Use Credit to Build Wealth & Buy Real Estate w/ Lee Patterson

Law of Attraction SECRETS

In this episode, host Natasha Graziano interviews real estate investor Lee Patterson about leveraging credit and 'Other People's Money' to b

Key takeaways

• Lee Patterson utilizes the concept of OPM (Other People's Money) by leveraging bank funds to scale real estate holdings.
• Wholesaling serves as a low-barrier entry point for real estate investing because it requires minimal upfront capital.

Main topics

• Real Estate Investing Strategies
• Credit Management and Optimization

Notable quotes

If you don't learn how to make money in your sleep, you'll be forever making money on your feet.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring guide for anyone looking to use fin

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Don't miss the USL Championship Final on CBS, November 21st at noon Eastern. Will the Pittsburgh Riverhounds retain their crown or will a new title winner emerge? Don't miss the conclusion to the 2026 season, Saturday, November 21st at noon Eastern on CBS. Speaker 3 (0:16) Welcome back to the Law of Attraction Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Natasha Graziano, and today we have an entrepreneur. He's somebody who is a real estate investor, the founder of LAP Investments and the Credit to Real Estate Academy, teaching people how to leverage credit and funding to build real estate portfolios. Lee Patterson, welcome to the show. Thank Speaker 2 (0:39) you so much for having me. Speaker 3 (0:40) Thank you for being here. Speaker 2 (0:41) Man, it's my pleasure. Speaker 3 (0:43) I love it. And you're from Atlanta? Speaker 2 (0:44) Yeah. I'm originally from Texas, but I came out here for college and I've been out here ever since. Speaker 3 (0:49) Love that. Well, I love that I'm in your city and we're... out here doing this. Yeah, so I'm glad Speaker 2 (0:54) you're here. Speaker 3 (0:55) Thank you so much. I got a few things I want to dive into. Buying real estate with other people's money. Like, that is so cool. The idea of that. So, when you say buy real estate with other people's money, what money, not money, what do you mean? Speaker 2 (1:10) It's typically the bank, most of the time it's the bank's money. It was the concept that I was introduced to just from this simple idea of how do I buy my first house? Right. And I... literally just went to the bank and said, what do y'all need from me? And he told me exactly what I need, right? Because that's the only place I knew where to get money from. Like, who else has got that kind of money? I didn't have any rich friends at the time to say, hey, can you lend me some money? Speaker 2 (1:36) They probably want some collateral, didn't have any collateral. And so I learned the whole concept of OPM, other people's money. Most people think people, but the bank is people's money also. I won't dive too deep into why that is the case or why, but where do you keep your money? Probably in the bank. What do you think the bank does with it? They lend it back out. So I need to be able to get access to that. And once I learned how to get access to OPM, other people's money, completely changed my life. Speaker 3 (2:04) That's amazing. Speaker 3 (2:06) Therefore, when you started, you just walked in, you just asked the questions. I Speaker 2 (2:10) sure did. And Speaker 3 (2:11) that was what started it for you. You started to learn. It's just simple. I go in, I need this, and then I can get that. Do you need good credit for this stuff? Speaker 2 (2:18) Absolutely. Absolutely. It makes it a lot easier. I mean, if you got money, right, you don't, a lot of this stuff don't apply because you got the cash. But for people, you know, that might have not been born with a silver spoon in their mouth. or inheritance or anything like that. This is the way I always encourage people to go because it made every dream a little boy from Longview, Texas could ever imagine by simply learning how to get access to other people's money. Speaker 3 (2:49) And what did you do with those first funds that you got? Speaker 2 (2:51) What did I do with what? The funds that you first got. Man, I literally just started buying real estate and then I was a student athlete. And I was able to have the honor of having a teammate that was into real estate and was able to do big things in real estate. And we would go for a run every day. And I literally would ask him. Speaker 3 (3:13) I Speaker 2 (3:14) would just pick his brain throughout the run. I mean, I write about it in my book and talk about it all the time, about how I got an education on a run. Like, there's something you're going to have to do that might not be typical. And for me, it was an apprenticeship. literally on a run every single day. I didn't even realize it was a mentor at the time for me, but he graciously just answered all my questions. Obviously, I had to apply it to where it just built me a multimillion-dollar portfolio, and I never intended it for that because I just started with one. Then it became two. And he encouraged me to run the play. until it stops working that Speaker 3 (3:55) is so cool and i love that so you were just doing something you didn't even know that you know if you start asking questions you get answers of course but what's amazing is you applied it what's amazing is you actually went out there and you were