazy. I’m still a little sore.
I’m like, “Can you move or are you sitting in a wheelchair?” That is a crazy town.
It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about myself and my mental toughness along the way. It was mostly mental honestly, but it’s been a fun time. My wife and I are road-tripping around the Southwest. It’s exciting.
We have a guest. It’s not us for once blabbing away. Matthew Sullivan is joining us and he’s got an interesting product to talk to us about a way to utilize your equity that even Craig and I didn’t know. Read to the end because he doesn’t get into it until halfway through the episode but it is a great tool to have in your tool belt as an investor and a property owner.
I look at a lot of ways to unlock equity. The only two that I could ever think of were either you got to sell or you got a HELOC but Matt has got a cool third way that a lot of people would be able to use, even if you’ve got a bad credit score, bad debt-to-income ratio and you don’t want to sell. Let’s bring him on so he can tell us the story.
Matthew Sullivan, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on.
We want to take it way back, as you alluded to where you first heard or learned about financial independence.
It’s one of those things that’s linked up being genetically engineered to be an entrepreneur. Financial independence, for me, goes hand in hand with unemployability. This is more of making necessity as the mother of invention. As a young employee, fresh out of university, I became instantly unemployable and always wanted to run my business. Therefore, you have to learn how to become financially independent.
What do you mean by unemployable?
You’re so irritating as an employee because you want to do everything. If your bosses say, “All I want you to do is this thing here,” you say, “I can do that but have you thought about maybe changing the way that your computer system reads your internal messages?” You see how businesses work and you think, “If only we could do that, I could do that a bit better. You’ve got a much better job than I have. I want to do your job.” You’re doomed at that point. You’ve got to take an entrepreneurial pathway. Otherwise, you’ll end up changing jobs every four days approximately.
You become unemployable. How long did it take you from graduating from university or college to then go ahead, quit your job and do your thing?
It starts as this irritating tickle in the back of your mind where you think, “I’ve gone to school or university. I’ve done all the things that I’m supposed to do but this doesn’t quite feel right.” I had a few years’ worth of jobs. I started life as an insurance salesperson in the early days. This is back when I left university but in the late ’80s. In ’88, I moved back to London and then started as a stockbroker. For a few years, I was broking the Far East markets as a stockbroker in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Those were interesting times in the late ’80s and early ’90s after the global financial meltdown of the late ’80s.
We were at the very forefront of these new emerging markets. That was exciting but it didn’t feel like that was my thing. A couple of the guys that were my bosses at that point split off and set up a small corporate finance company. I joined that and that felt much better being in a small organization where we can start doing things. We ended up doing some interesting deals and owning 50% of Per Lindstrand’s hot air balloon company.
Funnily enough, we ended up going to Richard Branson. My boss, Rory McCarthy said, “Richard, would you like to fly around the world in a hot air balloon because it’s the last great challenge known to man? We happen to own a hot air balloon company and we’ve got all the designs.” We ended up getting close with Richard Branson. For the next few years, we were working hand in glove with him.
The challenges are endless, but as long as you can keep marching forward, you're going to win. Share on XThis is your corporate life and you’re living the corporate dream.
It was both. It was about the late ’90s. I had a ten-year career in stockbroking, banking and corporate finance and was exposed to some cool people and good things. At that point, I had to leave, go and set up my business. I then set up a telecom business. It was in the late ’90s when the telecom companies were all beginning to deregulate and there was competition coming in. I set up a resell business where we would buy traffic and minutes effectively at wholesale prices, repackage it and send it out. That was using technology, which is still very much in its infancy. This was way before the internet was born.
It sounds like you had this 10-career from the late ’80s to the late ’90s. In the late ’90s, you start doing your thing. You see maybe some opportunity in the telecom space and the internet is starting to take off. What made you go into telecom?
It’s a very good business that allows you to make money when you sleep. It’s a build it once, sell it many times. The thread pretty much my entire life is if you can build platforms that allow things to happen without you having to push them, then that’s how you get to scale. Telecom is a great business. It is very scalable and a great opportunity then because there was a massive arbitrage opportunity between wholesale pricing and retail pricing.
