Find, Analyze, and Fund Your Real Estate Deals

When I first started investing back in 2006, I didn’t have anything close to what I’m about to show you. I had to drive to Bank of America. I had to go to Countrywide, back when that was still a company. I had to get creative just to keep buying past my third or fourth property, because banks would look at how many loans I already had and decide they didn’t want to lend to me anymore, even though every single one of those properties was making me money.

I even used a credit card to buy a house once. It worked out, but I shouldn’t have had to get that creative.

Today the game has completely changed. In a recent workshop, I sat down with Nick Tierno, who heads up the entire DSCR lending program at Conventus, and I walked our students through the exact three-tool process I use to find a property, analyze it in under a minute, and get it funded, sometimes all in the same sitting. I want to walk you through that same process here.

By the end of this article, you’re going to know how to filter for the right properties, how to run the numbers so you know instantly whether a deal is worth pursuing, and how to get financed without a single tax return or pay stub. Let’s get into it.

The Three Tools You Actually Need

I said this on the workshop and I’ll say it again here: if you just had three tabs open in your browser, you could build an entire income-building real estate business. Those three tabs are Zillow, Income Builder, and Conventus.

Zillow finds the properties. Income Builder analyzes them in seconds and tells you whether they’re worth pursuing. Conventus gets you funded, often in as little as 15 days, without touching your personal income.

I wish Zillow was this good back in 2006. I wish a free deal analyzer like Income Builder existed back then too. It didn’t, so I’m making sure it exists for you now. Go grab your free account before you keep reading, because everything below is going to make a lot more sense once you’ve got it open in front of you.

Step One: Find the Right Property

I don’t overcomplicate this. I go into Zillow, set my criteria, and let the map do the work.

Here’s exactly what I filter for:

• Price range: I start at the bottom of the market for the area, usually somewhere in the $0 to $175,000 range depending on the market, because that’s where cash flow lives.
• Bedrooms and bathrooms: Three plus bedrooms, two bathrooms. Cookie cutter homes rent better and faster than anything unusual. A third bedroom or a second bathroom can mean $100 to $200 more in rent every single month.
• Property type: Houses only. I strip out everything else.
• Square footage: I stay between 1,000 and 1,750 square feet. Below 1,000, it’s tough for a family to comfortably live there. Above 1,750, you’re paying for extra walls to paint, extra outlets to wire, and extra square footage to maintain, without a proportional bump in rent.
• No new construction, no coming soon listings. I want inventory that’s actually available right now.

Once you apply those filters, you’re going to see a map full of dots. Each one of those dots is a potential deal. Click into one, glance at the pictures just enough to make sure nothing looks alarming (I genuinely don’t spend much time on photos, because that’s what inspectors are for), and scroll down to see what Zillow estimates for rent.

In the workshop, I found a property listed at $137,000 with an estimated rent of $1,639 a month. That’s well above the 1% rule, which says your monthly rent should be at least 1% of the purchase price. On a $137,000 property, that threshold is $1,370. This one blew past it. That’s the moment a property goes from “maybe” to “let’s analyze this for real.”

Step Two: Analyze the Deal in Under a Minute

This is where most new investors either freeze up or make expensive mistakes. They either don’t know what numbers to check, or they check the wrong ones. I built Income Builder specifically to solve this problem, because I wanted a tool that does the math for me and tells me straight up whether a deal is worth pursuing.

Here’s the exact process. Once you’ve found a property on Zillow, copy the address, open your Income Builder account, and click New Analysis. You’ll choose between a long-term rental calculator, a short-term rental calculator, or a fix and flip calculator. For most beginning investors, you’ll want long-term rental.

Paste in the address and the software pulls in the property details automatically. From there you fill in a handful of numbers:

• Purchase price. Don’t just use the asking price. I always plan to negotiate lower to capture equity. In the workshop example, the property was asking $137,000, but I put in $112,000 as my likely negotiated price.
• After repair costs. A quick look at the photos told me this one probably needed $2,500 in work.
• Down payment and closing costs. The software calculates these based on your loan terms.
• Interest rate. This is where Conventus comes in, and I’ll walk through exactly how in the next section.
• Property taxes and insurance. Don’t just trust the low estimate. I always pad these numbers up, because I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than caught off guard.
• Maintenance and vacancy reserves. I use 5% for maintenance and let the software calculate a vacancy factor.
• Property management fee. Mine runs about 6% in most of my markets.
• Monthly rent. In this case, $1,639.