like yeah i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna transform my life Speaker 1 (4:09) and Speaker 3 (4:10) then one turns into two which turns into three which turns into four which continues on this journey can someone get started in real estate without cash they Speaker 2 (4:18) can and for me i didn't have i had a little bit of money because i had a job i had a nine to five but i started wholesaling. So in real estate, wholesaling is literally you be, be in the middle man of the transaction and you don't need any money. And I literally only put $10 down on a contract. People would never catch it. And if they want more, I'll put a hundred bucks and so forth. But again, it's a really, uh, low entry barrier to real estate that I encourage all people who don't have money to do. Um, it's a little tougher now with. the prices of real estate but that is one of the ways you can start and get into real estate with no money down and then obviously you can use OPM which is other people's money by literally cleaning your credit and that's in your control so I tell people like I can control if my credit is clean or if it's bad or good and there's a checklist that the bureaus look for and I take it and so what you hear is in the maturation of me through the years of Get my credit clean because we all know we need that. Next, I want to get into real estate or I want to get an income-producing asset or I just study what the rich people do. And the main thing that kept coming out was they all have something in their portfolio that's real estate-related, right? And I knew that I couldn't buy a building. I knew I couldn't. I wasn't ready for all that, but I knew I could start with one thing, a house. Speaker 3 (5:42) That's so impressive. Speaker 2 (5:43) Can Speaker 3 (5:44) somebody get started in this with a credit score of like 600 or is that too low? Speaker 2 (5:49) I would say it's too low, but a lot of times the bank won't even loan that much money out because the interest rate would be so high. So it wouldn't, it's not like, it's not a car, right? Car people loan it out, loan it to you in a minute because you'll just pay for the car three times over. And by the time you do pay for it, you done bought a house, essentially. You have to do that with a house, you're probably going to have a higher percentage of them going back and confiscating the house, which unfortunately I was a part of that growing up, which is kind of one of my whys. You know, we went through an eviction where my parents lost their house to this very thing, this not enough money, not enough income. that they could go and grab from because their credit wasn't where it needed to be, right? Because you know the average family, $500 a month could change their life, could change their situation, just an extra $500 a month. And so the fact that my parents couldn't borrow or had any way to get that kind of access to that kind of money let me know that I came out to find out later that they didn't have credit that would allow them to continue to branch out and borrow money. Speaker 3 (7:03) Gosh, that's so interesting. Speaker 2 (7:05) What's Speaker 3 (7:05) the biggest lie people have been told about buying property? Speaker 2 (7:10) That the biggest lie about that is too much. They said that 20 years ago. Properties have now quadrupled. In 2020, I had about five or six properties at that point. Never cared about what they were worth because I essentially did not plan on ever selling. But then I started getting them appraised because I started borrowing more money from the bank. Speaker 2 (7:36) I mean, you know this. Properties have just went bananas, right? Real estate is just out of control, but real estate has always increased over time. And so 2020, I literally became a millionaire through property. Wow. Not monetarily, but just through assets. I had a million dollars worth of assets under my management. I would have never. guest in my life because again that wasn't my reason why I started this it was it was really to start and then have something that I could pass down to generations and generations and something that would continue to compound and go down in the mortgage because somebody else is paying it all why it was appreciating and going up Speaker 3 (8:22) that's so cool so if you had to go back and you had your first ten thousand dollars again what would you do get Speaker 2 (8:30) a mentor 100%. I will get a mentor because I know they're going to help me get to whatever it is I want 100 times faster. Speaker 3 (8:36) Agree. You go further faster. You collapse decades into days from having a mentor. The same thing happened to me. That's how I began. I got a mentor who started my whole thing for me and showed me. hey, you need to do this. You need to get an LLC like this. You need to deal with the credit here. You need to do that. You need to do this with business. You do that. Like, that was a game changer for me, Speaker 2 (8:54) particularly Speaker 3 (8:55) not even being from America. That was like, okay, mentors are going to change the way for me. And then, of course, you go further faster. Speaker 2 (9:03) And Speaker 3 (9:03) now, of course, I mentor people, not on this topic, but on other topics, which I think is beautiful. Do you mentor? Speaker 2 (9:09) Oh, yeah, 100%. I actually even coach, like, running you know so what i do now in my give