It’s a tech company. It was the start of this recurring model where you sell something once and they’re going to buy it from you again and again. That’s why a lot of venture capitalists and people in that industry love the recurring or reoccurring revenue model because you can make money while you sleep.
In terms of the historical context, this is the same time you’ve got CompuServe and AOL. If people mention the word internet, no one knows what that is. This is happening at that same time. The late ’90s and early 2000s were very exciting times because you’ve got the launch of the internet. There’s a lot of stuff happening, particularly in markets that are being deregulated where you have competitive forces come in, so all sorts of opportunities pop out there. These are the times that we’ve seen with blockchain and other types of technologies, the same sort of feeling.
I was curious if there was a moment when you realized that you didn’t want to work in a traditional sense. Were you cognizant of this need to go entrepreneurial or pursue financial independence or did it just happen?
Everyone has their point where you realize, “This is the day that this is what I want to do.” I’d always wanted to be in smaller environments where I had a say in how the business was shaped. For the first few years of my career, that worked very well because I was in small organizations but there comes a point when you feel you have enough experience that you already want to impose your point of view on other people.
The point came where I wasn’t pushed. It was the right time like, “There are opportunities. I can see those opportunities and do something to take advantage of them. I’m out of here. I’ve got some capital. It is the right time.” I have my podcast, Hooked On Startups, where we talk to lots of startup entrepreneurs that have different moments. The moment is like a slow burn. You know instinctively that you want to pound your canoe. For me, it was the following day that I wanted to do it. “This is the day that I’m going to settle this up. I have no idea how I’m going to do it but I’ll figure it out.” That’s an important point as well.
After the telecom, did you do a series of startups? Is that why you have this podcast?
One of the telecom companies I ran and built for a few years sold it off. I sold it to an internet company and swapped it for shares, which I should have kept for longer than I did. It exploded in 2000 and 2001. We rode the wave and worked with them for a little bit. We split off and set up my company. We were one of the first companies to build a platform to bill data on the internet.
This was interesting because at that time, if you wanted to buy internet services, it was a fixed rate of $20 a month and you would get everything you wanted. What we were doing is we were building systems that could track the types of data that people were buying. If you wanted to download a book, it was X amount. If you wanted different types of content or data, then we would be able to charge according to that data type.
Effectively, we were inspecting the packets as they were flying through a system and saying, “That’s a particular piece of content, a piece of layer seven content or a piece of content that’s designed to make the system work, so we’ll let that go.” The sequence was not just a flurry of different startups. There was this process starting with telecoms and platforms moving into the internet, seeing the opportunities and looking at where the pain points were. “How could we build foundational instruments within the internet environment?” That’s how we created Copernicus Global Billing Services, which was the first true billing company to come out on the internet.
With all these startups that you’ve started and created, I suspect there are tons of challenges that you had. What were some of the big ones?
The biggest challenge is not looking over your shoulder because there are all the scary demons behind you. It’s being true to your vision. You’ve got this idea, “This is the thing that I want to build.” No one knows if you’re right or not. The only way you’re going to know if you’re right is if you build it and if anyone says, “That’s a good idea. I’ll have some of that.”
There were endless challenges. You’ve got to build companies, brands and momentum. You got to go get other people to fund it, buy in from a staff perspective, find ways of managing the staff and stay ahead of the competition who stole your ideas and probably do them better than you because they got more money. In that environment, as long as you can keep marching forwards, the chances are that you’re going to win because you’ve got that real belief that many of these copycats don’t. They tend to fall by the wayside, one by one.
That’s good to know. It’s super cliché but in any business, whether it be the internet business or the real estate business, you got to strap on that suit of armor and get ready to get hit, blown, take shots and bullets because you’re going to go through the trenches. When you come out on the other end, you’re going to be that much stronger and perseverant. It adapts to any aspect of life. Where are we? Was that 2003 or 2004 when you sell your internet company?
The internet company did blow up along with many other internet businesses.
Did it implode in a bad way?
It went the wrong way. The reason behind that was our clients or customers were big telecom companies that were moving into the internet space. We were well set to provide them with all this cool billing technology. All the technology that they had was effectively clockwork because it was used to build telecoms’ minutes. There was no way that their legacy systems could do anything useful at all with data. They weren’t designed that way.