Once you hit save, the analysis calculates everything and gives you a series of red lights and green lights. These are the exact criteria we teach at Master Passive Income: minimum cash flow, equity capture percentage, cap rate, cash on cash return, the 1% rule, the 50% rule, and yes, your DSCR ratio, all in one place.

On that $112,000 property, here’s what came back. Monthly cash flow of $684. Equity capture of 22% based on the difference between what we’re offering and what the property is actually worth. Every single light was green. That’s the kind of property I’ll put an offer on the very next day, and in fact, that’s exactly what I did.

The Secret Weapon: Share Analysis

Once your analysis is complete, there’s a button inside Income Builder called Share Analysis. This is one of the most underused features in the entire tool, and I want you to actually use it.

Clicking it generates a shareable report with every projection, the loan amortization schedule, depreciation numbers, everything a lender or a private money partner would need to say yes. Instead of trying to explain a deal over the phone, you send this link. I’ve used this exact report to hand a completed analysis straight to Conventus for a DSCR quote, and I’ve used the same report to approach a private money lender, a family member, or a partner and say, here’s the deal, here are the real numbers, I’d like to borrow the down payment from you.

That single report does the selling for you. It’s not a pitch. It’s just the math, laid out clearly.

Step Three: Fund the Deal Without Touching Your W-2

This is the part that would have changed everything for me back in 2006. Nick Tierno spent years building the DSCR program at Conventus from the ground up, and by the time he sat down with us, he personally had closed over $125 million in DSCR loans and overseen close to a billion dollars in total DSCR transactions. So when he explains how this works, it’s coming straight from someone who built the thing.

What a DSCR Loan Actually Is

DSCR stands for debt service coverage ratio. All it means is that the loan qualifies based on the property’s income, not yours. Take your monthly rent and divide it by your total monthly payment, which includes principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and association dues if applicable. That ratio is your DSCR.

If your rent is $2,200 and your payment is $2,000, your DSCR is 1.1, and that’s a positively cash flowing property. Anything below 1.0 means the property is technically losing money on paper, though Conventus can still lend on those in certain situations.

Here’s what makes this so different from a conventional loan: no W-2s, no tax returns, no personal income documentation of any kind. Just the property’s cash flow, your liquid reserves, and your credit score. That’s the entire qualification.

This matters enormously if you’re self-employed. If you’re running your business the smart way and taking every legal deduction available to you, your tax returns often show far less income than you’re actually bringing home. That’s exactly the kind of borrower who gets crushed trying to qualify for a conventional loan. A DSCR loan sidesteps that completely, because your personal income never enters the conversation.

DSCR vs. Conventional, Side by Side

Conventional loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cap you at around 10 properties. DSCR loans have no cap. Conventional loans max out around $806,000 before becoming a jumbo loan with extra hoops. DSCR loans go up to $5 million with no jumbo distinction at all.

Conventional loans rarely let you close in an LLC. DSCR loans close in an LLC 99% of the time, which matters more than most new investors realize, because it means the debt does not show up on your personal credit report. That protects your ability to buy a car, refinance your own home, or qualify for anything else down the road, completely separate from your investing business.

Closing speed is another huge difference. Conventional loans can take 30 to 60 days if you’re lucky. Nick told us about a brand new Conventus borrower, an experienced investor, who closed a cash-out refinance in 15 days flat and used the proceeds to buy two more properties almost immediately.

What You’ll Actually Need to Bring

Compared to a conventional loan, the document list here is refreshingly short:

• A photo ID
• The property address, with a signed purchase contract if it’s a purchase, or signed leases if it’s a refinance (if the property is vacant, Conventus uses market rent from the appraisal instead)
• Two months of bank statements, just to confirm you have enough liquidity for your down payment or reserves
• Your entity documents: EIN letter, operating agreement, and articles of organization

That’s it. No income verification, no source-and-season requirements on your funds. Conventus just wants to see the money is there.

What to Watch Out For

Nick was direct about the biggest thing that kills DSCR deals: the property appraising lower than expected. His advice, and mine too, is to research your market before you ever make an offer. Look at true comparable sales from the last 6 to 12 months, similar bed and bath count, similar square footage, similar finish level, and as close to the subject property as possible. A one-bedroom, 900-square-foot property doesn’t get to use 3,000-square-foot comps, no matter how much you’d like it to.

