Clay Sparkman As you all know, these have been difficult times for private money investors. Competition is up, rates are down, and solid opportunities are getting harder to find. The following article: Three Challenges Faced by Today’s Private Money Lenders and How to Weather Them, by Noah Brocious at Forbes, is a a very straightforward […]
Risk management
Don’t put all your egg baskets in one egg truck
Thursday, August 1st, 2019Clay Sparkman Colloquialisms are funny things. We use them pretty much every day in our speech and in our writing and yet most of us, I suspect, though we know the meanings of the expressions, frequently don’t know why the individual words have come to mean what they mean. Take for example: “Don’t look a […]
The Round Table, with King Arthur
Wednesday, March 27th, 2019S. Clay Sparkman I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I must say, we’ve seen good times and some bad. I’ve been involved in several thousand private money loans. Certainly, I’ve experienced a full cross section of the private money lender perspective. One might wonder, how can a long-term private money lender expect to […]
Private money – whole loans vs fractional share loans
Thursday, November 29th, 2018S. Clay Sparkman This issue nearly always comes up in early conversations with new potential investors. Working with private money investors, we are able to fund loans in two different ways. (1) Single loan/single investor – This is probably most common. It is quite simple. A potential investor evaluates a loan, and if she chooses […]
Will Amazon’s HQ2 sink Seattle’s housing market?
Tuesday, November 13th, 2018S. Clay Sparkman Will Amazon’s HQ2 sink Seattle’s housing market? https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/will-amazons-hq2-sink-seattles-housing-market/ Probably not much, but it should pump up the markets in NYC and DC even furthur. Best, Clay – Clay (clay@privatemoneysource.com, 503-476-2909) Clay is Vice President of Fairfield Financial, a primary source for private money loans since 1964. Fairfield works with a broad range […]
Twenty-eight questions you must ask
Friday, October 7th, 2016Clay Sparkman I first wrote and published this piece in its original form in September of 2009. I am of the firm belief that the key to success (defined as: having fun and maximizing your return, two closely correlated phenomena), is rigorous and comprehensive vetting of the loan proposal. If you do this right, the […]
10 things You should do before you start investing
Tuesday, September 27th, 2016Clay Sparkman Most of my discussions on this blog have to do with private money investing, and trends related to such. I cam across a Lifehacker article recently–one that I had saved in The Pocket to read *later* (if you know what I mean), and was reminded that before one can make sensible private money […]
Leading real estate value indicators
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2016Clay Sparkman Of particular interest to private money investors is to analyze and spot potential trends in real estate pricing. I recently posted an article, Three potentially useful indicators of the likely movement of property values, which proposed three potential indicators to watch. The following article, Unlike prices, real estate jobs not back at peak, […]
Private money – the rules of physics may not apply
Friday, June 3rd, 2016Clay Sparkman I first posted this article in August of 2009. That was right about when I was just getting started with the blog. It is hard to believe that it has been nearly seven years now. At any rate, I feel that this article deserves a second look (or a first look, if you […]
Into the mainstream
Friday, May 13th, 2016Clay Sparkman I thought that this recent article in The National Real Estate Investor would be worth sharing with the private money investors in this group. It certainly rings true with those of us at Fairfield, as we have had to work with our investors to adapt our programs and strategies to a changing market […]