Treat your real estate investments as a business. Share on XWe came in with this fantastic system that they could bolt onto their existing customer base and start selling them a whole range of new services but one by one, in very short order, they all went bust. Carrier-1, Viatel and Energis, all these companies that we worked with imploded, along with many other internet companies, when the internet business environment effectively crashed. It was the same time as 9/11. We couldn’t recover from that.
A big lesson learned there too, is that you got to make sure that your business does not rely on a small subset of customers. If 75% of your revenue comes from 2 or 3 customers, that’s a bad thing. That’s like when you go into a real estate market and you’re relying on one industry. Like Detroit, they rely on car manufacturing. When car manufacturing blows up, then Detroit sucks. You have to make sure that there’s a lot of diversity in the market you’re investing in. Not only that but make sure your property works in multiple ways too.
In a lot of these markets in the real estate space, it’s like, “My property works. I Airbnb out every bedroom and get the most out of this property as possible.” What happens if regulations start to impede Airbnb? Make sure it works as a long-term rental and short-term rental and you’ve got multiple strategies to make sure your business, your real estate investment or any investment works so that way you’re not stuck when the market head is at the bottom to sell it at that time.
The other point is to treat your real estate investments like a business. One of the things that one sees over and over again is we are very connected to real estate, primarily residential, with what we do with Quantm. Over the years, I’ve been involved in commercial real estate and commercial real estate investing. A lot of the smaller investors don’t treat real estate investing as a business, so because of that, they don’t have that same approach in terms of building resilience.
What is it that you’re doing with Quantm? I didn’t realize there was much of a real estate connection, so I’d love to know about that.
We are in the residential real estate space and we are investors but we have a very interesting financial product that enables homeowners to access their home equity without taking on debt. We work directly with owner-occupiers. Our product enables them, in exchange for investment from us, to get a cash lump sum which enables them to tap into their home equity without borrowing money. The way that we get paid is by taking a share of the future appreciation of their property rather than charging them interest or debt.
How does that work? Let’s say I bought a $1 million house and $600,000 of debt on the house. I have effectively $400,000 of equity. You would give me $400,000 to do whatever I want?
There are limits to the amount. We don’t want to take all of your equity because we want to leave you with some and we also don’t want to have all of the risks. We’ll typically go up to 25% of the value of the property in terms of the amount that we’ll invest. If we add that investment to the amount of debt you have, that’s got to be less than 75% of the value of the property.
In your example, you’ve got a $1 million property. Let’s say we invested $100,000, so we’d pay you $100,000, which is 10% of the current value. The agreement would say, “When you sell your property or if you agree to refinance, which you can do anytime in the next years, you will pay us 16% of the value of the property at that time.” We’re effectively trading 16% of the future value of the property in exchange for 10% of the value. That’s helpful for homeowners because they get a cash lump-sum tax-free with no monthly payments. The fact that there are no monthly payments is very valuable to them.
What happens if home prices go down? We haven’t seen that. The trend has been up and up but at some point, things may go down a bit. What happens there?
From a homeowner’s perspective, nothing happens or triggers. There are no clauses in the contract that says, “If your house goes down in value, something happens.” We take that risk but the contract has significant downside protection built in. If we’re buying 16% or $160,000 worth of value for $100,000, your house needs to go down by about 35% and sell it at that reduced value for us to lose money.
Houses do go down. We all know that but it’s unlikely that the houses that we invest in and have significant equity, which you have to, to start with, you’re probably not going to sell. If you’ve got a very high mortgage against the property, you’re not motivated to hang on. You can hand the keys back because what have you got to lose but if you’ve got a big chunk of equity as a homeowner, you’re going to hang on to it. You’re more likely to ride the downturns.
This is only for people with a primary residence, is that right?
We also work with landlords. The proviso is the property has to be owned by a natural person. You can’t work with us if the property is owned by an LLC. The reason for that is normally, when you sell the property that’s owned by an LLC, you sell the membership interest in the LLC. The property doesn’t have to change hands. That ruins our models because we like properties to be bought and sold so that we can have liquidity events.
Being a venture capitalist of people with homes, you’re taking an equity stake.