Credit score matters too. The minimum is 660. Down payment minimum is 20%. And if your credit is right on the bubble, Conventus has rapid rescore services that can sometimes bump you over the line before your loan closes.

Rates, Points, and Real Numbers

On the day of our workshop, Nick quoted a live example at 6.25% with zero points. He also mentioned closing a client at 5.9% recently, and personally financing his own home purchase through a DSCR loan at 6.125%, better than the conventional rate he was quoted at the time.

A point equals 1% of your loan amount, charged upfront in exchange for a lower rate, typically somewhere around a quarter to a half point of rate reduction per point paid. It’s a tool, not a requirement. You can run the numbers either way and decide what fits your cash flow goals.

There’s also an interest-only option worth knowing about. On the portfolio example we ran live in the workshop, a standard payment came out to about $5,000 a month, while the interest-only version dropped that to roughly $4,100. You’re never required to pay only interest forever, it just gives you breathing room, especially in the early years of owning a property while rents are climbing toward market rate. This is exactly the kind of scenario-testing you can do yourself once you’re talking with a Conventus relationship manager.

And because Conventus wants long-term relationships, not one-off transactions, first-time borrowers get 50 basis points off in points right off the bat. If you’re converting a fix and flip or new construction loan you already have with them into a DSCR loan, that discount jumps to a full 100 basis points, plus a reduced processing fee on every loan after your first.

Get Your Own Instant Quote

You don’t have to take my word for any of these numbers, because they change daily. The fastest way to see exactly what you’d qualify for is to run your own numbers through Conventus directly. It takes the purchase price, loan amount, and property details you already have from your Income Builder analysis and gives you an instant rate quote, the same way we did live in the workshop.

Putting It All Together

Here’s the full loop, start to finish. Filter Zillow for cash-flowing, cookie cutter homes in your price range. Find one that clears the 1% rule at first glance. Drop the address into Income Builder and let it calculate your cash flow, equity capture, cap rate, and DSCR in under a minute. If the lights are green, use the Share Analysis report inside your Income Builder account to get an instant quote from Conventus, lock in your rate, and move toward closing in as little as 15 days.

A Few More Things Worth Knowing

You don’t need a realtor to buy. I never use a buyer’s agent. When I find a property I like, I scroll down to see who listed it and call that agent directly. They already represent the seller, and when you tell them you don’t have your own agent, most of them get genuinely excited, because now they’re earning both sides of the commission. That’s how I’ve been able to put in so many offers below asking price. It’s a simple approach, but it works.

If cash flow feels too thin, don’t chase rent increases. You can’t just decide to charge more than the market supports. Instead, look at your purchase price and your expenses. Buying lower and controlling costs moves your cash flow far more reliably than hoping rent goes up.

You can use a partner to strengthen your application. If your credit score is a little low, Conventus will use the higher FICO score between two partners on the same LLC. If you’re short on down payment funds, a financial partner who takes a percentage of the deal in exchange for the capital is a completely normal, common structure. Think of every financing option, DSCR, private money, hard money, partnerships, as a different tool in your tool belt. A good contractor doesn’t show up with one tool. Neither should you.

A cash-out refinance on your primary home can fund a DSCR purchase. These are two completely separate transactions in the eyes of Conventus. As long as the funds are sitting in your account, it doesn’t matter where they came from. Pull equity from your primary residence through a conventional lender, then use those funds as your down payment on a DSCR purchase.

Ready to Run Your Own Numbers?

Everything I walked through here took me about ten minutes total in the actual workshop, and most of that was me talking. The analysis itself takes seconds once you know what to look for.

Start by grabbing your free Income Builder account if you haven’t already. Find a property that catches your eye on Zillow, run it through the analyzer, and if it comes back green, head straight to Conventus to see your real rate.

As always, every financing decision has tax and legal implications specific to your situation, so loop in your own CPA or attorney before you close on anything. But the tools to find the deal, run the numbers, and get funded without a single tax return are sitting right there waiting for you.

I wish I’d had this in 2006. You have it now. Use it.

Pumped to see you succeed!

Dustin Heiner Master Passive Income