That’s a good analogy because we’re like VCs and silent partners. If the property or company does well, it’s the homeowner benefits and investor benefits. The big problem though is liquidity. We’ve got to wait ten years potentially. In the other part of our platform, we take those home equity agreements that we’ve originated, use blockchain technologies to fractionalize them and sell them in a secondary market. You’ll see our secondary market go live. That’s where smaller investors can come in and buy a small piece of the home equity agreement on your home. That’s the equivalent of a venture capitalist buying a chunk of Airbnb shares and then enabling smaller investors to buy into them.
What happens if they don’t sell after ten years?
The agreement is protected by a lien on the title. We have the same rights as a lender. We are able to foreclose if we wanted to but we don’t want to do that because we’re in the same class as the homeowner and we bite your nose to spite your face, as it were. What we’re likely to do at that point is roll it over for another ten years.
We can do that because in most cases, the homeowner would have paid down the mortgage. The property would have gone up in value so there’ll be more equity. We can extend it for another 10 years but in most cases, these tend to pay off typically 3 to 5 years. People move homes every seven years normally. There are other programs that we can extend out to 30 years, so 10 years is not the only opportunity out there.
For those reading, I’m trying to synthesize this. It’s like the pros and cons of your strategy versus getting a traditional line of credit, which is a debt instrument. With the equity piece through Quantm, you can get a large lump sum of money that you don’t have monthly payments and interest payments on. It doesn’t show up on your debt-to-income ratio. It’s adding you as a partner on this deal to unlock value. It is more expensive.
As investment advisors would say, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your primary assets. Share on XTo give up 10% in exchange for 16%, which includes the additional equity of the house, which we all know, you get rich off of real estate through the appreciation over time versus that traditional, “I’m going to pay a 4% or 5% interest rate and that’s going to be the same over time. When we sell, all I got to do is pay off the remaining balance.” It feels to me that that would be a lot cheaper than the equity route. Prove me wrong.
You’re right. Debt products are less expensive in terms of the return on investment. In other words, if you’d look at the cost of a home equity agreement over 10 years, it’s going to be maybe 4 or 5 points a year more expensive than a well-priced HELOC. The difference is for many people, they’re not in a position to take that equity out. We’re serving a very large number of people that simply cannot borrow money. That’s a big piece.
You’ve then got people that would like to borrow or can borrow money, a typical real estate investor but if I were to borrow money, then that’s going to cap me out in terms of my borrowing capability. If I can somehow find a way to access the equity in my properties without increasing my debt-to-income ratio, that means I can buy more properties with more leverage because each one of those properties can serve as the debt. They’re different animals. If you look at them on a cost-by-cost basis, you’re not comparing apples with apples because no monthly payments, no income requirements and very low credit scores of 500 plus is a very different proposition altogether.
It’s like looking at hard money or private money. That might not be the first road you go down but it’s the road you go down as you’re an investor. You need more avenues and access to capital. Maybe you’ve already exhausted the easy low-hanging fruit that’s cheaper but you need to go into other products. This is cool for people to know about as a secondary product.
There’s another way of looking at it because rather than it being sequential, in other words, “We’ll try debt that doesn’t work. Let’s move to hard money,” you can look at this as a parallel funding mechanism because a homeowner doesn’t have access to hard money, accredited investor money, equity financing or mezzanine financing. The only financing they have at their fingertips is debt.
Different flavors, a HELOC, cash-out refinance, a second mortgage and that’s it. If they get turned down for a HELOC, got $500,000 worth of equity in their property and turned down because they were affected by the pandemic, run up bills on their credit cards and their credit score has come down, they’ve still got $500,000 of wealth there but they cannot touch it. This is a parallel strategy that uses equity funding. You can see it in a much more benevolent light. This is a funding mechanism that was not available to homeowners but it gives them extra choices rather than having them constricted to debt.
It’s another tool in the toolbox. The more tools you have in your toolbox, the more things you can build. It’s interesting because the only way to unlock equity is to sell it or HELOC it. Those are the only two options. Give this third option to people who don’t have jobs and there’s no way they get to HELOC.
I don’t want a HELOC. There’s so much equity in my property because I never expected over the last few years that my property, as an example, would have appreciated. We were talking to some people. Small houses in California somewhere have gone up to $250,000, which is more than it’s gone up in the last few years. That money was never expected but how do you get your hands on it? Either you can’t get the debt or you don’t want the debt. If I’m in a position where I’m happy and I’m meeting my obligations, I don’t want to increase my monthly outgoings by a couple of thousand dollars a month. If that’s the only way that I can get my hands on the debt, then I’m not going to benefit from it.
Let’s go back to that example. We’ve got a $1 million house and I got $600,000 of debt. You make a $100,000 investment and effectively get $160,000 worth of the house. Let’s say that house appreciates to $1.1 million. I still only have the $100,000 capital that you gave me but there’s an extra $100,000. Would you infuse on an additional $25,000 or something like that as the houses appreciate?
The 16% stays solid, so that doesn’t change at all but if you sell your house for $1.1 million, then we would get 16% of $1.1 million. We benefit if your house appreciates. We don’t give you any more money but the thing is, you’ve got that $100,000 but the question then is, “What are you going to do with it?” Let’s say you’ve got $50,000 worth of credit cards where you’re paying 25% interest. You’re getting a 25% return on that money if you pay your credit cards off or you could put it as a down payment on another property, which you can leverage and flip that property.
You could make a $100,000 return on that capital. It’s how you use that capital. You’re diversifying away from your primary residence. As investment advisors always say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” but for most people, all of their eggs are in one basket. It’s another very handy way of diversifying out of the primary assets.
I have a question about the life cycle of this business because when we started, we talked about the telecom company and how it was the timing of what was being developed that faded out. It wasn’t going to work any longer. I wonder if this is a good product because properties have been going up but if we see a downturn, what will happen with this business model? Do you feel like this has longevity?
Yes, I do. The billing business is still there. Not the same business but the model of billing for data is universal. Without that, you would have no services on the internet. You wouldn’t have pay-per-view, pay-per-click or anything like that. That was a blip in time that meant that that couldn’t progress further but looking at this business, it is the time.
The downside protection that’s in these instruments is a perfect way of investing in a down market. If you invest in real estate directly and the value of the property goes down, you’re going to take a loss. There’s no other way of getting around that because you’re investing in an asset, so if the value of the asset falls, the value of your investment falls with it. With these auction instruments, it’s got to fall by 35% to 40% and then be crystallized at that point. There’s no other instrument that we are aware of where investors can buy into owner-occupied, residential real estate and still benefit from the upside but have that downside protection.
Several things mean this product has long-term viability. For a start, 1) There’s over $23 trillion worth of equity in single-family homes. 2) People need money. 3) Interest rates are probably only going to increase for the foreseeable future, which means cash-out refinancing is cost-prohibitive.
If you combine all of those factors, houses will continue to appreciate in ten years. I would bet my favorite thing on that. This instrument serves multiple purposes. It helps homeowners. It’s an answer to the problem that they have. It’s not here now and gone tomorrow. We’re seeing the beginning of an enormous parallel funding industry that will ultimately rival HELOCs, reverse mortgages and cash-out refinance.
Have we hit on all of the drawbacks of this instrument which could be more expensive?
It’s a lot more flexible than a loan. It doesn’t have the same drawbacks. There are no monthly fees or costs. The only thing that you’re giving away that you’re not giving out with debt is a share of the future value of your home but with a loan, you kind of are because you’re paying off the principal. You’re spreading the payments out.
The biggest challenge and pushback that we have from homeowners is conceptually, are they willing to share something that they haven’t gone yet? It’s a mindset change. These products have been around for about ten years, so they are in their residencies. More people will begin to understand that this is a viable option. It’s not the same, it’s an option. As you rightly say, it’s another tool in the toolbox.
If this is an investment property, are you entitled to any of the cashflow from that investment property or it’s just that appreciation when you sell it?
You want to leave something behind, and it doesn't have to be anything big. It could be something very small that carries on, even though you're pushing up daisies somewhere. Share on XIt’s purely appreciation.
I’m curious if you’ve had people be upset at the end. It’s something they haven’t realized, so they don’t know how much their property is going to go up. At that point that they do sell their property if it’s gone up a lot, which properties have, are they ever feeling like they didn’t know what they were going to get into?
That’s why it’s so important that we do explain to people categorically and in many different ways what you are getting into and how this works. The other thing is that we advise them every quarter through statements of what they owe us. It’s like part of the servicing process. You’ll get a statement from us every quarter saying, “This is our estimate of the value of the home. This is what you would owe us if you sold the home now.” Every three months, you’re getting a reminder, “This is in place. Don’t forget about it. This is what you owe us.” That’s what’s going to help people prepare themselves for the moment when they do sell their home because they’ve always got this in the back of their minds.
Quantm seems like a big player in the space. Who are some of the other players that are doing this?
There’s a company like Point, which is based in San Francisco. They raised $112 million in Series C. Congratulations, Point. A company like Unison, Hometap, which is based out on the East Coast and also Unlock. There are only about 4 or 5 companies in the space. All together, we’ll probably collectively do about $1 billion in 2022 in investments.
Earlier in 2022 and at the end of 2021, we saw two important securitizations of these home equity agreements. One from Point and one from Unison, so that means you’ve got institutional buyers that are buying these instruments in a secondary market. Our business is focused on small investors, the guy on the street as it were, because we’re opening up this asset class to regular investors. At the moment, it is the playing field. Institutions, family offices, pension funds and hedge funds are the only people that can invest in that now but that’s going to change.
That’s going to be incredible once you open up that secondary market and allow the secondary market for buying and selling of shares of homes through the blockchain. That is revolutionizing the real estate industry. In layman’s terms, it sounds like if I wanted to own a piece of property in Memphis, Tennessee, I don’t need to go buy a property in Memphis, Tennessee. I can go buy John’s share of his house for $50,000 and own 16% of the house or whatever it is.
It’s a bit better than that because we don’t go on title as owners. We don’t own the property, so we don’t have any obligations or liabilities. We don’t have to fix the house. That’s John’s job. He’s the owner. All we get is appreciation. We get all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff. In other words, as an owner of a property, you have the issue of how you maintain toilets, tenants and trash but if you do not own the property and you can still benefit from the equity appreciation, that is a very interesting place to be.
It’s about time to head into the final part of the show but before we do, do you have any final words that you want to give to our readers?
It’s a very exciting time for us. We’ve been working on this for a few years. We’re delighted to help all the homeowners that we helped. We’re excited to be at the intersected PropTech in real estate and FinTech. It does have faint signals from the future, as it were, which is making us all bounce up and down in a very excited manner.
Let’s get into the Final Four. Z, kick us off.
What are you reading now?
There is a book Getting Things Done by David Allen, which is brilliant. One of the things that I think about all the time is, “Your mind is designed to create and not to be some biological storage unit.” You stop trying to remember everything that you’ve got to do and things that you have done. Write that stuff down and put it in a safe, secure place that you can trust, whether it’s a notebook or an app. The moment you declutter your brain from all of that, you can then stop thinking about things and be creative, which is what we were designed to be.
The whole idea of that is so simple. No longer do I wake up at 4:00 on a Monday morning and get to this and that because I’ve written it all down. It’s in my book on my desk. It’s practical advice. He also gives lots of lectures to groups on Google and Meta or Facebook. You can see them recorded online. It’s useful advice. There’s no psycho mumbo jumbo. It’s useful.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Keep at it. Over time, you realize that success is a combination of many factors. The most important one is probably your ability to stick at something. In other words, even though the night often appears darkest before dawn, when it feels like it isn’t going to work or you can’t do it, keep buggering on it.
What is your why?
You want to live with yourself. You want to feel that you’ve built, done and created something. It’s there that you can leave and spin away in the background. When you come back a few weeks later, it’s still there because you built it the right way and brought the right people into it. It was a good idea. The idea that you want to leave something behind doesn’t have to be anything big. It could be something very small but it’s this perpetual flame that’s there, something that carries on, even though you’re pushing up daisies somewhere.
In one sentence, how would you sum up the internet?
It’s a good place to buy stuff. Stuff is anything. It’s the ability to transact at a distance. There are millions of different things. It’s the ability to communicate. Do you remember you used to make long-distance phone calls and all that stuff? Everything has changed. It brings everybody closer.
Success is a combination of many factors. The most important one is your ability to stick at something. Share on XWhere can people find out more about you?
QuantmRE is the website, QuantmRE.com. We’ve got everything you need to know about what we’re doing with home equity agreements from a homeowner and investor’s perspective. There are lots of articles, blogs, press articles and a few more podcasts. There is a lot of information there about what we’re doing and how this works for homeowners. We’ve been at it for a few years, so there’s a calculator on the website. If you are a homeowner and want to find out how much we can potentially invest, you can go on there. Everything is in that one place.
Thank you so much for coming to the show. You’ve allowed us to purchase a new tool and we’ve unwrapped it. Hopefully, some people who are reading will get another option that we can be used this tool to unlock some equity and buy some more property.
Thank you for having me on. It’s been wonderful and fun.
Thank you so much, Matt. Best luck.
That was Mathew Sullivan. Z, what do you think about Matt?
I was listening to his stories of what he did for work and I kept waiting for him to be like, “These were the years that I was James Bond,” but that never came up. I love his voice and that accent. I was like, “This is amazing. I’m not even listening to what you’re saying. It’s all accent.”
I have a British cousin and he started a dating app called Date British Guys because he knows that American women love British men’s accents. It’s doing surprisingly well. It’s in New York and he may have expanded it a little bit, so if you’re reading this in New York and you’re a woman who wants to date a British guy, go on Date British Guys. You might find your Prince Edward or Andrew.
Can you date British girls on there too? You need to get a little more info for us. Our readers want to know. This is important.
I don’t know if American men like British woman accents as much as American women like British man accents but that could be wrong and I have no data or evidence at all. Check it out.
I feel like it could be dating people with accents because people love accents but this has nothing to do with our show.
I thought Matt’s story was pretty cool. He always had the entrepreneurial bug and is making an impact on the real estate space. He is flirting. He’s on the edge of the real estate space in terms of some futuristic stuff, where he briefly talked about how pretty soon you’ll be able to buy and sell these shares of equity in other people’s homes. If you wanted to own a home in a different city and you didn’t want to go through all the due diligence, the team and all that, all you got to do is purchase a share in the secondary market. That’s a cool concept. I’m excited to see where this thing ends up in the next years.
I like that this product is something that can be used on both sides for our readers because we do have readers that probably own homes with equity in them, especially ones that are investment properties and those are harder to get HELOCs on and maybe you don’t want to sell it. You could be using it as the person with equity trying to tap into it but you could also be using it in buying those shares of equity in other people’s homes. How cool is it that you don’t have to do anything? You just put up the money at one time but there’s no maintenance keeping up with tenants. That sounds pretty neat.
If you’re reading this to the end, you get to the nice fun part of us asking you to please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It helps us spread this word of real estate and financial independence to tons of other people so that when we all are retired and doing our thing, we’ve got some friends to hang out with. We all like friends. Let us know how we’re doing on Instagram. I’m @TheFiGuy. Zeona, what’s your name?
We will see you all next time.
Important Links
- @AmySellsBoulder – Instagram
- Matthew Sullivan
- Hooked On Startups
- Point
- Unison
- Hometap
- Unlock
- Getting Things Done
- QuantmRE.com
- Date British Guys
- iTunes – Invest2Fi
- @TheFiGuy – Instagram
- @ZeonaMcIntyre – Instagram
- www.RentRedi.com
- https://www.KapRE.com/
- https://www.StepByStepBNB.com/a/2147508384/zG79Sujh
About Matthew Sullivan
Matthew is the CEO and Founder of QuantmRE, a company that solves a real problem for homeowners by helping them access a portion of their home equity without taking more on debt.
This new financing tool is not a HELOC, it’s not a loan and it’s not a reverse mortgage. With a Home Equity Agreement, homeowners can get cash from their equity with no interest and no monthly payments. Matthew and his team have help homeowners access $Millions of their home equity to pay off expensive credit cards, remodel their home, pay college tuition fees or to diversify into other investments, all without taking on extra debt.
Matther has a proven track record in real estate innovation through his experiences as a co-funder of two real estate funds, and as a president and founder of Crowdventure.com, a real estate crowd funding company.
Originally from London, Matthew work with Richard Brandson’s corporate finance team and was appointed as trustee of the Virgin-sponsored London Air Ambulance. A helicopter pilot himself, he is also the host of his own podcast, “Hooked On Startups.”
